Let’s continue our optimization process to improve PPC campaigns’ performance:

Go Vertical

Going vertical is an effective method to lower your cost per click (CPC) and to improve the overall traffic quality. The quality also tends to be better because of the increased propensity for the buyers to use vertical search engines in their purchase decision process. This gives a greater opportunity for those who are with limited budgets to more effectively spend their money online and to get higher ROI.

Keyword Research

While doing the keyword research we debate constantly on what to use with regards to long tail keywords or the head phrases and which would perform better and get more results. Head phrases are generic and broad keywords. The search volumes for these keywords are very high but cost is also quite high. Torso keywords are with 2 to 4 words keywords. The search volume for these keywords are low as compared to the head phrases, but the cost is also low. Long tail keywords are the keyword phrases which are more than 4 words. The cost and the search volume is very low.

While developing keywords for your search campaign make sure you are in the shoes of searcher. The keywords should be related to the target market and useful to the searcher while searching for your product or service.

Quality Score

Google and Yahoo use quality score to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. If the advertiser provides the consumer with the best experience possible, then the quality score for the advertiser should be good.  If the quality score is poor, you should check the keywords, ads and landing page and re-cluster the ad groups to improve your quality score.

CPL than CPC / Suggestion: CPL over CPC

The ultimate objective of your search campaign is to lower the cost per conversion. So bid high or bid aggressively on converting keywords and bid low for the other keywords in the campaign. Even when you bid high, you get conversions within your target cost per conversion.

Happy Optimization!

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

In the PPC world, a Quality Score is a measure which tells you the relevance of your keyword to the users search query. Specifically, Quality Score is a score given to a particular keyword taking historical data of the keyword’s Click Through Rate, quality of the landing pages, relevance of the ad with the keyword and several other factors.

Why Quality Score is important for a PPC professional? Not because it gives a rating on a scale of ten but as a score which reduces your CPC when your Quality Score moves up, which affects your First Page Bid Estimates and your Ad Position.

Today I would be breaking 5 myths about Quality Score.

1. Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your Historical Quality Score data. We will not lose the historical performance of keywords, ads and landing pages, all these data is preserved, so feel free to restructure your account to optimize for higher conversion goals.
2. Quality Score does not suffer when your ads are paused or shown infrequently. Quality Score is determined by the performance of a keyword in combination with its ads. So pausing an ad or showing it infrequently does not affect, as these ads are not accruing any performance data. Showing your ads seasonally wouldn’t reduce your Quality Score.
3. A higher bid will not improve your Quality score. A higher bid will increase your Ad position but will not increase your Quality Score, as it is determined by a number of factors like CTR, Ad Relevancy and others.
4. Changing a keyword from broad to exact will not improve its Quality Score. For example a keyword like schools in broad match will show ads for variations of it like B schools, Animation schools etc. Even though your ad might show up in these instances, its performance will have no impact on Quality Score. The keyword’s Quality Score would only be affected by how your ad performed on the search term schools since it exactly matches the keyword. So changing a broad match to exact match will not affect its Quality Score.
5. Ad conversion rate does not affect your Quality Score. Setting an easy conversion event on your landing page to artificially boost conversion rates will not have any effect on Quality Scores of a keyword. So let the landing pages have the required set of fields to collect all the details of the prospective customer.

On the whole it becomes mandatory for a PPC professional to always look into Quality Score as a measure of how his keywords, ads and landing pages are working as whole but not as individual entities and make corrections to increase relevancy between these.

Contributed By Chetan Prakash