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

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Ever wondered why you do not get enough leads even when your website generates a lot of traffic. You would have noticed that your website maybe ranking well for the most competitive terms but it still fails to generate quality traffic. If you happen to notice that your website is still failing to get the leads, then you may have to consider conversion optimization and also analyze what kind of keywords are driving traffic to your website. This may also be a good time to look at your SEO landing pages, to identify if the page convinces the web visitor to take an action on the page.

Improving conversions on your website can involve following steps

• Identify pages having highest bounce rates to make improvements
• Ensure that your call to action content is  clear and  prominent
• Ensure that the sign-up or registration process is  streamlined
• Display fewer ads
• Identify and optimize top converting keywords
• Keep your purchase funnels short
• Have a clean design layout for your page

Ensure that you audit your website against these parameters to improve the stickiness of your SEO landing pages and to improve the overall conversion rates for your website.

Contributed by Zuheb SM

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Google caffeine – A recent update in Google’s algorithm will change how search engine results are perceived. The new update has changes in Google’s crawling and indexing mechanism and will bring minor fluctuations in keyword ranks. Google announced that this update will only include changes in its internal algorithm and will not include any user interface changes. This new update will seem more capable of producing real-time results. This happens to be a big step by Google towards providing real time search by improving capacity, speed & accuracy.

According to Google, its Caffeine update will bring certain changes such as,

1) Google’s current infrastructure of manages data by way of Collection > Quality Ranking > Sandbox > Search Results. Google caffeine seems more capable of filtering the content & producing real-time search data.

2) Google Caffeine’s data collection process will differ from the old Google. Currently, Google uses robots to crawl through the web for data. The caffeine will include changes to the robot to get real-time content.

3) Google Caffeine results to be more accurate as it relies more on keyword phrases.

4) Google Caffeine search is designed to be more comprehensive than old Google search.

Currently Caffeine is in its beta stage. This could be accessed at  http://www2.sandbox.google.com by webmasters and other Google users to test and identify the differences in search results between Google Caffeine & the original search engine google.com.

Contributed by Sandhya Katiyar

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“The End” is “The Beginning”

Imagine a movie starts with “The End” in the beginning. People will walk away. But in PPC, the advertiser should know the end. Many advertisers start their PPC campaign without knowing their end goal so here the visitor walks away. So an advertiser should know what he has to achieve at the end. Plan your work with your ultimate goal and objective such as “How does the PPC campaign affect the bottom line and what kind of ROI am I seeing? These kinds of questions will be helpful to be more clear on your goal & objective. The goal for your PPC campaign must be the conversions which speak for you directly.

Conversion Path Optimization

Once your goals and objective is defined clearly it is time to optimize the conversion path. It’s an old fact that the conversion path stars from the landing page, but it starts when the visitor interacts with your ad and clicks it. All the tactics an advertiser use must be dictated to the end goal. Each and every process of the conversion path must keep the visitor in a continuous motion. The conversion path should have all the information that the visitor needs to know in his purchase cycle.

Test it rather than guessing it

An advertiser’s best friend is testing. It is a constant & continual process followed to refine the effectiveness of paid search campaigns. It includes testing of different landing pages such as A-B testing of the LP or the Multivariate LP testing with various aspects such as image, title, page copy to get the best performing versions. Without testing an advertiser will not be able to improve the effectiveness of the PPC campaigns.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting has become more popular in the industry. The effectiveness of a PPC campaign will depend on the effectual targeting of the specified market. There are several options available for better target such as Geo Targeting, Day – Parting.

We will continue further about PPC optimization in the next post.

Contributed by Ajesh B

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