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

Quality Score is based on the relevance to users search query and user experience in your website or landing page. As per Google bid price policy, the higher your quality score is, the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in PPC ads.

Below are the ways to improve the quality score

• Increase your click-through rates. Always try testing your ads to improve click through rates. Always keep the ad settings to rotate while you are testing ads. This will allow the search engines not to show well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. As a result you will know the better performing ad which increases click-through rate, which means a higher quality score.

• One way to achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in each ad group. This will allow your text ad to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which results to be more relevant to the target user. This will help you to increase your click through rates.  It’s never late to organize your ad groups to improve your quality score. It’s okay to only have 5 or 10 keywords in each ad group. Adwords Editor will help us in this process to cluster the keywords easily and faster.

• Delete or pause non-performing keywords and ads. By doing this, your quality score improves as your account have only high CTR keywords and ads, all your non-performing ads & keywords are not active.

• Always check your keywords. As quality score depends on how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. Always try to use your keyword on your landing page.

• Landing page load times do matter. As quality score was implemented to have a great user experience.  Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. It’s very important to load your landing page within 3 seconds in all browsers, personal computers and Mac systems.

All your keywords in Google will have a quality score associated to them. If you have a quality score fewer than 7 then it’s time to change or test your ads to improve your quality score.  Always try to change keywords in to a different ad group or try changing ad messaging.

These changes will take time to get effect in your account. Might take couple of weeks to build history & improve the quality score.

Contributed By Ajesh B