Pay Per Click Insider TipsBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

By Kelly Larsen Director of Marketing, PPC Summit 

At past PPC Summit events, attendees have shown a lot of interest in WordStream’s keyword tool so we decided to provide a more detailed look at how these tools work. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Larry Kim, Founder and VP of Product Development at WordStream, to learn about their new keyword tools. Larry walked us through how the Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper work and how you can use them to enhance your SEO and PPC results. We wanted to share some of the cool product takeaways in the following Q&A on how these tools can help you better manage the keyword development process.

1.  How do these new tools help Search Marketers do their jobs better?
We launched these free Keyword tools to offer Search Marketers a broader range of keyword development and management options. The Keyword Niche Finder is designed to help prioritize content, keyword targeting and campaign creation based on an entire “keyword universe” surrounding a topic. It helps Search Marketers find the most popular pockets of related keywords (keyword niches) rather than individual keywords. And the Keyword Grouper helps Search Marketers organize their own keyword lists and data into actionable groups and niches.

 Advantages of The Keyword Niche Finder and Keyword Grouper:
a. Identify Keyword Niches Versus Single Keywords – Many times the most popular   keyword will perform best on your site, but not always.

b. Discover In-depth Keyword Variations – The Niche Finder offers popular variations within a given keyword cluster. This helps to vary page content and anchor text – something SEOs advocate – and it helps to structure comprehensive PPC campaigns or Ad Groups.

c. Improve Campaign Structure – These tools help to create a well-organized, semantically themed campaign and Ad Group structure for paid search accounts.

2. What are keyword niches and how do they help SEO and PPC campaign performance?
Keyword niches are groupings of tightly related keywords that can be used to drive paid and organic search marketing strategies.

For SEO purposes, identifying keyword niches helps marketers prioritize SEO workflow, identify promising topics for Web content and blog posts, and ensure that a website is optimized for the most profitable keywords.

As for PPC performance, when you identify keyword niches in your vertical, it allows you to create a strong PPC account structure at inception. This will save time and money by delivering more relevant ads, which in turn generate more clicks and improve your Quality Score.

3. How does the Keyword Niche Finder work?
Let’s take a look at the Niche Finder in action. It’s interesting to compare the results of a traditional keyword tool to The Free Keyword Niche Finder, as shown below. Here are results from WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool:

 
Now let’s look at the results for the same topic using The Free Keyword Niche Finder:
 

The interesting point here is in the difference between the two results, and the way that the two tools function. The Free Keyword Tool looks at the volume of results across a variety of sources (ISPs, search engines, and toolbars). The Free Keyword Niche Finder takes the same data that The Free Keyword Tool is using and then clusters that information semantically. So what we’re seeing here is that some keywords have a longer or more substantial “tail”.

Take one of the more popular niches (“refurbished laptops – dell”) and enter that keyword into the Niche Finder:

 
Assuming we’re using Refurbished Dell Laptops as a campaign, these would make for a series of pretty tight Ad Groups, ranging from approximately 10 – 35 keywords. This allows you to write very targeted ads and create a very specific, compelling landing page for each group.

4. What is the Keyword Grouper and how does it work?
The Keyword Grouper offers similar functionality to the Keyword Niche Finder, but instead of asking for a keyword as input, it groups existing data. You can export data from your analytics or a search query report, drop it into the tool, and then The Free Keyword Grouper segments that data.

Just drop in a list of keywords, and it provides a list of results similar to what you would find with The Free Keyword Niche Finder. This is a nice way to look at either a list you already have, or to examine historical data on a client site or an existing site you may be taking over. You can then leverage the same advantages The Free Keyword Niche Finder offers.

5. How can I get these tools?
The tools are free and easy to use; all you have to do is create a free WordStream account to gain full access to both tools, the Keyword Niche Finder and the Keyword Grouper.

By Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit Founder

Part One. This is a two part article. Part Two will appear in our next Pay Per Click Insiders newsletter.Small businesses face a unique set of challenges when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. They don’t have a lot of time to constantly monitor campaigns while juggling their other business responsibilities and they typically can’t afford to hire a full time marketing person to run them. They also don’t have the dollars to invest to test huge campaigns and every dollar they spend needs to return an immediate and significant investment, otherwise they tend to just throw up their hands and bail on the process assuming it just doesn’t work for their type of business .

