Creating successful pay-per-click campaigns is not rocket science. It just requires spending a little extra time and focusing a little extra effort to make your ad groups top performers.

The Basics:
1. Focused ad groups

2. Targeted, relevant keyword list

3. Well-written, interesting creatives

4. Tracking parameters

5. Negative keywords

6. Match type

For many marketers or business owners, managing pay-per-click campaigns is just one more thing on an already too long ‘to-do’ list. It is very easy to be sloppy when setting up campaigns. The result is under-performing campaigns and overpriced keywords. Following these basic steps won’t take a ton of time and the results will be well worth it.

1. Focused ad groups - An ad group should not be a catch-all that contains all sorts of unrelated keywords. It should be a well thought out ’sub-category’ of your campaign. For example, an online jeweler may have ad groups for ‘bracelets,’ ‘rings,’ ‘necklaces,’ rather than just ‘all jewelry.’

2. Targeted, relevant keyword list - Any one of your creatives can display as a result for searches on any keyword. Therefore, the keyword list needs to be very relevant to the theme of all creatives in each ad group. In the example of the jeweler simply having one ad group for ‘all jewelry’ with all of the keywords and creatives, could result in a mis-match in results as an ad for a ‘bracelet’ may display when someone searches on ‘ring.’

3. Well written, interesting creatives - Again, because many marketers approach pay-per-click as just one more chore, often times little thought is put into writing the creative. As a result searchers are faced with many boring, similar ads on the results page. There are some basic, best practice tips. Use your keyword in your headline. Use a call-to-action, maybe even a limited offer. One of the best pieces of advice that I’ve heard is to write an ad that is longer than required text limit then rewrite it as many times as it takes to fit within the text limits.

4. Tracking parameters - You will want to be able to see how your ads are doing, not just count clicks. In order to do this, you need to have the appropriate tracking parameters to be able to segment the traffic in your web analytics. Depending on how your campaigns are set up, use the following structure (the actual parameters you use are up to you):

For campaigns with the destination URL set up at the creative level:
www.mydomain.com/?source=google&c=campaign&ag=adgroup&creative=version
source= the search engine or other site
c= the campaign name
ag= the ad group name
creative= version number of the creative (this allows you to test specific versions of each creative)

For campaigns with the destination URL set up at the keyword level:
www.mydomain.com/?source=google&c=campaign&ag=adgroup&kw=keyword
source= the search engine or other site
c= the campaign name
ag= the ad group name
kw= the keyword

5. Negative keywords - Regardless of what your business is, there are searches that you don’t want to show up as a result. In the example of the jeweler, if he only sold high-end jewelry, he would want to make sure to add words like ‘cheap,’ ‘bargain’, ‘discount’ as negative keywords.

6. Match type - One of the most often overlooked option is the match type. Many marketers just let their keywords default to ‘broad match.’ This also can result in a potential mis-match in results. In the example of our jeweler, say one of his key phrases is ’silver bracelets’ as a broad match. Since broad match means that his ad can display as a result of a search on either of the words in the phrase, ads for his silver bracelets would display along with ads to ‘buy silver stock,’ ‘profit from sub-prime mess’ and other results for the search only on ’silver.’

Using ‘exact match’ may result in paying more for a keyword, but the traffic is better qualified. Using ‘phrase match’ is a good alternative when purchasing phrases as it requires that all words (not any words, as in ‘broad match’) must be in the search.

Following these simple steps will ensure that your ads are relevant to what people are actually searching on, your campaigns are trackable, and will likely result in higher CTRs and lower costs!

Filed under: PPC on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 by Joy Brazelle |
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