It is a common belief that in order to get the number one spot in Google pay per click sponsored results is bid higher than your competitor. This practice used to be a sure fire way to maintain a competitive edge in the market. Just spend more money.

This argument and practice used to make sense until Google flipped the switch. Identifying this belief in the market, Google changed the algorithm to level out the playing field. Google AdWords places great importance on what is called the “ad score” when determining placement and total cost per click, in addition to the quality score of a keyword.

What is an ad score?

The ad score equals the total click-through-rate x the maximum bid that you are willing to pay for a specific keyword. (Ad Score = CTR x Max Bid). This means that if you have a click-through-rate of 3% and you are bidding $1.50 for a keyword, your ad score will be 4.5.On the other hand someone who has a click-through-rate of 12% and is bidding $0.50 for a the same keyword will have an ad score of 6. Looking at this scenario, you can see that having higher click-through-rate can allow advertisers to experience higher placement while spending less per click than their competitors.

Actions you can take

There are several actions that you can take to improve your click-through-rate. Keyword match type is always the best place to start. Using phrase and exact match keywords can help you to eliminate unwanted clicks and increase qualified clicks (clicks that are looking for a keyword that is associated with your product or service). Using match types will decrease the number of impressions and clicks you receive, however the ratio will be a lot higher, thereby increasing your click-through-rate.

Ad copy is another place to look when increasing click-through-rate. You want to make sure that your ad accurately describes your product or service that you are advertising. Continue to test ad copy to determine which ads receive a good number of both impressions and clicks. If you have ads that receive a large number of impressions, but few clicks, it is time to revisit the message and ad some new copy. Don’t run underperforming ads too long. You can both lower your click-through-rate and miss out on the opportunity to test a better performing ad.

Another note on ad copy is to make sure that your keywords are listed. When starting a new pay per click campaign, it can be challenging to determine the better performing keywords and to find a way to fit them all in your ad text. As you continue to run and test your ad groups, you should be able to get a good idea of the better performing keywords. Once this happens, it is essential that

Most of my blog posts are focused mainly on pay per click; however, the topic of keyword targeting is relevant to both search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. I recently attended a seminar where they talked about using pay per click as a means for determining effective keywords for your search engine optimization strategy. This topic can be discussed for days, so for the purpose of this blog post, I will be focusing solely on optimizing your site for the longer-tail keyword phrases. For this blog, I am referring to long-tail keywords as keyword phrases that consist of three or more words.

Optimize for long-tail keyword phrases

This applies to both pay per click and SEO. It is common practice to begin with broad keywords when starting a pay per click or SEO project. These are the keywords that  generate the largest number of searches on the search engines. Companies spend  countless hours, not to mention endless revenue, optimizing their websites for broad  search terms. Not to mention that millions of websites are also competing for this exact  same keyword. This practice can be exhausting.

Don’t get me wrong, this practice is not fruitless if it generates traffic. Websites on page  one are eligible to receive thousands of visitors each day. But are these visitors searching  for your product? When competing for the high traffic, broad keywords, it is important to ask yourself “Is the return on investment worth it?”

Think about it. If I am bidding on or optimizing my website for the keyword shoes, I am  opening myself up to people searching for shoes for several different reasons. Now I know that pay per click allows you to have exact match keywords, which can help to filter out unqualified clicks (people who may click through expecting something else). When determining keywords for your pay per click ad groups, it is important to focus on keywords that are the most relevant to your product or service.

For instance, if you own a shoe repair company and you bid on the keyword “shoe,” you may get some clicks through to your website, but chances are that many of them are not  looking for your service. Now before you say “That is what the ad is for,” keep in mind that consumers are becoming much more accustomed to pay per click ads and their location. Knowing that it is of no cost to them to click through to your site, they are very likely to click through to a site without really reading the ad. Now take this same person and say he bids on the keyword “shoe repair company.” A consumer searching on Google for this keyword is much more likely to be looking for his service, thereby increasing the likelihood of conversion. Now say the person bids on the keyword “shoe repair company st. louis.” As you can see, the longer the keyword, the more likely you are to receive more qualified clicks, the more likely you are that the visitor will convert.

As I noted earlier in this post, I recently attended a seminar where the presenter discussed using pay per click as a means of finding targeted keywords for your website. SEO is different in the sense that it does not cost you money to bring people to your  website, or does it? Optimizing your website for a broad keyword like shoes opens you up to a large battle to get to number one. Is it worth it? Possibly. It could be that the number one position brings you ten times the amount you spent on optimizing your site. But don’t forget those long-term keywords. The longer the keyword, the smaller percentage of websites competing for that keyword or phrase. You may find that you can optimize your site for ten targeted keywords for the same cost of optimizing your site for one broad high traffic term.

My advice is be smart and use your analytics packages. Once you begin any internet
marketing strategy, be it SEO or PPC, make sure you have analytics in place. If you use
pay per click advertising, you should know within the first few weeks which keywords bring the most qualified traffic to your website. Use this information and apply it to other online endeavors.

