PPC - Pay Per Click Management

I find myself writing sometimes too specifically towards PPC looking at areas such as CTR, CPC and landing pages. However, I know that some advertisers just want general tips on how to improve their campaign for the better. Google AdWords is a program all about refining detail. The more in detail you go into with your campaign, the more specific and successful your campaign will be. Following a few guidelines can give you the potential to make you PPC campaign alot more profitable.

Develop and Extend Your Keywords

The keywords of the campaign are what make pay per click advertising contextual. Making sure you have the right keywords will help to locate and target your target audience alot easier. As well as this, it can turn out to be cheaper for you too. Choosing the wrong keywords may result in your CPC increasing due to choosing high paying keywords. You will want to develop and extend the amount of keywords you already have. Like in most markets, trends constantly change. For example, no-one would have expected touch screen computers to compete against laptops 10 years ago. Make sure you constantly update your keywords to help keep your campaign up to date. You can also include additional keywords to your campaign that you think might benefit you. With the use of researching your keywords with Google’s Keyword Tool, you can produce a list of keywords which will be cheap, effective which produces high traffic to your landing page.

Use Your Campaign as Market Research

Most advertisers won’t know it but pay per click advertising can be used as a source of market research. You can do this through analysing your landing page’s success through Google Analytics (which I have done a part 1 and part 2 on). From bounce rate to the types of browsers people use, you can get a detailed idea about the type of people that are your traffic. This will help in locating key problems within your campaign. For example, if you find that people are spending on average a few seconds on your landing page, you know they are getting bored and clicking off your landing page. Or let’s say that your average loading time for your landing page is around 15 seconds. This is quite long for a visitor to wait for your loading page. Therefore, you can then start removing HTML to make your landing page load faster.

Don’t Aim to Be Best

A lot of advertisers put ridiculous prices on their adverts so that they know they won’t be outbid and will always be the highest bidder getting prime spot ad location. Such cases have led to certain keywords being as expensive as $55! This is not the approach advertisers should take to PPC. Being the highest bidder for your advertising space means you will be one of the first adverts to be displayed. However, the problem with this is that these are the adverts that are often associated with click fraud. You may get more clicks from increasing your CPC. However, your conversion rate might suffer as there is the risk that of your advert is being clicked more by accident than legitimately.

Offer More Than Just a Product

It is clear that the majority of advertisers are using pay per click advertising to offer a product or service. The problem with this is that not all internet users want to buy a product or service. The majority of internet users are online because they are looking for a solution. A solution to a problem which they feel the internet will be able to solve. Therefore, as well as offering a product, give internet users a solution to the problem they are facing. This will also increase the chance that you will have a successful conversion. The internet user will be thankful to you for solving their problem. Therefore, they might consider more about buying your product or service than before.