In some cases that may be true, but more frequently they simply haven’t set up the campaign correctly to start with, or have set it up and forgotten about it until at some point they review their credit card statement and realize it’s providing diminishing ROI. With a little education you can avoid most of the common things that kill small business AdWords campaigns and make them perform more effectively for you.

Here are the top ten mistakes many small businesses make that cause their AdWords Campaigns to fail:

1. Not turning off the content network.
When first setting up a campaign in AdWords turn off the content network. Google sets this option as “on” by default, but it typically only works for certain products/industries and those advertisers with a lot of experience and the ability to perform frequent testing. The content network doesn’t deliver relevant enough results to make it worthwhile on a small budget. It’s difficult to manage where your ad shows up and what queries it will show for unless you know what you are doing.  Ads on the content network can show up on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing if you are looking for cheap traffic and know what you are doing, you can also run through dollars very quickly. These aren’t focused searchers, specifically looking for your product or service; they are typically impulse buyers at a very early phase of the buying cycle. Nurtured properly these leads can turn into sales, but if you are just starting out or have limited dollars to spend that’s not where you want to get hung up.

2. Using too many or too few keywords.
Some small businesses assume they can get all the sales they need with twenty keywords, others go to the other extreme and add thousands before they really know how to properly set up a campaign. The folks with the twenty keyword campaigns bail out fast as they typically blow through their budgets in less than a month, wondering why they used the main keywords their competitors are on, but didn’t get many sales. That’s why. They spent too much on obvious keywords that everyone else has been bidding on for ages. Some of their larger competitors have already tested their ads, landing pages and bids to see what works, tweaked them and moved on. This strategy does not create a level playing field for a smaller business or give them any type of advantage, as you are playing a high risk game with high dollar keywords and there are always going to be competitors who have more money to spend than you do.

The folks who start off with thousands of keywords basically forget one simple thing. There is no point in having that many keywords unless you have the ability to test them and see which ones perform for you. With this strategy you’re just throwing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks.

Start off with 200 – 300 targeted keywords and that will allow you to test appropriately. You can use free tools like those from WordStream to determine which keywords to begin with. Then, when you have a list together, work on organizing your Ad Groups, and creating relevant ads.

3. Not structuring Campaigns correctly
In a perfect world your campaigns would be set up like this:

Campaign One:
Keyword One = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test
Keyword Two = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test

But seriously, very few small businesses have time to become a full time copywriter and marketing analyst, so wait to try this approach on your top performing keywords after you get some results. At the start, you need to set up your campaigns in a user friendly fashion that allows you to test easily and frequently and see at a glance what’s working and more importantly what’s not.

Creating ad groups with sets of tightly matched keywords is critical but most small businesses don’t do it. Add a few (maximum 10) relevant keywords to each ad group and add more groups as necessary to accommodate new “themed” keywords. Google maxes out at 100 ad groups per campaign, so you have plenty of room to move things around until you see what makes the most sense.

4. Using broad match unilaterally.
When you initially set up a Google AdWords campaign and input your keywords, the default type is broad match. While broad match can work effectively, it’s better to start off using phrase and exact match types, track the performance and adjust from there. Examples of match types and their functions are:

• Broad: tennis shoes (any order, any word, not as targeted, more clicks)
• Phrase: “tennis shoes” (exact order, words before and/or after, more targeted, less clicks)
• Exact: [tennis shoes] (exact order, no other words, highly targeted, least clicks)
• Negative: – white (this would not show ads for “white tennis shoes”)

By setting all your keywords to broad match initially you allow Google to control which keywords it deems “relevant” for your campaigns rather than deciding for yourself. Broad Match can provide great targeted traffic, but ONLY when you have a large list of negative keywords attached to the campaign and ad groups. Don’t even think about trying broad match without determining which negative keywords you want to use first. Otherwise you run the risk of Google’s algorithm running your campaign for you without a true understanding of your product or service offering. Really? You’d allow a robot to run your business? I would never suggest using broad match on a small budget campaign. You will just blow through money before you can test and determine the appropriate keywords for your business.

