I often hear from companies that they don’t know how much money they should put into their Google Adwords account. But let me show you how you will get your perfect PPC budget. Step by step.
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Regardless of the type of website that you own, it is imperative to drive traffic to it. After all, unless you want to be the only person who will ever see it, you will need to take steps to let people know that your site exists.
There are several marketing strategies that are utilized to increase a website’s search engine ranking and daily amount of traffic, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is definitely one of the most popular options. By creating quality PPC ads that run on websites such as Google, you can easily transform an under-performing website into a solid financial resource.
What Exactly is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
PPC advertisements enable you to get a message about your website in front of a large group of people for a discounted rate. Instead of standard banner ads that can cost several hundred dollars for a limited time period, you will only be required to pay when someone actually clicks on your advertisement.
The advantage of this is easy to understand, especially when you consider that anyone who is interested enough to click on your ad is much more likely to actually spend more than a couple of seconds on your website.
The most popular example of PPC advertising is Google AdWords, but the format is also used by a wide variety of other websites, including Facebook. Google’s version enables owners to push their website toward the top of the search engine’s site rankings. These paid advertisements will catch the attention of most Internet users, and this will help you capture a larger percentage of your target audience.
How do I Design a Quality Pay-Per-Click Ad?
You will be given the opportunity to enter a target market and several keywords that are relevant to your website. By properly taking advantage of these options, you will ensure that your ads employ the necessary search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
After all, if people who look for information about your specific company or general industry are unable to easily find either your PPC ad or your website’s search engine listing, you will not be able to capture a large audience.
Everspark Interactive, an SEO firm in Atlanta is one of the many companies that provide SEO services in the United States. Among many other rules, Everspark Interactive teaches its clients that keeping SEO in mind at all times during the construction of your website and your PPC ads is crucial.
The most important thing, besides using the right keywords, is to make sure that you are targeting the right audience. After all, if you have a locally owned comic book store in New York City, it is not going to make sense to target people who live outside of the general area.
You should also consider your key demographic when you are setting up your parameters, and make sure to use common keywords that are associated with your industry. In the comic book store example, that would include keywords such as Spider-Man, Batman and Superman.
How do I know if My Ads are Working?
You should receive a PPC analysis along with your paid advertisement. For example, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that makes it easy to figure out if an ad is attracting a lot of traffic. However, if you are paying for hundreds of clicks a day without getting a lot of additional business, it is important to try a new approach by changing your keywords.
If you take advantage of everything that PPC has to offer, it can help you greatly increase your website traffic. As long as you offer a quality service or product to everyone who clicks on your ad, you should also see a better bottom line.
Felicia Willis is a writer and editor of more than 15 years, and lives in Atlanta. Everspark Interactive is an SEO firm in Atlanta that takes the mystery out of SEO practices, and teaches about the importance of it. Photo credit: altemark.
When you hear experts preach the gospel of local SEO, they’re often praising a mixture of on-page and off-page tactics that result in natural rankings. The organic approach always makes a fine option for the simple that it’s cheap (often free) and works incredibly well. With that said, local businesses should not dismiss the value of going the premium route. That’s right. I’m talking about PPC advertising.
If you’ve got the budget and could use the added visibility, paid search is a viable option to consider. Below I have outlined seven ways it can help your local business.
1. Deliver Instant Results
Despite what an aggressive SEO agency might tell you, search engine optimization is not a game of overnight success. The blogs and websites that consistently rank high in Google for multiple keywords — many of them are riding on years of hard work that finally paid off. PPC campaigns are generally easy to set up and deliver fast results. It is possible to see a huge traffic surge mere hours after deploying your campaign.
2. Increase Visibility
Local search grows more competitive by the day, which makes gaining a top spot in the SERPs an increasingly difficult chore. Even with all your hard work in creating solid content, building links, and convincing customers to leave feedback through review channels, there is no guaranteeing where your site will be positioned. Paid search can ensure that your site pops up in the results on the first page, and the better you are at it, the more visibility you create.
