Pay per Click Campaign Optimization

To be really successful at Pay per Click (PPC) marketing, you need to optimize your campaigns all the time. Every week would be ideal. If you can’t, try to do it at least every two weeks.

When we optimize our clients’ Pay per Click campaigns, there are three main things that we do for them.

Ad Position Optimization
People don’t go to the fourth page of PPC ads to find what they’re looking for. If your ads don’t show within the first positions of the first page, very few people will click on them. However, ads in the first position always get a lot of unqualified clicks because people tend to click before they read. For that reason, advertisers in the first positions end up paying for a lot of junk traffic.

Try to get your ad between positions 2 and 6. On Google AdWords there are two ways you can increase your ad position: by raising the bid amounts and by making the ad more relevant –or a combination of both. On Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, ad relevancy is not an influential factor; they only car about bid amounts.

There is one case where it really makes sense to be number 1. Google can sometimes put your ad above the organic results instead of on the right side of the screen. If your ad is very relevant and your bid is high enough, you’ll get there eventually. Ads at the top get much more traffic than ads on the right side.

Ad Copy
You should always be running split-tests. They are free, setting up the test will take you less than a minute and most of the time a tiny change can boost your Click-Through Rate (CTR). Last week we replaced the word “amazing” with the word “great” for one of our clients and CTR went up 46%. That’s a huge improvement and all it took was a tiny change. Unless you constantly test, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Use PPC as a market research tool for the real world. You can run two ads; one featuring your low prices and another one featuring your high quality. Then you can figure out if online buyers in your industry are more price-driven or quality-driven.

Conversion Rate
The conversion rate optimization is the most important component of a PPC campaign optimization. You need to figure out what keywords convert very well and which ones convert poorly or don’t convert at all. Then there are a few things that you should do about non-converting keywords: get rid of them, add negative keywords to your campaign (if people are searching for “free widgets” and you sell widgets, add “free” to the list of negative keywords) and/or lower the bids for these keywords. If you have keywords that convert very well, this is what you need to do: perform more keyword research and add similar keywords to your campaign, create an ad group for these specific keywords so you can keep a closer eye on them, increase the bid value and use these keywords to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC using other search engines. Yahoo!, Ask and MSN won’t send you as much traffic as Google, but they can send you a fair amount of traffic that might convert better than Google AdWords’.