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!

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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.

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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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