Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Tips for Better PPC Management

By Josh Prizer

One of the driving forces in the PPC algorithms is your Click Through Rates. Spending time, effort and even investing in a PPC expert can help you to double or triple those rates. Not only will that increase your traffic, but it will lower your costs per click.

Let's look a little closer at some of the things you can do to improve those Click Through Rates (CTRs). There are several techniques and areas to look at but many of these require some continual effort on your part. If you are not up for it, think about hiring a PPC company to do the heavy lifting for you. A good PPC management company can double or triple or CTRs.

Relevant Keywords

Think about the user who is searching the phrase you are advertising on. The more you can focus your ad to them, the more you can drive up our CTRs. This may mean including the keyword phrase into your actual ad copy. So, if you have built yourself and account with a couple ad groups stuffed with keywords, you are in a bit of a bind. You want to reach the searcher and nothing does that more by being as relevant as you can with an ad that speaks to that individual keyword.

Unfortunately, if you have one of those accounts with tons of keywords under just a few ad groups, you may need to restructure your entire account. Again, not a pretty process scrapping all the work you have done. And, again, this might be an area where you consider outsourcing to a professional.

Negative Keywords

With the growing importance of CTRs, negative keywords (keywords you don't want to appear on) also grow in importance. So, when you are doing your keyword research, pay particular attention to keywords you don't want to appear on. By eliminating some of these, you will lower the numbers of "bad impressions" that your ads are appearing under. Lowering those will help pull up the CTRs.

Ad Copy Improvement

Few items can improve your CTRs as a well-crafted ad. You want your ads to inspire people...to compell them to click. You want to have a Call To Action. You may want to provide some kind of value statement to separate you from your competitors. There are a variety of methods and secrets to better your ad copy, but effort is sometimes the best approach. You want to run split tests.

Split testing is the process of running multiple ads at once and comparing the results. It sounds simple enough, but you also need to do it with consistency to make it effective. You also need to make sure that you don't pull the plug from an ad to early. There are some mathematical ways you can determine this, but if you are not committed to conducting split tests frequently and often, don't expect to see your CTRs rise.

There are a variety of tricks and secrets to optimizing your PPC accounts. Putting added focus on those Click Through Rates is a good place to start. If you are in an especially competitive business and keyword marketplace, consider outsourcing to a professional. If you can't afford that added expense (although a good PPC expert will more than pay for himself), roll up the sleeves and get to work. Intelligent effort pays off.

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