It is not uncommon for search engine marketers to find difficulties in developing successful
Pay Per Click (PPC)
advertising campaigns. In essence, the reason for their failures in PPC
advertising is primarily a lack of experience and understanding as to
how to use Google AdWords effectively.
With some basic knowledge
and AdWords awareness, one can optimize their Pay Per Click campaigns
for greater performance. Knowing of the intricacies of the Google
AdWords platform and how organize cohesive campaigns and ad groups can
lead to a much higher return on ad spend (ROAS).
PPC optimization
is imperative to sustain success using Google Adwords. Below we touch
upon many strategies to optimize your campaigns for better
profitability.
Understand Keyword Match Types
Although an elementary concept in
Pay Per Click advertising,
understanding keyword match types is essential to be successful. Google
breaks down keyword match types in three primary ways: Broad, [Exact],
and "Phrase" match.
In Google search, a broad match can often
times be extremely broad. For example, for a keyword phrase like "Kids
military uniforms," under the broad match setting, your ad may be
triggered for searches like "childrens army suit" or "youth navy
uniform." In essence, broad match is very broad, so be sure you know
what you're getting into if you choose to leave your keywords as broad
(without "quotes" for phrase match or [brackets] for exact match.)
Using
exact keyword matching by surrounding the keyword phrase in brackets
will ensure that your ads are only triggered when search engine users
submit that exact phrase, and nothing else. By using exact phrase
matching, you can better minimize wasted impressions from broad searches
and reduce budget-sucking click-throughs.
Because exact phrase
match might fail to display your ads for searchers that you actual do
want to capture, a great alternative is using modified broad matching.
Modified broad is simply placing a "+" symbol directly in front of each
keyword (with no space) that you want specifically mentioned in a user's
search query. The "+" symbol ensures that this word, and only very
close variations (such as plural and singular variations) are what
trigger your ads. So if we bid on the keyword "+kids +military
+uniforms" our ad will still be displayed for search queries like "kid
military uniform" or "kids military uniforms for sale," not "childrens
navy uniform."
Looking for an seo analyst to take care your keyword analysis, you can contact me.
Do Negative Keyword Research
Negative
keyword research is the effort of pinpointing undesirable keyword
variations that are resulting in unwanted ad impressions. For instance
if we are an ecommerce store that selling NEW "kids military uniforms,"
we would want to implement negative keyword variation for "used," "how
to make," or "free" kids military uniforms.
By using exact
keyword matching, we have no need to worry about negative keyword
research; however by using modified broad match, we will need to
research those unwanted variations. For many marketers, this is a
crucial step to the PPC optimization process.
One of the easiest
ways to conduct negative keyword research is to open the "See search
terms" feature. This is located under the "Keywords" tab of the ad group
you are in. Here you can view a list of all of the search terms that
have triggered your ads over a certain period of time. Taking a look at
all of these search queries can be very eye-opening as well as
enlightening to pinpoint negative keywords to implement into the ad
group.
Once you have drilled down on the keywords that you want
to add as negatives, just click the check box for the unwanted keyword
and hit "Add keyword as negative," which is found above the list of
search queries. This will automatically implement the full keyword
phrase as an exact match to your negative keyword list for that
particular ad group.
Create Tight Ad Groups (with Few Keywords)A
typical mistake that online advertisers make while developing PPC
campaigns and ad groups is poor keyword grouping. In most cases, ad
groups with too many keywords are destined for failure. Because only one
ad can serve an entire ad group, only a few, very closely related
keywords should be included.
By segmenting keywords into highly
focused ad groups, marketers can write targeted ads with greater
relevancy to the user. In addition to ad copy, keyword-tight ad groups
allow advertisers to use better landing pages. Not only does creating
more focal ad groups increase the precision of the ad and its landing
page, but more narrowed ad groups can increase keyword quality scores
and minimize CPC's (cost per clicks).
A solid first step to
optimizing your ad groups is to analyze the nature and quality scores of
each group. How many keywords are in your ad groups? What are the
quality scores of your keywords? How much activity is each keyword
receiving (impressions/clicks)? How closely related are the keywords in
the ad group?
Hopefully the answers to these questions will
enable you to pinpoint the keywords in your ad group that can be applied
to a new ad group. In more extensive AdWords accounts with many
campaigns, sometimes a keyword can be transferred to more relevant ad
group that already exist. This is a common PPC optimization strategy
referred to as the "Peel & Stick".
Split-Test Your Ad Copy & Landing PagesAdWords
allows you to run multiple ad variations for each ad group. So instead
of creating just one ad for each ad group, try writing three to five ads
with different ad copy. By default, AdWords will begin to display the
ads that are performing the best, however, AdWords does not take into
account the importance of statistical relevancy, or validity. That is,
AdWords will start favoring one ad over the others only after a handful
of impressions and clicks when often times more data is needed to make a
valid decision on which ads are working better than others.
If
you are split-testing a number of ad variations, be sure to choose the
option to "Rotate to show ads evenly," which is in the settings tab for
the particular campaign. This way you can let your ads run for awhile
before gauging the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the ad copy.
Equally
important (if not more important) is split-testing your landing pages.
This may not be an option if you are advertising an ecommerce store with
specific product pages as the destination URL of the ad. However for
other businesses and industries, testing various landing page designs
and concepts is critical, especially for competitive keyword targets.
Try testing various types of call-to-actions as well as using different
landing page copy. Another great strategy is to make use of videos and
images where relevant.
Users have a lot of expectations these
days while browsing the Web, so be sure to optimize your Pay Per Click
campaigns to their fullest potential.
Source :http://succesful-internetmarketer.blogspot.com/2013/02/ppc-optimization-strategies_322.html
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