Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be deemed one of the best forms of online marketing out there. This is made clear from the millions of people that use the likes of Google AdWords to gain contextual traffic – this is no fluke…

However, making the most of PPC can be quite difficult. Although the structure of the marketing platform is very simple (you pay only once your advert is clicked), there are many elements to a campaign that can influence the return on investment (ROI). With this, here are some tips you can use to help improve your PPC campaign’s performance.

Remove Poor Performing Keywords

When PPC campaigns are first created, you will have selected a number of keywords to target your PPC advert against. After a while, these keywords can be analysed to see how they perform for your campaign. By ‘a while’, it is important to wait for sufficient impressions/clicks before you analyse the performance of the keywords, so that the data is reliable.

Depending on your objectives will depend on what deems ‘poor performing’. It could relate to the impressions, click through rate or conversion. Either way, whatever keywords are performing badly for you, pause them or remove them altogether, so more of your advertising budget is used on the best performing keywords.

Define Objectives

It is important when you start a campaign to understand the specific reasons of why you are starting a campaign. This is the case since if you do not define clear and achievable objectives, you will find it hard to determine when to stop the campaign, potentially eating into your budget that could be better used elsewhere. With this in mind, it is a good idea to set yourself SMART objectives relating to the performance of your PPC campaign:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Based

Use Negative Keywords

Although it is very effective to analyse the performance of your keywords and adjust your marketing budget accordingly, so that the high performing keywords gain the most traffic and the lowest performing keywords gain the least traffic, if any traffic at all, isn’t it better to simply prevent low performing keywords from even gaining traffic and eating into your budget? This is exactly what negative keywords do. By choosing keywords that you don’t want your campaign to appear for, you are effectively preventing your PPC campaign from bidding for keywords that you know are either 1) poorly performing or 2) unrelated to your PPC campaign’s contents.

For example if you had a campaign about electronic tablets, you might remove keywords relating to the pharmaceutical tablets since this will drive unrelated traffic to your PPC search advert and landing page, that has been wrongly targeted (due to a word having two different meanings).