PPC - Pay Per Click Management

There are a many factors in pay per click advertising that will affect the performance of a campaign such as the advert itself, the landing page and so on. An important part to PPC, though, is the positioning of where your advert is when viewed by the web user. Not only will positioning help your advert get more attention, it has the potential to improve other statistics such as the click through rate and the quality of traffic that will head to your landing page. For these reasons, it is important to know how to improve your ad position in PPC to effectively improve the success rate of your campaign.

In PPC, the location and positioning of an advert is affected by two main factors:

• CPC or cost per click – The CPC advertisers chooses how much they will bid against competitors for ad position.
• Quality score – The quality score is a measure of how relevant your PPC adverts and keywords are. The click through rate of your advert, relevance of your keywords and advert’s text and the performance of your AdWords account determines your quality score.

This makes it clear that in order to change your ad position, you will need to change one of the two factors above.

Changing the CPC is not too difficult a process – all it involves is changing your maximum CPC to either increase or decrease your ad rank. This, I guess, is why many advertisers choose to improve their campaign’s CPC first before anything to increase their ad rank : because it is the easy way to getting better results in PPC.

On the other hand, to increase your quality score in PPC takes a little more time and effort. However, in the long term, it will serve as a better and more financially stable alternative to increasing ad rank than just by increasing the CPC. Bullet pointed below are ways you can improve your quality score:

• Optimise your landing page – Landing pages that directly connect with your target audience in a way to benefit them greatly will help to create a good quality score.
• Include negative keywords – Making sure your keywords are relevant is important. You can do this by eliminating poorly converting keywords from your campaign.
• Change your ad text – Have an advert that is clear and relevant to what the web user wants and searched for.
  
• Refine your keywords – Again, make sure you have researched your keywords and have refined them so they are targeting only the most contextual of traffic for your campaign.

Since ad rank is calculated by multiplying quality score and CPC together, improving either one by ‘X’ amount will have the same impact on ad rank. Therefore, if you want an easy way to improve ad rank, just increase your CPC although your budget will suffer. The better, but more, long term solution is through increasing your quality score.