Category Archives: Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click Advertising and PPC Management Tips

Posted on by poonambhatt

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website, increase your leads-to-sales conversions, and announce new products and services. However, achieving success and maximizing your return on investment with Pay Per Click is not merely a matter of outbidding your competition for prime ad placement. As with any Internet marketing strategy, it’s critically important to have a clear understanding of the fundamentals and develop a PPC advertising plan before the campaign is launched. Otherwise, you run the risk of wasting your time and resources to take advantage of this increasingly effective means of reaching your targeted audience.

Here are some Pay Per Click advertising tips that will help you get started:

1. Establish a Budget – This may seem simple and obvious but creating a budget and sticking to it is the best way to keep from overspending and falling victim to bidding wars for popular search terms.

2. Develop a PPC Marketing Plan – Creating a plan in the early stages gives you a template to follow which should include thorough research of your industry, your competition, and a prioritized list of your targeted keywords and phrases.

3. Consider your Target Audience – Spend some time assessing who you want to click on your ad, the search terms they are likely to use, and how broad or narrow your intended demographic may be. Determining your audience in the early stages will help to inform your decisions in every phase of the campaign.

4. Identify Niche Opportunities – Instead of focusing on the most popular search terms where costs and competition will be steep, think about specific two- and three-word phrases that may have been overlooked by your competitors.

5. Write Compelling Ad Copy – You have a finite amount of space, so choose every word carefully to entice your audience to click on your ad. Most web users know the difference between sponsored and organic search results but if your ad copy leads them to believe that the link will help them find what they’re looking for, your click-through rates and sales will take off.

6. Craft Custom Landing Pages – This is essential. Each ad must take the viewer to a landing page where they can quickly and easily find what they need. Always remember that web users scan content and the decision to stay or look elsewhere is made in seconds.

7. Create and Analyze Performance Reports – These reports will tell you which ads are underperforming and which are exceeding expectations. Use this data to fine tune and adjust your marketing plan. Track your results at regular intervals.

PPC Tips for the Small Business Owner

Posted on by poonambhatt

The following tips provide the framework for developing a successful and cost effective pay per click campaign.

Time/Day Parting – Google allows advertisers to determine the day of week or even the time of day they want their ads to display. This can be a very useful tool for small business advertisers who know when their customers are most likely to look for their product or service. By setting your ads to display at only high performance times you increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce your costs.

Ad Scheduling.png

Match Types – Gone are the days of simply adding keywords that are all set to broad match and hoping for a return. Sure, casting a larger net brings in more traffic, but it also punishes your budget. The quality of that traffic might also suffer depending on the chosen keywords. Try using the available match types, especially exact match, to control costs and which searches are actually displaying your ads.

Negative Keywords – Selecting negative keywords to offset unwanted traffic is an absolute must for any campaign, large or small. For example, f a florist that sells only fresh flowers and plants might want to include the negative “artificial” to prevent traffic from artificial flower type keywords. Using negatives also allows you to pursue higher volume keywords without the exposure to unrelated searches.

Geo Targeting – According to a 2009 TMP/comScore report, 80% of consumers expect businesses in their search results to be within 15 miles of their location. This definitely doesn’t apply to all industries and regions, but it should provide a starting point with your targeting. It’s important to mention that with Google’s targeting granularity, you could potentially target your business out of traffic if it’s set so small that only a few people will see the ads.

Other Search Engines- Google has the lion share of the search market, but they also carry the highest bid prices. Bing and the like might not offer the volume that Google does; however, smaller search engines often have lower bid prices, which ultimately produce lower conversion costs. Test out a small budget on these other engines to start looking at your PPC efforts as a portfolio.

Keyword Development–The Google traffic estimator tool might show you that the keyword “new shoes” generates 1,500,000 searches each month, but that doesn’t mean it’s a quality keyword for your ad group. To maximize your budget, think locally and specifically. For example, if you’re in the printing business, expand past the generic and more expensive “printing” keywords;  pair them up with location identifiers to better define your product and audience. By using the keyword ”printing shops Denver 80202,” you pay less for a consumer that is further along in the buying cycle.

Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Posted on by poonambhatt

Targeting Google AdWords contextual advertising campaigns just got easier. This new tool keeps your ads from appearing in some pretty dodgy places online.

Google launched an important new tool that prevents your ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool.

Remember why content campaigns drain ad dollars? You waste budget because contextual ads appear on sites that are “poor quality,” meaning visitors to those sites are not likely to convert, even if your ads garner clicks.

We’ve discussed several strategies for controlling which sites carry your ads. The Category Exclusion tool simplifies the job by allowing advertisers to exclude whole swaths of site types.

To find the tool, click on Tools under PPC Campaign Management. First you’re allowed to choose a campaign. Though you can choose search campaigns, you shouldn’t — the tool really only acts on keyword-targeted and placement-targeted content campaigns.

Having chosen a campaign, you’ll see the familiar site exclusion text field where you can type or paste the specific domain names of sites that shouldn’t carry your ads. But you’ll see two additional tabs: Topics and Page Types. Let’s start with Topics. Here’s an example of what you’ll see:


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Here’s Google’s explanation for each of the topics that can be excluded:

Conflict and tragedy

  • Crime, police, and emergency: Police blotters, news stories on fires, and emergency services resources
  • Death and tragedy: Obituaries, bereavement services, accounts of natural disasters, and accidents
  • Military and international conflict: News about war, terrorism, and sensitive international relations

Edgy content

  • Juvenile, gross, and bizarre content: Jokes, weird pictures, and videos of stunts
  • Profanity and rough language: Moderate use of profane language
  • Sexually suggestive content: Provocative pictures and text

But Google doesn’t trust its intuition, or yours, to lead to an intelligent decision about which site topics to exclude. The tool shows you, based on your campaign’s history, exactly what you’re risking by excluding sites within each topic.

In the example above, the advertiser would probably be wise to exclude sites in the crime topic, since the CTR has been a dismal .52%, with no conversions. But the advertiser might think twice before excluding sites in the juvenile topic, since despite the poor CTR, clicks from that site are converting at a respectable 7.41%. Notice that cost-per-conversion data is also available, so advertisers can make sure their decisions are likely to result in acceptable ROI .

Let’s turn now to the Page Types tab:


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Here the advertiser is presented with a range of page types that have traditionally yielded poor results for some advertisers. Again, Google’s explanation of each type:

Network types

  • Parked domains are sites in Google’s AdSense for domains network. Users are brought to parked domain sites when they enter the URL of an undeveloped Web page into a browser’s address bar. There, they’ll see ads relevant to the terminology in the URL they entered. The AdSense for domains network is encompassed by both the content network and the search network. If you exclude this page type, you’ll exclude all parked domain sites, including the ones on the search network.
  • Error pages are part of Google’s AdSense for errors network. Certain users are brought to error pages when they enter a search query or unregistered URL in a browser’s address bar. There, they’ll see ads relevant to the search query or URL they entered.

User-Generated Content

  • Forums are Web sites devoted to open discussion of a topic.
  • Social networks are Web sites offering an interactive network of friends with personal profiles.
  • Image-sharing pages allow users to upload and view images.
  • Video-sharing pages allow users to view uploaded videos.

This data is fascinating because it illustrates something I’ve been hearing from Google for some time: it’s not uncommon for pages/sites like parked domains (arbitrageurs) and error pages to yield good-to-excellent CTRs and conversion rates. In the example above, only social network pages yielded poor results, while the others produced results that rivaled the best search campaigns.

So, use the tool to further fine-tune your content campaigns — but watch out for these caveats:

  • Not all languages are supported — at the moment only Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sites can be excluded
  • The tool is not infallible — so continue to run Placement performance reports and use the Site Exclusion tool to opt out of poorly-performing sites/pages.