Saturday, May 31, 2008

PPC Management Tips

By Kirt Christensen

Sometimes places are associated with businesses. For example, if you had a casino you might get additional cheaper traffic bidding on "Niagara Falls" than merely bidding on "Casino."

For local businesses, take whatever keywords apply to your business and then add your state and as many close-by cities as possible. For example, a Cincinnati IT firm might use this list, which includes suburb names and deliberate misspellings of "Cincinnati":

Ohio computer consultant

Cincinnati computer consultant

Cincinati computer consultant

Cincinatti computer consultant

Tri-state computer consultant

Tri state computer consultant

Eaton computer consultant

Jamestown computer consultant

Miamisburg computer consultant

Sidney computer consultant

Troy computer consultant

Milford computer consultant

Loveland computer consultant

Go to a map site and paste in a list of cities, then use an Excel spreadsheet to mix and match those terms. Use "computer consultant," "IT company," "IT consultant," etc.

Having lots of keywords is the key to untapped markets, low bid prices, higher click through rates, and successful PPC management. Your effort in this will pay dividends.

Would you like to increase your keywords by 3x and also get to bid on keyword terms that your competition has overlooked? Here is how:

To really maximize your base keyword list use brackets and quotes. In his tool AdWords Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com), Stephen Juth helps identify variations that are less pricey and for which there is less competition.

While struggling through the daunting and frequently tiresome task of selecting a comprehensive keyword list, you may miss one or two singulars and plurals and leave out synonyms of your niche phrases.

There is an additional feature that Google provides that can help you with that difficulty, Expanded Phrase Matching adds singulars, plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms where they may be lacking in your keyword list.

Care is warranted here. This feature works for your broad matched keywords, not for your exact matches and phrase matching on your list of phrases.

Broad-Matched Keywords

When you insert keywords at the time you're setting up your campaigns, these are the keywords that don't have any delimiters around them. For example:

used cars

Japanese used cars

used cars for sale

Caution is also warranted at this point. If you do not use negative keyword phrases on "used cars" you will end up with your ad showing for these search phrases also:

used cars

german used cars

used cars cleveland

used police cars

It may even show your ad for this wonky search:

cars used in filming dukes of hazzard

Phrase Matches

Keywords with quote marks on them fall under this category. Such as:

"used cars"

"Japanese used cars"

"used cars for sale"

The quotes will have your ads show up in searches that include these search terms in the order given, no other words inserted, like the words that follow:

used cars

old Japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

But your ad will not appear in this search:

used police cars

Exact Matches

Place square brackets around your words to make exact matches. Such as:

[used cars]

[Japanese used cars]

[used cars for sale]

Using exact match means that only the searchers who type in this precise phrase will get to see your ad. The following searches will not see your ad:

used cars chicago

german used cars

old japanese used cars

used cars for sale chicago

used police cars

By including negative keywords on your list, your total number of ad impressions will be fewer. This is caused by your ad being shown on fewer searches. In turn this causes your click through rate to raise. But Check out this math: If you lower your page impressions by 20 percent, then your click through rate will improve, not by 20 percent but by 25 percent. Here is some more:

If you cut unwanted impressions by 30 percent, your CTR will increase by 42 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 40 percent, your CTR will improve by 67 percent.

If you cut unwanted impressions by 50 percent, your CTR will double.

Negative keywords won't affect the CTR of exact-matched keywords, but they will help your CTR on phrase- and broad-matched terms. If your PPC management is done right, there's no way they can't help.

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