Many advertisers see a large increase in their AdWords advertising expenses due to a decrease in quality scores on their keywords. With the quality score being one of the largest factors in the minimum bids and ranking of keywords in Google campaigns, several factors can be addressed to improve overall score.

Quality score is a measure of the user experience. Google reviews both the advertiser’s campaigns and landing pages to ensure that they are both of high quality. In measuring quality Google looks at:

• The keyword’s historical click-through-rate (CTR) on Google
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• Other relevance factors

• Relevance
  • This is one of the most important factors of the user’s experience, and one of the easiest for the advertiser to control. Make sure that the keywords within your ad groups are assigned to a specific landing page for the product or service you are offering. If you are advertising a specific shoe, you don’t send the visitor to the women’s shoes category page.

• Ad Content
  • Make sure that your keywords are mentioned in your ad text. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but many advertisers overlook this when creating their ads. Although a generic ad about the company is great for branding, it doesn’t necessarily your quality score. Assigning a few keywords to each ad makes this task easier.

• Original Content
  • Just as it is important to keep site content updated for SEO purposes, advertisers should keep original content on their site for quality score purposes. Google places a great amount of importance on unique content on a site to help improve the user experience. Although this task may seem time consuming, there are some ways to accomplish this task without a large amount of additional effort.
  • Blogs
    • This is a great way to continue to add fresh content to your site. Having an RSS feed on your blog on your site can create fresh content every time you post.
  • Product reviews
    • Not only are these great for the user experience, this is also a good way to have your visitors provide content for your site.
  • Testimonials
    • These are always great for conversion purposes and can add fresh content at the same time.

Although there is no sure fire way to guarantee a “great” quality score, the methods discussed above can help you get one step closer. Google is constantly changing the way it judges sites within your network, which makes it hard to keep up with the latest criteria. Just continue to update your site and your content, which helps with SEO too as a bonus.

When determining the best methods for managing a pay per click account, there is never a clear cut path to success. Yet although there is no single answer, I have found several truths that have proved to be effective time and time again.

I recently came across a blog post on Earners Blog titled “Explode your PPC Campaigns in 6 easy Steps“. This blog does a great job of of touching on the main components of an effective pay per click campaign. When choosing keywords, there are a few things to remember:

• Targeted keywords can increase “qualified” clicks
• Longer tail keywords can help to increase click-though-rates and conversion
• Broad keywords often bring in more traffic, but fewer “qualified” clicks. Phrase and exact match keywords are more cost effective.

Check out this blog to find out other great tips for a optimized pay per click campaign.

When preparing keywords for a new pay per click campaign, there are a few things to consider. There are several tools out there that can make keyword preparation less challenging. 

Keyword Suggestion Tools

Keyword research is the most important part of any new campaign. Chances are that your new campaign does not have historic data on keywords for the product or service you are advertising. When starting from scratch, there are several tools to assist you in determining keywords. Google AdWords has its keyword suggestion tool, which shows you keyword estimated searches per month, keyword variations, and the amount of advertising competition for the keyword. Other tools, such as Wordtracker, are free tools that will give you the estimated number of daily searches for keywords as well as variations to consider.

Competitor Keywords

Analyzing your competitors’ keywords is not an easy task. In some cases, you may have to take a screenshot of those competitors that show up in the same results for your keywords, but even that doesn’t give you full insight into the exact keywords they are bidding on. Although the results are not 100% accurate, there are tools out there that can give you an idea of the different keywords and variations that your competitors are bidding on. KeyCompete is a tool that will provide a list of advertising keywords that are associated with a certain domain. Although there is no way to know if all of the results are being bid on by your competitors, it can help to shed some light on keywords that you had not previously considered.

It is also important to bear in mind that your competitors in pay per click advertising may not be those that you regularly identify for your industry. When considering a new keyword list, you may want to do a Google search to see the other companies that show up. Often times, larger companies will bid on the broader terms, in which case, it may cost you a lot more to show up. If most of the companies on the Google search are too hard to compete with or are outside of your industry, you may want to revisit you keyword list. In some cases, it may be more beneficial to find a small niche to compete in that is closely associated with your product or service.

Website Analysis

 Often times, your website is the best place to find potential keywords. The content on your website can give you good insight into company keywords and even targeted messages for your ads. Google AdWords’ keyword suggestion tool will analyze a url to find certain keywords associated with it. This can also help you in identifying changes that need to be made to your website if it pull keywords that are not associated with your product or service. Your landing page is taken into consideration for your keyword’s quality score, which can affect the amount that you spend. Make sure that the keywords you decide on are present on your website.

All of these tools can be used to help determine your begining keywords for a new campaign, however, it is important to remember that your keywords are subject to change. Chances are your first keywords will be much broader in the beginning of the campaign run. After time though, reports and analytics can be used to determine the top performing keywords for your ad groups. After the first month of running, you should be able to narrow your list and have a much more exact keyword match.

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