3. Boost Company Revenues
Some companies have a regular budget allocated to PPC advertising. These businesses have unlocked the secrets of using it to open another active revenue stream. Paid search is a proven way to create more exposure for new products, sales, events, and other elements that generate revenue. Behind a compelling call to action in your ad, an optimized landing page can be key in driving those prosperous conversions.
4. Align with Existing SEO Efforts
One of the most effective marketing strategies you can employ is one that involves mixing and matching different channels. Integrating your PPC campaigns with organic SEO efforts is a perfect example of this. Just think of the impact you could make if sponsored results are driving in additional traffic on top of the flow you’ve created from your long time optimization efforts.
5. Provide Access to Affordable Advertising
For years, local businesses have been relying on traditional advertising channels such as TV, radio, and newspaper to increase buzz and traffic. While these methods have worked for some, they are generally expensive and for others, questionable in terms of effectiveness. Paid search offers an affordable alternative to traditional advertising. In most cases, you can set your own budget and literally spend only what you’re able to afford on a day-to-day basis.
6. Create an Edge Over the Competition
A little competition is good, but you want to be on the favorable side more often than not. If you get behind too much, you could eventually find yourself out of business. Indulging in paid search advertising is essentially another way to distance your business from its competitors. It might not be a huge edge, but every visitor, subscriber, and customer that the campaign sends your way contributes to an edge you didn’t have over the competition before.
7. Support Local Initiatives
Search advertising platforms have advanced in ways that make them far more useful to digital marketers. A prime example of this can be seen in their rich targeting capabilities. Google AdWords, for instance, allows you to customize your PPC campaigns to specifically target search users in your area. This particular platform offers tools that let you craft your ads based on local criteria such as city, state, or ZIP code, ensuring that you target the right audience.
Keeping an Open and Opportunistic Mind
Most local businesses are small to medium-sized companies with very little extra cash to spare. However, marketing is one expense that can be considered a necessity. If you want decent to good returns, you have to make investments that give you something back. So if you’re writing off paid search, this is the part where I go: “Not so fast!”. Combined with what you’re doing currently, it can be highly effective at helping maximize your visibility and make the most of your overall efforts.
What do you guys think about integrating PPC into local marketing strategies? Is it worth the investment? Let us know below.
Chiko Noguchi is a best practices activist and advocate for a leading provider of email marketing services.
Google AdWords is the alternative to search engine optimization, using advertising to bring in traffic instead of organic search results.
At first glance, the two methods have very little in common, but they can be used together to create a more informed and effective marketing strategy on both fronts.
From an SEO perspective, AdWords’ main value lies in its potential to find and test keyword phrases with quick results.
Instead of spending half a year optimizing for a promising query only to be disappointed, an AdWords campaign can collect the necessary information in as little as a month.
Performing Keyword Research
Most webmasters limit their AdWords usage to its Keyword Tool, which provides a number of statistics for any given search term.
The tool is free to use and simple to learn, though some terms are not immediately intuitive.
When a phrase is entered, the Keyword Tool returns the competition level for advertiser fees as well as an estimated number of searches per month.
More importantly, it also offers variants on the phrase, which may be more lucrative or at least spawn a few new ideas. It is not fool-proof, but the Keyword Tool is a useful starting point in any SEO strategy.
Collecting Demographic Information
Once you have some keywords in mind, you can choose to either walk away from AdWords or begin a campaign.
It costs money, but the information gathered is generally well worth the initial investment.
AdWords provides extensive reports based on performance, including a rough sketch of the people most likely to click the ad. This may divulge age, gender and location, all of which play a role in conversions.
Knowing your visitors helps shape content to better suit their needs, resulting in a better experience for everyone involved. At the same time, don’t get so focused on one group that other traffic feels alienated.
Determining Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate is the number of times an ad is clicked relative to the number of times it is shown.
A low rate indicates either a lackluster keyword or poor copy. Unless the first run is satisfactory, it may take several tries to get right. How does this help SEO?
Think of the title and description that appear on Google’s results page as an advertisement that runs without any fees.
Those few lines of text are all you have to lure in readers. Knowing what it most likely to get them clicking is a key part of business success.
Studying Conversions
Last but not least, the number of people you reach is only important within the context of conversion rates.
