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

When you run a search marketing campaign, the questions is bound to arise at a point of time whether we should bid on our competitor brand keywords?

There is no correct answer for this question in reality. It’s legal that you can bid for a competitor brand keyword. So is it worth?  When you want to bid on your competitor brand keyword, just have these following thoughts in mind

•  What you offer is a relevant or an alternate to whatever your competitor has to offer.
•  Check the price & compare it to yours. If you have low price then you can bid for it.
•  When the competitor is targeting your brand keywords then boy don’t even think about it fight back aggressively.

Some situations you shouldn’t bid on your competitors brand keywords when,

• Your competitor price is lower than yours.
•  You are worried that your competitor will fight back by aggressive advertising on your brand keywords
•  You don’t want to take a chance.

Key points to remember when you bid for competitor brand keyword.

• Avoid keyword insertion in your ad messaging (not to use dynamic insertion).
• Don’t be disconcerted by small traffic volumes from competitors brand terms.

So, as you can see there is no definite yes or no answer to whether bidding on competitors brand keyword is a good or bad thing.  However, think about the points above and if you choose to begin bidding on competitors terms TEST the results and then analyze the data.

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan