Category Archives: Pay Per Click

5 Ways To Improve Your PPC Marketing Campaign on Google

Posted on by poonambhatt

Pay-per-click advertising can be very effective channel for increasing your brand’s reach but PPC branding campaigns are often cost prohibitive. Bidding to top positions for your industry’s core terms is an excellent way to expose your brand to new audiences but the “short term ROI be-damned” strategy is usually risky business. Below are 9 strategies to help you build your brand without burning through your spend.

  1. Start with the campaign structure and creatives. Separate your branded terms from your other terms so that your ads’ creatives can be more easily controlled. Searches for your branded terms should always trigger ads with strong brand-based titles and messaging instead of your more traditional ads for industry terms.
  2. Bid on your branded terms, slogans and all their variations. While most everyone bids on their own branded terms, few remember to bid on slogans, alternate spellings and typos. While correctly spelled brand searches may often lead to your company’s organic search listings, casting a wide net ensures you capture searchers who are actively interested in your brand but might otherwise not be able to find you. These bids are especially important for capturing word-of-mouth referrals.
  3. Bid on branded terms in your industry. Brand based search terms are a common method of navigation and often have very little competition. Even high-volume branded terms often have only a handful of competitors and are usually available with low minimum CPCs. Make sure you follow the advertising platform’s terms of service and avoid using anyone else’s branded or trademarked terms in your creatives.
  4. Bid on your domain name and variations. Domain searches are also a popular means of navigation and generally less competitive. Bidding on your own domain name makes it more difficult for your competitors to appear prominently and bids for variations of your domain name are a great way to ensure you capture all potential visitors. Just like misspelled branded terms, offering searchers easy access to your website, despite their challenges with typing or spelling, is a great way to start their visitor experience on a positive note.
  5. Bid on your competition’s domain name and variations. Select a few of your competitors whose products or services align closely with your own and present searchers your brand’s core messaging. Just like bids for your own domain, be sure to include variations like “domain.com”, “domaincom”, etc.
  6. Bid on tradeshow and conference names. If you company spends a great deal of time and money on industry events, reinforcing your industry presence via PPC is an excellent way to maximize your investment. Start by creating a nice landing page for each event that explains your company’s involvement and then tailor your ads’ creatives to include a summary. Ads appearing just before and just after each event are an excellent way to seed event attendees with your brand and reinforce your participation.
  7. Bid on the names of your company’s awards. Whether your company has just been nominated for an award or you’ve just won your industry’s most prestigious honor, drawing attention to your achievement is always beneficial. Be sure to create an informative landing page that also includes links to further background reading on the award or nomination.
  8. Bid on the names of your organization’s key employees. Running ads for the names of your key industry and customer facing employees increases the likelihood that a positive brand message reaches the searcher.
  9. Take the high ground. While it would be quicker and easier to only create a couple of groups to target several groups of terms, investing the time to create highly-targeted landing pages and ad copy is critical step that can not be overlooked. Don’t bother trying to run a pay-per-click branding campaign if you aren’t going to fine tune the details if you do you are just exposing your brand to more people, not building value.

Just as with any other channel you leverage for branding, PPC is also ultimately dependent upon the maturity of your message. If you can present searchers with a concise snapshot of your brand’s value, and then expand on their initial impression with , PPC offers a number of cost-effective opportunities to help you increase your brand’s reach. A wealth of 99 branding tips was recently published by Aviva Directory and is certainly worth a read if you missed it.

5 Ways To Improve Your PPC Marketing Campaign on Google

Posted on by poonambhatt

Running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing campaign on Google is one way to increase your visibility online. Having your website show up at the top of search engines means that your company will be seen by your target audience before your competitors.

Having your ads show up at the top of Google requires more than just money to bid on keywords. Google assigns each ad a Quality Score based on the keywords you are targeting. Google says it looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A high Quality Score means your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Here are 5 strategies to improving your Quality Score and your PPC campaign on Google.

  1. Get rid of ads with a low Click Through Rate (CTR) – Your CTR is an important part of calculating your Quality Score. Ads with low CTRs lower your Quality Score, which means it costs you more to run the same ad. Also, Google assigns Quality Scores to ad groups, so a low CTR can also affect future ads. Be sure to constantly test slightly different wording and pick ads with the best CTR to bring in more customers and lower your CPC.
  2. Remove keywords that aren’t helping – Bidding on highly keywords that are relevant, but very general, may hurt your keyword performance. Large companies may be able to outbid you on the more general keywords, so try to focus your keywords to be as specific as possible.
  3. Add content to your website and landing page – When creating a website or landing page for your PPC campaign, use extremely unique content and constantly update the information. One way to do this is to create a blog for your website that is updated regularly. It not only shows you at being an expert in your specific field, but it also creates new content that will help improve your Quality Score.
  4. Include information about your company – Having a clear “About Us” page on your website and a privacy policy for anyone who gives your company their information helps improve your Quality Score. Transparency is a key factor in calculating a company’s keyword Quality Score.
  5. Have fast-loading pages – A slow-loading landing page equals a bad user experience to Google. Things like large images, animation, and flash graphics can all slow down your page load time. Also, if your website goes down and Google sees that, then that will hurt your Quality Score as well.

Running a successful pay-per-click campaign on Google means paying attention to your Quality Score and improving it wherever it is possible.

Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns

Posted on by poonambhatt

Pay per click advertising is a form of marketing with major benefits. It differs from other methods of marketing in its ability to allow advertisers and marketers to measure and analyze the results of their techniques, to refine and optimize them to increase ROI beyond almost anything possible in the offline marketing world. Google AdWords is currently the prominent pay per click resource available today. Learning some of the ways to optimize your AdWords campaigns can cut costs while keeping conversions up in several ways.

Here are four ways to refine your AdWords campaign to see where money spent is producing the best return and to adjust settings to maximize return on investment.

1. The Segment option. This is one of the newest additions to AdWords. The Segment option is available within your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. Within each, the options are different, but allow for viewing of your results in specific ways of measurement. This can include breaking into specific units of time, such as weeks or days of the week.

By viewing your data this way you can discover what weeks are most active for a seasonal market, as well as information such as which days of the week are most prone to getting better conversion rates. By knowing this data, you can reduce costs where your conversions are more expensive, increase bids where you are seeing better conversion rates, and in all these ways increase ROI.

2. A-B Split Testing for ads. This can be one of the most effective means of increasing CTR for your ad groups. Have two or three ads active for each ad group. After a number of clicks (ideally at least 20 clicks on each ad), choose the better performing ad. Replace the more poorly performing ad with a different ad copy. Repeat the whole operation to find which advertisement will produce the best CTR or the best conversion rate.

Doing this can often improve your CTR by a factor of 2 or more, and a higher CTR improves Quality Score as well as increasing lead generation. To get an accurate reading for proper A-B split testing, make sure your campaign setting for Ad Delivery->Rotation is set to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

3. Remarketing with the Audiences tab. This is an element of AdWords that works only for the Content Network. When the Audiences tab is enabled, you can create remarketing lists to target specific visitors to your site. By placing code on specific pages within your site, a cookie is put on all users who visit these pages.

Then when they visit other sites with similar targeted themes, a very relevant ad is shown to these users to give them motivation to return to your site to make a purchase or opt-in. This works by reaching out to visitors who had visited your site previously and displayed some kind of interest in that market. Often this remarketing approach can increase conversions by contacting people who have an established interest in your products and reconnecting with them.

4. Changing advertising frequency/rate settings. Advertising can be adjusted in AdWords to not just advertise for certain days and hours of each day, but the amount for CPC can be adjusted to raise or lower bidding rates for certain days and hours. The setting is within each Campaign settings area, under Advanced settings->Schedule and choosing Ad Scheduling, the selecting “Bid Adjustment” inside the scheduling option.

After doing research for performance for specific days within your campaign you can make changes to cut costs and increase ROI nicely. For example, after viewing that you are getting little or no conversions on certain days of the week, you can pause these days with this setting. In the same way, any days that have better conversion rates can have an increased bid amount to maximize CTR for those days. This can all help improve business results for your AdWords campaign.

By knowing about and using these different options within AdWords you can greatly improve your pay per click results. AdWords optimization is a definite way to increase ROI and open additional opportunities to expand your marketing methods. Properly using these techniques can cut costs, increase profits, and help you make the most out of this powerful tool.