The conversion rate describes how many visitors actually go on to do a profitable activity, whether that is buying a product, signing up for a service or clicking someone else’s advertisement.
The right keywords and copy are essential in this. For example, someone searching for how to potty train a puppy might be interested in buying house pads, but they may just take the information and run.
An AdWords campaign is your first clue whether or not a keyword string is actually commercially viable, making it one of the most important pieces of research in SEO.
Author Bio – Paul Teitelman is a Toronto SEO expert who has been involved with the industry since its earliest days. He currently offers consulting and optimization services through his website at www.paulteitelman.com.
Google Analytics is perhaps one of the most ideal assessment tools for startups, who wish to make it big in the online marketing realm and appear as a challenging competitor to its rivals.
The records, metrics and the array of valuable information the analytics provide can truly improve the performance of a website.
Apart from the information on the number of page views, traffic, and others, Google Analytics also provides precious information on the Keywords, which when tracked and implemented efficiently can bring about beneficial results.
So before we proceed further, let’s just see briefly about keywords, and what they mean in SEO.
A Quick Introduction to Keywords
In SEO, keywords are of two types – Longtail & Head Terms.
Head Terms
These are non-specific keywords, which the users type in to get generic results. For instance, a user looking for a laptop will reach in his search engine by directly keying in the term ‘laptop’. This is more open and throws in a number of options to the users.
Longtail
Longtail keywords are search terms that contain a tiny phrase of about 3 to 5 words.
These are specific in nature and help the users to refine their search results and get closer to what they are looking for.
In the same example as above, a user who is specific about his requirements will type ‘Laptops below $500’ in his search engine. The phrase ‘Laptops below $500’ is termed as longtail keywords.
Perks of using longtail keywords
- ü They are less competitive, since they are specific
- ü They constitute about 70% of the web traffic
- ü They produce higher conversion rates, because the user knows what he wants
Now that we know the importance of longtail keywords for our website and content, it’s time to capitalize on them and reap the benefits. So, let’s get started.
Using Google Analytics to Find Longtail Keywords
I. Login to Google Analytics and set the timeline to about 3 months, for a detailed information
II. Reach the ‘Content’ tab , present on the left portion of the page, beneath the dashboard
III. Now select the ‘Top content’ tab. This will display the pages in descending order, or in simple words, based on the number of times they are viewed
IV. Select the page for which you wish to analyze and determine the keywords
V. Notice the option ‘Entrance Keywords’ on the bottom right corner of the page and click on it. This option will display all the keywords that were used by the searchers to reach that particular page you’ve chosen
VI. Now explore through the keyword list and gauge if you have used them already in your articles or web content. If used, ignore them and proceed to the next. In case if you haven’t select a few keywords, which you think have a potential, and set them aside
VII. Now, zero-in from the hand-picked keywords, after carefully analyzing the following factors
a) Choose only the keywords that are relative to your website and/or niche
b) Also factor in the number of page views the keyword managed to convert
c) Take into consideration, the duration spent on that particular page. This indirectly signifies the relevancy of the keyword and assists you in coming into a conclusion. The longer the duration spent on the page, the relevant the keyword and the information was and vice versa. However, there is a restriction that the amount of time spent may also be due to the length of the article. So, consider even this and zero-in on your keyword
So, that is how we determine new longtail keywords and make the most out of Google Analytics.
Implementing this will surely bring about a commendable change in the derivation of website traffic.
So, make use of Google Analytics to the optimum, try out new longtail keywords in your articles and content and witness the traffic your website soaring high, this 2013!
Andrea Walters, a freelance writer for www.globalx.net – The Nation’s Lowest All-Digital Price Provider. dish tv packages
I am very happy to show you this Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4. And it’s still free for all members of SeoCustomer.
This guide contains all the post and articles from 3. Quarter 2012 about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building – 159 pages.
After a while the older articles are no longer visible here on www.SeoCustomer.com but you can still get a lot of tips and tricks from the posts.
So I have collected all the articles in an eBook (PDF) – so you can get a hot cup of coffee (or tea) and sit down and read about it all.
