Top Ten PPC Tips – part 1

Managing a PPC campaign can seem a little daunting at first, but many marketers fail to realise the fun and creativity involved.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll outline ten top tips to help ensure you are well on your way to managing a successful paid search campaign.  Here are the first five.

Tip 1: Segmenting keywords into relevant ad groups

If you are going to invest time and money into paid search, you first need to structure your account effectively. Keywords need to be carefully planned, as do the ad groups that they will sit in. Ad copy needs to be relevant to the keywords within the ad group and the best way to do this is by segmenting your keywords into themes. For example, ‘Maldives holidays’ and ‘Maldives hotels’ should be in two different ad groups. When you separate your keywords in this manner, you can then cater your ad copy appropriately. Not only does this allow for the ad copy to be highly relevant to the users search query, but also enables you to better track the results of your keyword segmentation.

Each ad group should have no more than 50 keywords in it.  If yours do, you would greatly benefit from a restructure because it could well be having a negative impact on your ad group quality scores.

Tip 2: Creating keyword rich ad copy

The most effective paid search campaigns will have the keywords mentioned in the ad copy as much as possible. This strategy will reassure your potential customers that when they click on your ad you can provide them with exactly what they are looking for. So, if you are using ‘Maldives holidays’ as a keyword, mention ‘Maldives’ and ‘holidays’ as much as possible. Another benefit of this strategy is helping to create a high quality score. If your ad copy is not keyword rich, your quality score will be low so taking the time to create relevant ad copy will mean you will spend less money to maintain the same average position.

Tip 3: Utilising your quality score

I have written about the importance of your quality score previously, and I want to emphasise again how we cannot afford to ignore this! A higher quality score ultimately means that you will pay less for a good position.  This is exactly why many paid search advertisers pay on average 2p per click on their brand name but competitors have to pay more in the region of 20p per click on the same keyword to sit in a lower position.

Keywords with low quality scores should either be deleted if they have no relevance to your ad group or if the traffic is very low for your market. This will prevent the low quality score keywords from dragging down the overall quality score of your ad group.  If keywords have a low quality score but are relevant and do generate high levels of traffic then it is worth considering segmenting these keywords even further and working on the ad copy, campaign settings, positions and landing pages on an individual keyword basis.

Tip 4: Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion is avoided intentionally by many advertisers due to people misspelling their search queries. If a user types ‘iPod tuch’ into Google instead of ‘iPod touch’ and sees a sponsored link with the title ‘iPod tuch’ this could ultimately deter the user from clicking through mistrust or annoyance.

However, if used correctly, dynamic keyword insertion can produce very good results and quality traffic. Ensure that you only use DKI where appropriate so that it makes your ad copy very relevant for the searcher. If a user searches for ‘Central London hotels’ and your ad copy title says ‘Central London hotels,’ this is going to result in the user being much more likely to click since the result is the exact query of the user.

Tip 5: Make the most of negative keywords

Negative keywords are another core component of a successful PPC campaign that many advertisers fail to benefit from. If you want to increase your click through rate and maximise the chances of conversions, negatives are the way to go. It is great having thousands of impressions, but what if those impressions are your ad being seen by users searching for something that is not at all relevant to what your business offers?

Running regular search query reports will highlight the terms that you need to add to your negative keyword list. Yes, this could reduce the amount of impressions that your account receives but it is generally much more important to know that your traffic is relevant and you are reaching the most appropriate prospects. Adding negatives to your campaigns or ad groups will also help control costs by reducing your cost per clicks and ultimately increasing your ROI.

So, there we have 5 of our top tips to help you on your way with expanding and simultaneously refining your paid search campaigns. Check back next week for 5 more interesting ways to manage your PPC with maximum ROI and effectiveness.