What Are the Most Important Criteria for a Good PPC Campaign

Recently I have come across a nice article. It says there are mainly 7 criteria for a good pay per click ad campaign. Here are the 7 criteria:

* Use conversion tracking
* Don’t use Google’s default settings
* Keep a fixed schedule when optimizing keywords and ads
* Study the competition before you begin
* Treat your keywords, ads, and landing page as one unit
* Be selective in capitalization
* Keep it simple with a strong call to action

My doubt is whether one of the criteria is more important than the others? For example, is being selective in capitalization more important than avoiding Google’s defaults? In my view all these are important. But I will give more preference to these aspects –

* Use conversion tracking
* Consider your keywords, ads, and landing page as one entity
* Keep it simple with a strong call to action

These are basic to any successful campaign. You cannot run a successful campaign without calculating conversions and you should understand how they relate to ROI. Optimization means your keyword usage in your ad with the keyword usage in your landing page and making the two work together. A strong call to action associated with a well-written, highly optimized ad is the best treat for an average performing campaign.

Conversion Tracking – The Best Tool to Measure Your ROI

One tool that you have to be included in your pay per click advertising is conversion tracking. This tool will help you test how healthy your campaigns are performing. By seeing the conversion tracking, you can easily find whether your ROI is positive or negative. If you aren’t making money from your advertising then it is not worth. There are times when you can achieve a greater benefit by losing money in order to gain branding and top-of-mind marketing results. For most advertisers, ROI is very much important. ROI is measured by subtracting your pay per click spend from the revenue earned from your advertising hard work. Suppose you spent $50 on advertising and as a result of that advertising you made $60 back from sales. Then your ROI is $20. Conversion tracking is a tool that tracks the buyer on your site to find out when they make a purchase. As soon as a customer clicks on the ad to go to your site, they have a cookie dropped on their computer and when they make a purchase, a conversion is logged. By using this tool, you’ll know in an instant whether your advertising is truly being effective. You can take conversion tracking code from PPC service providers. MSN adcenter’s and Adwords’ conversion code you have to place in between Body tag of the html of your tracking page. But yahoo search marketing conversion code you have to place in between head tag of the html of your tracking page.

Preserve Keyword integrity in Your Ad Groups

It seems that people are keeping same keywords in different adgroups of the same campaign. Never do that. What is the point in doing like that? You want them competing against each other? You’ll get much better performance from all of your keywords if you don’t use the same keywords in multiple ad groups. Suppose you are running a wristband campaign. Keep the keyword “silicone wristband” in only one adgroup not more than that. If you want to do some experiment, then pause the ad group with that keyword and experiment your keyword in the new ad group. If you want to move it, move it completely. Don’t copy it. If the issue is critical, then stop the adgroup. But don’t do that too often. The keywords that you feel right to be together should stay together. You should keep the integrity of your keyword groups as much as possible.

Will Google Chrome Affect My AdWords PPC?

Google has released a browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday we downloaded it and is really user friendly. I was using IE and don’t like to use Firefox at all (no reason for that). I heard chrome is an interesting application and many of my friends started to use it. So I too started a test use yesterday. Didn’t get much time to experiment. Then suddenly my thoughts went the way that whether my adwords ppc will be affected by this new browser. But inside AdWords blog I could see a blog post telling that Google Chrome shouldn’t affect our AdWords. What they mean is your landing pages should appear the same way in Google Chrome as they do in Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft IE. You don’t have to do anything new for your landing pages to look exact the way before. Waiting for the development and popularity of Chrome. What you think? Chrome will catch up to Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft IE? Even if it is from google, I will take its own time to reach the top. But I believe that one day it will reach the top. If you like to download the software, download it. Don’t worry about your existing landing pages. I feel it is almost the same way as top browsers. When creating a new landing page, make a look at this new browser before make it alive.

Make a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

PPC Summit Los Angeles September – 25 & 26

Early Bird Registration cut off date is September 18.

Pricing – Includes full summit access, all sessions, keynotes, Continental breakfast, lunches, breaks, comprehensive “How-To” manuals, promotional items, networking opportunities etc.

Individual Passes Regular Early Bird*
One Day Pass (Day 1 or 2) $699 $599
Best Value!Two Day Pass $1199 $999

Additional attendees from the same company get a DISCOUNT ($100 off) when registered at the same time!

Company Passes Regular Early Bird*
Two Day Pass Only Not Available $899

* An additional 10% discount may be granted to account holders of Sponsors on Individual rates when the appropriate Invitation code is entered during registration. This discount is not reflected in the pricing above.

* This discount applies to the Early Bird rates only and will be deducted at checkout when you enter your Invitation code

* To be eligible for a Company Pass, all company attendees must register prior to the Early Bird deadline, at the same time and with the same credit card. If registering separately you must use the individual pass rates. No regular or On-Site registration is allowed with this group discount.

For more details and registration Visit http://www.regonline.com/Checkin.asp?EventId=172278 or mail to registration@ppcsummit.com

Using Organic and Paid Search Together

Why you are using pay per click advertising? You don’t want your targeted users to miss your service when they are searching for that. Estimations show that 10% – 25% of searchers click on the paid search ad. If your website is not listing is 1st or 2nd page of Search engine result, you will loose majority of your users. Many marketers are satisfied with 75% of the search market that clicks on the organic listing. But revenue is revenue. It is hard to see people click on someone else’s paid search and missing your service. Right? Why should you loose your target audience? According to SEM researchers, out 12% of the searchers on search engines clicked on the top pay per click ad and 7% clicked on sponsored links on the side of the search results. That’s 19%. If you are not running some kind of search marketing campaign through paid search then you will miss some sales. Try to maintain PPC campaign along with your SEO tactics. If you are 1st or 2nd in the organic search result, you can pause your PPC and when you are down in organic, you can resume your ppc. One of our clients is doing the same. He’s ranking top for “auto transport”. If he’s going down means he will start ppc. He is ready to pay $30(cpc) to get the first position in PPC.

AdWords’ PPC Placement Tool – Find Websites for Your Ads

Now it is easy for you to find website for your ads through Google AdWords’ pay per click placement tool. After log in to your account, go to your desired campaign and click on the Placement tab. But you have to start with your keyword list. Go into your campaign settings and ensure that you have filtered your keyword list to be as highly optimized as possible. Don’t look for placements for an insecurely optimized website. Your money will flow somewhere without your knowledge. There are many methods to look for placements – search by category, topic, specific URLs, and demographics. Find exact websites that are correlated to your function and if you like your ads to run on those sites, start with specific URLs. May be those sites are not running adsense, but sometimes like to start. Now next step. Search placement by category and topic. Placement search tools will help to do it. Lastly, you can search demographics. But be careful with searching by demographics because you are really looking for a type of customer and these sites may or may not be related to your service. Remember that everyone in your demographic will be interested in your product. It is nice to see Google AdWords keeps improving. Hmm Right?