You can get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4 here free after signing up for the weekly newsletter.
As a bonus you will also get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011, 2012Q1, Q2 and Q3. All together 5 ebooks now.
Have a great day out there.
Carpe diem, Henrik
Who says there is competition only in business field! Well in the world of internet these days it’s a battle between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC).
As per the research made around 90% of the people who uses internet use various search engines like Google, Bing, yahoo and MSN to get information on the products and services which they are looking for.
Almost everyone who searches for information type a keyword which is also known as Keyword which helps search engines bring up the required results which have natural organic listings also consisting of PPC advertisements.
But the bottom-line is not about the battle and who wins! It’s a question of which one would suit your business requirements. Keep reading the article for more details.
You need to pay to attract traffic to your website with the help of PPC advertising programs which are provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing etc.
These tools would help you to display your advertisement in sponsored section whenever the result related to your website is displayed. You would need to pay a certain amount of fee every time the user clicks on your website link. The amount however depends on how strong are your keywords.
On the other hand you could also attract more traffic to your website for free by getting high rankings in the natural listing results. Natural listing results are the results which are shown next to the sponsored sections.
All you have to remember is that you follow the SEO practices in an appropriate manner so that your website results appear on the first page more often whenever the visitor keys the words related to your product or services.
There may be some circumstances when your website might take some time to reach on the top of the page but then again the free, directed traffic would most likely be worth the deal.
But the question is which tactic is much better? To answer this question I would say it entirely depends upon the budget. If you have a huge budget go for PPC but if you are looking to save money by investing a little than SEO is better.
How much is my budget?
Before choosing SEO or PPC, you must first know how much you are going to invest in advertising your business on the web. It can be a good idea to start with a minimum amount of $5 to $10 per day set as your daily spending limit.
On the other hand if you have a very little budget than SEO is the best option. If you ask me I would say even if you have a little capital to invest go for PPC as it offers various benefits like faster testing and guard from SEO algorithm updates.
What are the CPC rates for my business?
Secondly, it depends on how are the CPCs for your industry. PPC allows the users to bid on how much they are ready to pay for a single click which is known as cost per click (CPC).
For instance if you are targeting people who are looking for “Cleaning industry services” you can make use of online software called Traffic Estimator which is a free Google External Keyword Research Tool.
You would see that the average CPC for this keyword is $2.76. On the other hand average CPCs can sometimes run as high as $30 thus making it difficult for your business to gain profit from PPC which means SEO is a better choice.
To conclude SEO and PPC can both be powerful. Last but not the least! Always make sure you get regular updates about Google’s policies as they change every now and then which means if today your website is on page 1 who knows tomorrow it might land up to page 6 of the page.
Matthew Anton is a professional online marketer offering search engine optimization services through Backlinksindexer
PS – Remember to check out the article How to find your perfect PPC budget here.
However interesting your online marketing campaign may be, at the end of the day, there’s only so much it can do.
It can certainly target your niche and bring in interested customers to your site, but it can’t convert all the incoming traffic into sales.
The reason is, regardless of the attractiveness of your website, people may not tend to come back to your site even if they were interested in your products initially.
The fact that barely 2% visitors purchase products when they visit a site for the first time is proof enough that every online marketing strategy needs to be thoroughly looked into.
The remaining 98% of visitors don’t make a purchase the first time they land on your webpage.
What can a marketing manager do to bring back these potential customers to the site once again to complete the purchase? How about a gentle reminder or giving them a cue that can turn these potential clicks in to concrete sales? That’s where Google AdWords remarketing comes in.
What is AdWords Remarketing?
Remarketing is a feature in Google AdWords that can help you reach out to those people who initially visited your site but left without purchasing anything.
With remarketing, you can connect to these people even when they visit any other site on Google Display Network.
You can send certain compelling advertisements that can encourage them in coming back to your site and buying the product.
How does Remarketing work?
Here’s an example of how remarketing may help in bringing more traffic to your site. Let’s assume you deal in the sale of antiques.
You know that 10% of visitors to your site will purchase your products. But the rest 90% visitors, although they were initially interested, leave your site without purchasing any product.
