The fuel that drives every PPC campaign is your keyword list. The success of any PPC campaign will depend on the keywords that you target. We need to target the right keywords and the list should be exhaustive and robust.

The Google Wonder Wheel is one such tool which helps to build your keyword list and also gives you new themes and ad group ideas. The tool is an easy way to research your niche to find keywords that are current and relevant to your PPC marketing campaign. It not only gives you an endless supply of related search terms to look at, but also allows you to study competition.

Google Wonder Wheel by definition is a graphical wheel display of relevant search terms. Clicking on one of the search terms will open a new wheel of relevant search terms and so on.

The following is a step by step guide on how to use the Google Wonder Wheel tool:

Enter your key word or phrase and perform a search. After submitting the keyword you would like to search for, click on the “show more options” link on the top left side. The results will be divided in to two screens. Among all the options, that Google offers to optimize, the Google Wonder Wheel is the option you should look out for. Remember to check the other ones as well once you are done exploring this tool.

Clicking on the Wonder Wheel link will create a sun shaped circle of terms, which are related to the original search. You can navigate your way around relevant keywords and phrases to find more results. The power of the wonder wheel is that it is such a natural way to brainstorm and very much mimics using pen and paper or a white board.

Contributed By Shweta Gaonkar

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