5. Not tracking ads and keywords.
Many businesses both large and small set up their ad campaigns assuming that they will just be able to measure results by the amount of sales or leads that come rolling in. They forget this simple fact: If your campaigns aren’t performing, you’re wasting money from the very start. There is no excuse for this given the fact that the Google Analytics tool is available for free to help you track exactly which keywords aren’t performing. Set it up and use from the very start to adjust your results.

All of this may sound a little intimidating at first and as a small business owner you’re probably wondering where on earth you can find the time to work on all of this. Setting up the campaigns properly is a good first step. The next is to learn as much as you can about AdWords. That’s what will give you a true competitive advantage in the long term, and with a little bit of knowledge you can tweak your campaigns to truly perform better.

For additional information we’d like to invite you to attend our upcoming AdWords Advantage Online Summit where a team of 13 experts will go into much greater depth on strategies that you can use right now to make your AdWords Campaigns produce more dollars.

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Mary O’Brien is the Founder and Chairman of Pay Per Click (PPC) Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit, premier Search Engine Marketing training events held in person and online to offer laser-focused education to help internet marketers make more money with Pay Per Click advertising. These training events bring together an expert pool of Search Marketing’s most respected leaders during hands-on workshops, how-to sessions, power labs, personal consulting and much more.

By Craig Danuloff, President and Alex Cohen, Senior Marketing Manager at ClickEquations

Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting.  In our popular blog post about The Economics of Quality Score, we showed how improving your keywords from 7 to 10 could reduce your CPCs by 30%.

But, the way Quality Score works and how you can improve your Quality Score isn’t as easy to understand as it should be.

Just How Important Is Quality Score?
Quality Score plays a critical role in two formulas that Google uses to determine where (and if) your ads appear and how much you pay for clicks.

Quality Score and Ad Rank
The first is the formula for Ad Rank. This is the math that decides which ads appear in the top slot, which ones sit in position #2, and so on all the way down to the point at which ads don’t get shown at all. The formula is:

 
Quality Score is equally as important as your bid in terms of when and where your ads are positioned. It’s the sweat-equity of PPC. You can out-maneuver bigger or slower competitors without spending more.

So if your keyword earns a Quality Score of 10 and your nearest competitor earns only a Quality Score of 5 for that same keyword, your $2 MaxCPC will earn you a higher Ad Rank (and display position) than your competitor’s $3 MaxCPC. Your Ad Rank = 20 (10 x 2) while their Ad Rank = 15 (5 x 3).

If two competitors have similar or equal bids, obviously the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.
And since there are often more advertisers than available display slots, the Ad Rank impact of Quality Score in many cases is the difference between an ad displaying and not displaying at all.

Quality Score and Your CPC
After Quality Score is used to determine the position of your ad, it is used again to calculate how much you’ll pay for each click.

The formula for your CPC on any keyword is based on the Ad Rank of the advertiser who scored just below you and your Quality Score.

 
Using the previous example, our Ad Rank was 20 while our competitors’ Ad Rank was 15. Our cost-per-click is then calculated as 15/10 + $0.01 or $1.51.

For every point (or fraction of a point) our Quality Score goes up, our cost-per-click goes down. And each rise in our Quality Score literally costs us less money on every click.

Assuming that the average Quality Score is 7 (which is our experience based on ClickEquations clients), earning a Quality Score of 10 is like getting a 30% discount. If your Quality Score is 5, then you’re paying a 40% per-click premium.

These are approximate values, because the numbers Google reports to us as Quality Scores aren’t the actual numbers they use in their calculations. We can assume they have much more precision than they share, and their numbers may or may not be exactly proportional to those they show us.

5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score
Understanding and optimizing your Quality Score puts you in a powerful position: you can improve performance while reducing costs.

1. Prioritize: Analyze and prioritize your Quality Score optimization
2. Align: Precisely match search queries with ad copy
3. Revise: Extensive ad copy tests to find best performers
4. Remove: Delete or pause ineffective keywords
5. Eliminate: Landing Page problems and penalties

To get started, we’ve put together our 5 favorite tips to boost Quality Score

1. Prioritize Your Optimization - They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and you need to know your Quality Score before you can improve it.  Pay as much attention to Quality Score as you do to CPC, CTR, and Conversion Rate.