Now with remarketing, you can add a remarketing tag or a remarketing code to all your site’s pages.
Thus, whenever a visitor visits your site, he will automatically be added into your remarketing list.
You can now reach out to those 90% visitors who didn’t buy any product by showing them ads and offers’ that may entice them to come back to your site to buy even while they browse other sites.
How can AdWords remarketing bring in more traffic to your website?
• Creating and managing AdWords remarketing list is very easy.
• AdWords remarketing is a targeted advertising campaign that targets only those visitors who dint get converted into sales.
• As Google has a huge partner list, your remarketing campaign has the potential to reach millions of customers.
• It can target those visitors who were on the verge of making a purchase (those who discarded the shopping cart!) before leaving the site without completing it.
• Remarketing helps you connect with every visitor. It can also target those visitors who have completed a sale by offering them other products and special offers.
• It helps you get in touch with customers within a period of time.
• It helps bring in higher and faster return on investment.
• You can create attractive and relevant advertisements and follow-up messages to target customers.
• You can also control where your advertisement appears by limiting or increasing the number of advertisements depending on that particular sites performance.
Tanya Hansen is a Freelance writer, she currently writes for www.homesecurityreviewsite.com – offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes. home security systems
Most of the small or medium sized businesses (SMBs) that spend money on Google Adwords don’t optimize their Google Adwords. So for all of you I have made this checklist.
When I did some research for this article I found out that over half of the Adwords users haven’t checked their account in the past month and 25 percent haven’t logged in once in over 90 days. Amazing right?
SMBs marketers are often working with much smaller budgets and they often have a lot of different tasks to perform, so maybe they don’t think they have time for Google Adwords in their daily routines. But I will show them that it’s worth spending some few minutes every day, week and month.
They don’t check their keywords, they are not changing their ads – it’s all on autopilot. But on the other hand this is good news for the businesses which are checking their Adwords. It is much easier to beat a competitor who doesn’t check their account regularly.
You don’t have to spend hours optimizing your Google Adwords, just a few tips and tricks will do magic for your Adwords. So are you ready? Do you have coffee in your cup?
# Daily routines with Google Adwords
Every day I will log into my Google Adwords account for just 5 min. Is everything working well? You will have to check if everything looks normal.
If you normally have 100 clicks from Adwords and one morning you found that you only have 5 clicks – something is wrong, right?
This should only take 5 min.
# Weekly routines with Google Adwords
Check your keywords
You should raise your bids on the keywords that are doing a good job. A good job means converting clicks to conversions. (You do have some goals for your Adwords right? If not – make some right now).
You should lower your bids on keywords from which you don’t get any conversions. If you don’t have too much time to spend every week on this, you might find that Adwords automated bidding will help you. Remember that you need to give your keywords some time. You can’t create a keyword on Monday and raise or lower your bid the next day. You will need some clicks to be statistic sure how great/bad it is performing.
Every week I will look at the Negative keywords list. You will find it when you click on your campaigns/keywords at the bottom. Go through the list and exclude the word phrases which are a waste of money. This could save you a lot of money and raise your quality score.
Check your ads
You need to have at least 2 ads for every keyword. This way you can test which ads give you most clicks or conversions. You need to give the ads some time before you can tell which one is the winner.
To give you an idea about how many clicks you need to take a good here at www.SplitTester.com. Maybe you shouldn’t do this every week but only once a month – it all depends on how many clicks you are getting.
Make sure that your ads have a benefit statement and a very strong call to action. When you are sure about the statistic you should throw away the bad performing ads and replace it with a new ad. This way you will continually get higher and higher CTR and Quality Scores over time.
# Month routines with Google Adwords
Check your Quality Score
Google calculates your Quality Score every time somebody does a search that triggers your ad. Quality Score is very important to you because of several factors.
Your keywords cost per click (CPC) – higher quality scores leads to a lower CPC. Yes you actually pay less per click when your Quality Score is higher. It also affects the first page bid estimate – a higher Quality Score leads to a lower first page bid estimate. So it will be much easier for you to get your ad on the first page with a higher Quality Score. Your Quality Score also leads to a cheaper top of page bid estimate. In general your ad position will get higher with a higher Quality Score and lower with a lower Quality Score.
