If you are reading this you are probably a digital marketer, and that too one in the Search space. Have you made any resolutions for your PPC campaigns yet? Have you committed to doing something different from what you did last year?

At Position² we have compiled a list of 7 PPC resolutions to abide by this year. We strongly believe that you will benefit from this information, a compilation of our focus areas, driven by our experiences, learning, strategies and best practices.

Wishing you the best for a fantastic and a profitable 2012! Let’s get started with the PPC’s 7 key Areas of Focus in 2012.

Get Critiqued:

Kick start 2012 with a audit of your PPC campaigns. Identify if your campaigns are hitting target metrics, measure your ROI – is it what you or your clients expected, study the pitfalls and evaluate things you have not done in a while (may be testing or adding negatives). Identify opportunities right from keywords to ads to landing pages.

PPC accounts can be audited on a variety of parameters. At Position² we use a 40 point benchmark checklist that is built on industry and Position² best practices. Our in-house experts audit across Campaign Structures, Competition, Keywords, Bid Management and Ads to name a few. At the end of the audit your campaigns receives a Best Practices Benchmark Score that tells you how effective your campaigns are.

Cut that Fat:

Evaluate your keywords thoroughly. Identify “the budget hogs”, those that eat-up your budget but do not convert or convert at a high cost per acquisition. Weed them out. Analyze your search query reports and think wisely about keywords that do not make sense for your business- add them as negatives. Dump keywords you should not be bidding on to start with.

Search space will likely get expensive by the day, so focus on common misspellings and long tail keywords for efficiency. Put yourself in the searchers shoes. What would they think of when they need your product or a service? Do they search in short phrases or long or do they search in questions?

This is not limited to just search, target content as well. Look at placement reports, find sites that are working for you and those that are not. Add negative sites. Select sites manually if that is what if required.

Be Relentless:

Conduct tests regularly in 2012 and learn from both success and failure. The flexibility to conduct tests frequently is the beauty of PPC. Testing is one sure way to improve your campaign performance. Start testing keyword positions, ads and landing pages. Test keywords in different match types.

Tests can be as simple as bumping your keywords to top positions for a day or longer and observing the impact or trying new ad messaging (text and images). Eventually you want to get to more detailed tests such as launching large MVTs or SEO VS. PPC testing for example.

Make Friends:

With SEO and Analytics that is. Do not forget, valuable learnings can be drawn from anywhere. So keep evaluating SEO and Analytics performance and reports regularly – at least once a month in our opinion.

You can get significant learnings from SEO and Analytics. For example organic headlines, title tags etc. can be tested in PPC. PPC’s quick customizability and turnaround time could benefit SEO, i.e. if you identify a winner from text ads testing, you could test that message on the site. You can also test landing pages with different designs, layout and content by drawing learnings from PPC and SEO.

It goes without saying that everything you do in digital should be measured and fed right into a robust analytics platform. Study the user behavior, do they stay on your pages once there, if so for how long, where do they go from landing pages, what is the bounce rate, time spent, depth etc.. All this information will help you optimize your PPC campaigns down to a keyword level. There are many benefits of capturing keyword level data within analytics tools, so go ahead and do that.

Improve Your Communication:

Marketing is all about communication. Paid search is no different. In PPC you have a governing principle of Quality Score (QS) that plays a major role in your visibility or lack thereof, therefore the overall performance.

Regularly monitor your QS this year. Analyze why the QS is low or high. Develop appropriate communication strategies to counter low QS. Always look for relevancy across your keywords, ads and landing pages. Modify messaging in your ads and the content on the destination pages to increase relevancy. The higher the relevancy, the higher the QS and better the performance- which means happy customers and a happy you in 2012!

Try Something New:

Go beyond regular Adowrds or MSN. Try Youtube, Linkedin, Facebook, and social and PPC integration with features like Google+ Project. Use Click-to-Call Extension, Communication Extensions and Social Extensions. All these could help you reach targeted audience and some of these, depending on your business, could be more useful than expected. Test these new features and always watch out for latest industry developments and case studies to learn what worked. Be sure to track and measure!

Train your Teams:

All of the above that you plan to accomplish this year is possible only if you have disciplined, subject matter expert, motivated and dedicated PPC professionals. So, make sure you train your employees and team members effectively. Take time out for formal education, set-up casual sessions and most importantly ensure they get enough practical exposure to PPC. If you are a single man/woman team, motivate yourself to learn. Teach yourself and learn from others.

In the spirit of learning and teaching, here are a few great sources to follow: ClickZ, SearchEngineLand, Adwords Blog, Hubspot and Sempo.

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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.

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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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Mobile ads are a format of Adwords ads that appear on mobile websites and Google search pages when a user searches from a mobile device. Mobile ads are available as either text or image ads.

Mobile ads work on a pay per click as well as a pay per call basis. Every ad contains a headline and a description with a maximum of 18 characters each. The third line contains the site URL or a telephone number or both. Advertisers can therefore choose to connect to customers via whichever medium – phone or website – that they prefer, or they can let customers choose.

Mobile ads can be targeted only to following countries:  Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Always create a separate campaign for mobile ads. This campaign won’t require a separate landing page, because clicks on the ad will be directed to a Google-supplied mobile-friendly page describing your business.

Mobile ads pricing works same as PC based text or image ad. Advertiser only pays when user clicks on the ad and advertiser can even bid to connect users to their business via telephone (click to call).

It’s recommended to start off with just a small list of strong keywords and a few different targeted ads. Based on performance, the list can be expanded later on.

Opt for contextual targeting so that your ad reaches readers of specific mobile web pages written about specific concepts.

Target campaigns to iPhones, T-Mobile G1s and other high-end mobile devices with full Internet browsers through demographic settings of the campaigns.

Mobile ad performance can be measured pulling campaign level and placement performance report.

Contributed by Manisha Singh

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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.

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We can use four keyword match types for PPC campaigns:

1. Broad: Display your ad if your Keyword is anywhere in the Search term

2. Phrase: Displays your ad only if Search Term and Keyword are in the same order

3. Exact:  Displays your ad only if the Search Term exactly matched with the Keyword

4. Negative: Your ad will not be displayed if a negative Keyword is included in a search term. These keywords help us control broad and phrase match keywords. We can use Negative keywords in all Broad, Phrase and Exact match types.

Glossary

Search Term: word used by the user

Keyword: word bid on by the advertiser

The grid below will help you understand the various terms used by the top three search engines:

Identifying Search Terms and Optimization:

There are different ways to optimize keyword match types, here I will explain how you can track Search terms (exact keywords) triggered by broad and phrase match keywords for different search engines:

Google Search Query report:

1. The search query report gives us the Search Terms that are triggered by phrase and broad match keywords

2. Identify the Search Terms that are used by the users and that are not there in your campaigns

3. Separate them in relevant and irrelevant categories.

4. Again, cluster the relevant keywords into different clusters and add them to relevant adgroups

5. You can add these relevant keywords in all three match types

6. Irrelevant keywords can be added as negative or excluded keywords

7. You can add negative keywords in all three match types, depending on the keyword

Yahoo:

1. Yahoo doesn’t provide a report for Search Terms triggered for broad and phrase keywords

2. You can track Search Terms used in Yahoo by using a URL parameter

3. Keyword={OVRAW} – use this as a URL parameter to capture Search Terms

In my next post, I will explain how you can track keywords from MSN and how to track Search Terms using Google Analytics.

Contributed by Sudheer Dayanand

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