A great way to start is by creating a distribution of your Quality Score to get a snapshot of how things look overall. Here’s one example.

Then, sort campaigns by spend, then ad groups by spend, and finally keywords by Quality Score. In those top spending campaigns and ad groups any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

2. Align Search Queries and Text Ads  – Because Quality Score is driven by click-through-rates, the more you can narrow ad groups so that keywords (and the search queries they attract) are highly relevant to the provided text ad copy the better results you’ll see.

For example, a pet website selling organic pet food wouldn’t want to have the keywords “organic dog food” and “organic cat food” in one ad group. Each of those searchers has a specific pet and a specific pet food need, so they need custom ad copy and landing pages to maximize CTR, Quality Score, and ultimately conversion rates.

3. Revise and Test Ad Creative – Writing compelling, persuasive and distinctive text ads is the most important way you can improve CTR and drive up Quality Score. (The presumes you have organized ad groups narrowly as described above.)

Find the lowest perform text ads (by CTR) in the highest priority ad groups (by spend).  Remove poor performing text ads and work to introduce new ones that are even better. To really figure out what works, run disciplined tests. 

Here are some tips for writing killer text ads.

4. Remove Bad Keywords - Because Quality Score looks at historical CTR beyond the keyword itself, it’s important to remove low CTR keywords and text ads that pull down your overall average and historical rates.

Before deciding to pause or delete a lot of keywords with relatively low CTRs, you should consider the overall distribution of Quality Score within your account. If your account shows these strong signs of solid Quality Score performance, you can be less vigilant about hunting down and removing the low-end performers.

If you’ve got some Quality Score drag, the ?rst step is to remove keywords and text ads that have particularly poor CTRs relative to their closely related peers.

For example, you may have one or more particularly broad keywords within an ad group that gain a massive number of impressions but achieve very low CTR. The decision to pause those is an easy one.

If you have a new or marginally performing account,  you may need to cut more off the bottom and put tighter controls in place, at least until you push the vast majority of your keywords to a Quality Score 7 or higher.

There is a weight of history to the Quality Score calculation so the longer you let poor results linger the harder it may be, and the longer it may take to earn your way out.

5. Eliminate Landing Page Problems  – Of all of the Quality Score components, landing pages are the source of the most confusion and myths. Let’s start by clearing up some of the more egregious ones:

a. Landing pages can only hurt Quality Score, they can’t help it. Generally, only major problems will cause landing  page penalties.

Here are some obvious things to avoid
i. Extensive, unoriginal copy (such as scraped text)
ii. Pop-up advertising
iii. Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query
iv. Very slow loading pages

b. Unlike keyword Quality Score, landing page Quality Score is not updated frequently. If you make changes, be patient. It make take a few weeks to see the impact.

Google landing page guidelines provide the most definitive suggestions.

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Craig Danuloff and Alex Cohen work at ClickEquations, a complete, easy-to-use paid search platform for large advertiser and agencies. For more free tips, check out the ClickEquations Learn section and their paid search blog.

By John McPhee,  Senior Account Executive at Anvil Media

I think we all know by now that social media is here to stay. Yes, it’s true the sites we participate on and the tools we use will all change from time to time, but social media isn’t going anywhere. Looking at these current social media statistics is staggering.

•  4 out of 5 computer users are active in social media
• 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Over 3.6 billion photos have been uploaded to Flickr
• 70 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily
• 19 million tweets per day

Are Companies Monitoring Social Media Usage?

So with all of this social media activity happening, how much of it do you suppose happens at work? Are companies monitoring employee usage? My guess is social media use at work is quite high, and yes, companies are monitoring employee usage. Let’s take a look at a survey conducted by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) to determine how companies are currently monitoring social media use in the workplace. Roughly 65% of companies are doing some sort of employee monitoring while at work, however, the biggest segment uses a “passive system” and will only act when an issue arises. Sounds dangerous to me.

 
From the survey, 24% of respondents said that an employee has faced disciplinary action due to their activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. However, the percentage of disciplinary action in the public sector (33%) was much higher than the private sector (13%).
 

With all of this activity going on at work, and companies spending time, energy and resources monitoring it, doesn’t it make sense to embrace social media and accept that employees will use it? I’m not talking about lying down and letting employees freely use it as they please, but it makes good business sense to take advantage of this medium while you can, and what better way to do that than to empower your employees to join the conversation?

Set the Stage for New Hires

So where, and when, do you start training employees in social media? How about setting some ground rules, a foundation that every employee can learn, understand and use. Creating a social media training course is one of the best ways to start molding your employees into social media marketing machines. Ideally this training would happen during the new hire orientation process. This way every employee understands from day one that social media use is accepted and encouraged, but there are guidelines that must be followed or disciplinary action will be taken, which could lead to immediate termination if the rules are broken. Employees must be held accountable for their actions, or in this case, the words they write via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. 

Get the Old Dogs to Fall in Line

If you do implement social media training in the new hire process, what about your current employees, the old dogs that have been working for the company for years?  Maybe they’ve been using social media already, and are used to doing things a certain way? How do you handle this situation? It’s important to let them know that there will now be guidelines, and a training course (could be a couple hour session, doesn’t have to be extravagant) that must be taken by every employee. Let them know you appreciate what they’ve already done within social media, and you’ll continue to encourage them, but in order to protect the company they’ll need to follow specific guidelines. I would suggest you focus on things that they can say, not what they can’t. This puts a little more positivity to the guidelines.

Creating a Social Media Policy

Looking at the explosion in social media use over the past few years, you have to ask yourself “how many companies actually have a social media policy in place?” In a study conducted by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, 69% of companies said they didn’t have a social media policy in place.

 
That is shocking to me, especially considering the amount of social media use that happens at work. Aren’t companies concerned of the risk they are taking by not having a formal policy? The biggest reason stated for not having a policy is companies aren’t sure what to include, which 25% of respondents stated.

So you’re a company that has created an employee training program, and are looking to also create a social media policy? Where do you start? Well, that’s easy. Look at what other companies are doing and determine which route you’d like to take. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Will it be like Dell, very short and sweet? Or will you decide to provide your employees with a full arsenal like the American Red Cross’s social media toolkit? I think the Mayo Clinic did a good job at providing information about what employees can do, versus what they can’t. Even ESPN has a policy, although I see it as a tad overbearing, prohibiting anyone from writing a personal blog containing sports. Kinda broad and all encompassing, don’t you think guys? A personal blog where you can’t write about sports…hmmm. But hey, at least they have one. Now all ESPN employees know exactly what they can, and can’t, do.

The Bottom Line

Knowing that employees are going to use social media, whether it is at work or outside, the bottom line is that all companies should create some sort of social media policy. This will protect the company in any negative situation that involves an employee, social media and some undesirable words. At the same time, I would highly suggest that companies do what they can to reap the benefits that social media can bring, especially from a trained staff. If the entire company has been trained and understands the goals, social media could be an entirely new medium to obtain new customers, or help retain current ones. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a plethora of others, can all be used to your advantage, and in a down economy, these inexpensive (most are free) tools can work wonders.

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John McPhee is a Senior Account Executive for the Portland-based SEM Agency, Anvil Media. He has expertise in all aspects of search engine and social media marketing with extensive experience in the hospitality/travel and environmentally-friendly consumer goods verticals. He has provided guidance for a number of B2B clients as well.

Successful PPC campaigns start with keyword discovery, research and organization. In paid search, keyword discovery and keyword research are important since searches of the keywords you pick are what you’re paying for. Yet keyword organization—the way you choose to structure your PPC campaigns—is an often overlooked, but critical, task.

To achieve high return on investment in paid search, you’ll need to organize your account in such a way that the keywords in your keyword lists are:

• Relevant to your ad text
• Relevant to your landing pages

The only possible way to achieve these goals is to ensure the keywords in your Ad Groups are relevant to each other.