The reason is that Google wants to show the most relevant ad to the user looking for something special. So a higher Quality Score makes Google happy because the user is happier. So if there are a lot of businesses out there who never check their Google Adwords account, they will properly have a low Quality Score on some keywords and because you are working with your quality score you will beat them.
Google calculates your Quality Score with a large number of different factors related to your keyword – Your keyword’s past click through rate (CTR), your display URL’s past CTR, your account history, the quality of your landing page, your keyword/ad relevance, your keyword/search relevance, geographic performance, your ad’s performance on a site, your targeted devices
If your Quality Score is below 5 you should do something about it. So increase your Quality Score by mention your keywords in the title and text on the landing page and in the ad text. If you have too many keywords in an ad group you should split up the ad group to 2 separate ad groups.
If you have some keywords below the average ROI and below your average Quality Scores – theses keywords are costing you money. If you don’t work to increase your Quality Score you should delete them. I have heard the term “Band-Aid Solution”. So you have a choice – optimizing your low performing keywords or put them on pause.
Keyword Research
Your keywords are the backbone of your Google Adwords. The Quality of your keyword research can make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful campaign.
So you should expand your keyword research to increase your reach. Try some other keyword match types such as modified broad, phrase and exact match. In the end you should have a keyword database that is both deep and broad and highly targeted.
Give me a comment – did I forget something?
I am sure you guys are doing this Google Adwords routine in a different way – because not one way is the ultimate way.
So I will love to hear from you – give me some tips – what are you doing daily, weekly or monthly? Did I forget something here.
Give me a comment and show me you are alive.
Many companies are spending tons of money on their PPC (Pay Per Click) on Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing or even on social media like Facebook.
So we have to give our PPC budget a review from time to time.
How effective are our campaigns? Are we getting the maximum return of our investment?
Have you identified your metrics and your key performance indicators (KPI) so you can measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaign?
Let me give you a step by step approach to do a PPC audit.
The analyze consist of 4 steps. First you have to “Analyzing Account and Campaign Structure”. Then you will have to “Analyzing Ad Group / Ad Copy”. After that you will have to do an “Analyzing Keyword and Landing Pages”. Finally you will have to “Identify quick opportunities for optimization”.
Okay are you ready? Coffee in your cup?
I will talk about Google Adwords in this article – but you can use the same kind of audit in all your PPC accounts on the Internet.
1 – Analyzing Account and Campaign Structure
First you will have to start looking into your existing PPC account and campaign structure. You can waste a lot of good money if your structure is wrong.
Check whether the account includes categorization for different campaigns. You can start by checking your campaign structure – start checking whether it includes a categorization of different ad groups or not properly.
When do you need to create a new campaign?
Staying organized – you might have to create a new campaign to stay organized. You could be selling shoes in one campaign and footwear in another campaign. This way you will stay organized and not just having one huge campaign folder.
Setting the drive campaign structure – this is the main reason for setting up different campaigns. You are controlling some of the structures at the campaign level. This could be the “search and display network”, “Search Network only” or “display Network only”.
You can also choose the location and language settings. If you are selling shoes in Denmark and in the USA – it will be advisable to create a campaign for each of the two countries.
You can also choose your device targeting options on the campaign level. Here you can text and image ads either to desktop and laptop computer, or to Smartphones devices with an internet browser, or to tablet devices.
So you might create a new campaign specific to a mobile campaign instead of mixing it into your normal campaign. This way you have more control over your different type of campaigns.
If all your ads are collected in one campaign if will be a good idea to start splitting into different campaigns.
Okay – ready for next step in our audit?
2 – Analyzing Ad Group / Ad Copy
Now it’s time to check the ad groups.
First we will check the settings. Is your campaign split into locally ad groups? Let’s say you are selling Shoes – then you might want to make an ad group for your “party shoes” and one for more “Formal shoes”.
The reason for this is that you need parameters like keywords, relevance, landing pages to be focused on party shoes. And it will be different parameters for the formal shoes.
Remember to check into your ad scheduling, the Geo location targeting and the language settings.
When you check your ad copy – remember to check whether you are using your keywords in the copy, prices, special offers, do you copy some unique selling points and do you have some strong call to action?
Depending on how many clicks you have – you should at least have 2 variations of your ad at a time. Read more here about – how you can decide which ad is the winner.
One little trick is to automatically insert the search phrase into your ad copy. You can read more about the dynamic keywords here.
That was step number 2. Take some more coffee before we start again.
3 – Analyzing Keywords and Landing Pages
Now it’s time to check out our keywords and landing pages. In this section we will look into how the keyword is performing, the quality score, keyword match type, bid rate and conversions.
Keywords – start to think you are the customer. If you are looking for shoes how do you want to search? If somebody is looking for shoes – the person might look for “red shoes”, “high heel shoes”, “tennis shoes”, “women shoes”, “cheap shoes”, “casual men shoes”.
Often you will get a much higher CTR for keywords phrases contain more than one word.
Remember to review your keywords periodically and remove non performing keywords which are not providing any revenue for the company.
Keyword Match Type – check out your keyword match type.
There are 5 types of keyword matching. “Broad match”, “phrase match”, “exact match”, “broad match modifier” and “negative”. The most normal thing is to use phrase match, exact match and broad match modifier as the match type.
If you have the word “men’s shoes” as a keyword and uses a broad match – they your ad will be shown if somebody is searching for “men’s” and “shoes” in any order of the search query. Your ad will also be shown for both singular and plural forms, synonyms and other relevant variation. So this way your ad will be shown for “men’s shoes”, “cheap men’s shoes”, “men’s shoe photos”,” running shoes” and more.
If you are using the phrase match – then your ad will only be shown for a keyword search query in the same order of words. It will also show your ad like if you have used exact phrase. Your main benefit is compared to broad match is that the ad will not be shown for searches like “shoes for men”, “men shoe”, “men’s sneakers” and more.
If you pick out the exact match – then your ad will only appear when a user is looking for your specific term “men’s shoes”. The user will have to search for the exact word and with the exact order. Your ad will not be shown for “cheap men’s shoes”, “men’s shoe”, “buy men’s shoes” and more.
Let’s say if you placed +men’s +shoes as a broad match modifier type then your ad will appear only when a user searches for terms like discounted men’s shoes, stylish men’s shoes and so on.
Negative keywords is a great way to get a higher CTR. When you add some negative keywords it will help not to show your ad when it’s really unwanted or irrelevant. If you are selling men’s shoes – then put “women’s” as a negative keyword. If you’re selling expensive shoes – a negative keyword could be “cheap” and more.
Next check out the landing page quality. In a PPC audit it is also important to check out the landing page of your ad. When you are doing landing page analysis – remember to look for factors that could improve your quality. Are you using an appealing tag line, do you have a strong call to action button above the fold, do you use testimonial, videos and demo of your products? Benefits in bullet points?
Get some more ideas here with 13 elements your home page must have.
4 – Identifying Quick Opportunities to Optimize
This is the last step in our do it yourself PPC audit.
First you will need to take a look at your quality score on each keyword.
If your quality score is 7, 8, 9 or 10 it will help you to get a higher position on Google Adwords. So you are doing a great job.
If your quality score is 5, 6 you have a medium level quality score.
If your quality score is 1, 2, 3 or 4 your keyword has a low quality score and you will need to work with it. Import your landing page or delete the keyword. A low quality score will increase your cost and lower your ad position.
You could also split the keywords into different ad groups, with a more specific ad copy relevant to the keyword with lower quality score. Try also to change the title and the Meta description of the landing page and the content of the landing page. This will all help you to increase the quality score of the low ranking quality score keywords.
Check out the conversion rate of your website. Whatever your goal is – email subscribe, purchase, Sign-up – you will have to check it out.
What is your cost per lead? What is your cost per conversion?
And how much money is a conversion worth for you and your company?
Get more ideas how to optimize your conversion rate here.
Well time for me to do an audit now.
Have a great day out there – take care.
Henrik