This will result in:
• Higher quality score: Keywords with higher quality scores enjoy greater exposure and a lower CPC.
• Better conversion rates: By selecting specific keywords and using relevant ad text and landing pages, your customers are more likely to find what they were looking for.

Where do you start?
You can’t possibly write different text ads and landing pages for each keyword in your account, so be creative.
Group and organize your keywords (i.e., segment your keyword list) into close-knit keyword groupings, and write targeted ad text and landing pages for each group. This is a much more realistic approach, and by making your keyword segmentation attainable you’ll be more likely to complete this time-consuming task.

What’s the magic number?
It depends entirely on how closely related the keywords in your groups are. A quick test is to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher and run through each keyword in a given group. Look at the keyword and compare it to the ad text and landing page associated with that Ad Group. Does it make sense? Would you click on that ad if you were the searcher? What would you think of that landing page after clicking on that ad?

Group by intent—analyze the search phrases for the presence of discriminating words that give clues to what they were actually looking for.

For example:

Browse
Searchers who write “asset management” or “asset management best practices” are likely looking to learn more about the topic.

Shop
Searchers who write “asset management software” or “asset management vendors” into a search engine reveal they are in the comparison shopping phase and want to learn who the contenders are.

Buy
Searchers who write “buy asset management software” reveal they are much closer to converting.
Once you have grouped your keywords according to searcher intent, you can craft customized ad text and page content to satisfy the various query types. This process is hard work, but, if done well, provides great returns. You can prioritize your work based on the keyword verticals that drive the most traffic to your site.

Not only will you be driving better qualified traffic to more useful landing pages, you will also be streamlining your bid management efforts. You can now set Ad Group-level bids with the confidence that you won’t be blowing your daily budget on general keywords (think “asset management”), and not bidding high enough on long-tail keywords that specify intent (think “asset management vendors”). If you have successfully segmented your keyword list into “Browse, Shop, Buy” themed keyword groups this will be a piece of cake.

The good news is you can apply the work you do in creating your PPC campaign structure to your SEO efforts. Having grouped and organized keyword data into Ad Groups, you can leverage those same keyword organization structures to inform content authoring, information architecture and workflow prioritization for SEO.

PPC and SEO data sharing and keyword organization results can be staggering — keywords support your search campaigns, and developing an intelligent keyword infrastructure impacts search-driven revenue.

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Larry Kim is the founder of WordStream. You can get in touch with Larry by following him on Twitter, or by reading the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog.

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

Now that the holidays are upon us, most advertisers are pumping ad dollars into their campaigns in hopes of reaching more buyers. Even though we are still in an economic slump, market indicators show that sales stand to improve as more people than ever before are expected to shop online in the next two months, according to a recent Forrester Research study. This is promising for Pay Per Click (PPC) marketers as consumers are increasingly buying and researching online, but it’s important to know where consumers are REALLY spending their dollars. Today more shoppers are buying ‘customer-centric’ brands rather than ‘product-centric’ brands. Learning your customer habits, anticipating their future buying patterns and finding new ways to add value will give your online marketing strategy a boost especially during the holidays.

Here Are Some Tips To Help Drive Your Pay Per Click Sales This Holiday Season

Get Inside Your Buyers’ Heads
Wonder why visitors are bouncing away from your site or landing page and then buying from your competitor? Go beyond the numbers and start studying your customer’s buying behavior to understand what pushes them to purchase your product or service. An important thing to keep in mind is making sure your web site copy touts your product benefits—not features. This is such a simple marketing strategy but it bears repeating because so many etailers get caught up in what their product is all about that they forget why prospects buy. Prospects generally buy because of what a product or service can do for them – not because it is feature rich (ie, cheaper, bigger etc.).

Do Your Keyword Research
Make sure you are targeting the RIGHT keywords – for your current offer. One of the biggest mistakes PPC marketers make is being too general when selecting keywords. This is particularly important for etailers and merchants with wide product lines.

For example, if you run an online shoe store that caters to the whole family, don’t select keywords that drive them to your home page. Get them to the specific product pages so that they can find the item that they are searching for immediately. If you’re having a holiday special on kids’ shoes, select keywords for this; for women’s shoes, do another ad for this; etc.

In short, be specific with your keyword selection. While you may get fewer clicks, your ROI will increase because the leads are super targeted.

Create A Specific Call to Action
Many pay per click marketers waste great PPC ads because they end with a weak call to action. An example of this goes something like, “Click to learn more.”

Call to action statements should be strong, direct and specific:
> Buy Today and Save 10%
> Subscribe to Receive a FREE Gift
> Sign Up for Free Holiday Shipping

These types of call-to-action statements implore the potential customer to take a specific action.

Many retailers will offer free shipping this year in the belief that it will make them more attractive in this recessionary holiday season, but if everyone in your channel is offering it, that won’t allow you to stand out. Think about what your customers are looking for that allows you to stand out and then focus on that benefit heavily in your PPC ads.

In conclusion, pay per click marketing is simple. The basics don’t change. If you keep these three pieces of advice in mind when writing your ads, you’ll get more bang for your buck this holiday season!

P.S. We’re holding our first ever and highly anticipated AdWords Advantage Online Summit on January 12-28. Don’t miss this 3-week online training event, go to www.AdWordsAdvantage.com to learn more.

By Kim Toomey,  Anvil Media

Integrating Google Analytics and AdWords is as easy as clicking a few buttons in your account settings. Despite the easy process, these two programs combined provide powerful data that can improve your PPC accounts more than your standard AdWords data alone. Knowing how visitors behave on your site once they click on a PPC ad is really the true test of how effective your keywords, ad text and landing pages are, not just click through rate and conversion rate.  Here are four reports to look at in Google Analytics that will help to improve your PPC performance.

Keyword Position Report
This gem of a report is hidden in the Google Analytics navigation but is well worth finding. Under Traffic Sources there is a whole AdWords section. Within your AdWords reports you’ll find a keyword position option. The report looks at your top traffic driving keywords and visits based on ad position for that keyword.
 
This report also features a drop down menu so you can look at a variety of data for that one keyword, and determine the most cost effective position for your ad to be in (Average order value by position, Per visit value, % of new visits, etc.)

Using these metrics you can then set your position preference at the keyword level and have a good idea of your maximum cost per click for that keyword in a given position based on your average per visit value.

Ad Version Reports
Although you can get conversion data for each of your ad text variations in AdWords reports, using the Ad Versions report under your Traffic Sources section gives you even more metrics for each ad. Here you can sort your ads by the most revenue generated or goals completed and discover what messages are resonating with your audience best. You’ll also have the opportunity to look at what ads drive the least amount of revenue and consider pausing them or doing an A/B test to find a better message.
 
PPC Landing Page Performance
Now that we have our ads optimized and in the right position, we need to ensure our landing pages are doing what they are supposed to, i.e. drive sales. Using the Advanced Segments feature in analytics, select only your paid visitors.
 
Now navigate to your Content report and look at top landing pages. Using the comparison feature in Google analytics, you can measure bounce rate compared to the site average, and make changes to your site’s landing pages or bring visitors to an entirely different page.
 

Paid Keyword Time on Site
Every business has a unique buying cycle that requires a different number of touch points before a conversion occurs. It’s critical to your campaign success to know what keywords may be at the beginning of your customer’s buying cycle, as they may have lower conversion rates, but drive very engaged visitors who will come to your site multiple times. Keywords with a high time on site but don’t drive conversions are often critical to keep in your account to catch visitors early-on in their decision making process.

Equally important to keywords with a high time on site value, are keywords with a very low time on site. These are likely low volume keywords that you may find are not highly relevant to your site, or may have multiple user intentions. This report will also pull in any content network placements if you are running ads on Google’s content network. Remember, you are paying for these keywords and placements, and they are resulting in visitors who immediately leave your site. Use this report to clean up your campaign and pause underperforming keywords or placements on the content network.

Google Analytics provides campaign metrics that can help take your PPC account to the next level.  By looking at the bigger picture of how your paid traffic visitors interact on your site, you can find powerful insights to make your PPC campaigns more effective and deliver a better ROI.

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Kim Toomey works for the Portland-based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in social media strategies and analytics optimization. Kim has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and paid marketing campaigns during her time at Anvil.