Archives for "keywords"
Using PPC for Branding
Earlier this month, we all got a lesson in how not to brand when BP began buying PPC ads for terms related to ‘oil spill.’ As a result, plenty of people who were looking for real news about the oil spill clicked on those ads and were redirected to BP’s official take on the spill. Not exactly objective content there. The consensus in the PPC world is that BP’s money would be better spent cleaning up the gulf, and then cleaning up its reputation. Ahem.
While we don’t suggest using PPC for damage control, we do recommend it as an effective branding tool for businesses. Continue Reading
Geo-Targeting & Your PPC Campaigns
Geo-targeting your PPC campaigns is a great way to screen out unqualified clicks and raise your clickthrough and conversion rates. But like everything, it’s a little more complex than it seems. When you choose to geo-target, you can do it in two ways: choosing specific regions, states, or radii when you set up your campaigns, or putting geo-qualified keywords (i.e. ‘electrician San Francisco’, or ‘movie theater San Jose’) into your campaigns or adgroups.
We here at ClickSweeper have tried both strategies in our PPC management experience, and we have to say that geo-targeted campaigns are considerably faster to set up and easier to maintain. Take, for example, a hair salon in Santa Cruz that only wants to advertise for local (10 mile radius) traffic with the keywords ‘hair salon’ and ‘hair stylist.’ Continue Reading
Organizing Negative Keywords
Good keywords are essential to the success of your PPC campaign, but you may be surprised to hear that negative keywords also play a significant role. We here at ClickSweeper have talked about negative keywords before and how they form a fantastic combination with broad match keywords. Want to capture long tail keywords yet exclude irrelevant queries and clicks? Negative keywords are definitely your friends.
But how do you get the most out of them? Not too surprisingly, like your regular keywords, negatives work best when they are:
- tightly organized
- focused
- well researched
In other words, it’s going to take a little time and work on your part. But it’s worth it to have fewer irrelevant impressions and clicks, higher clickthrough rates, and more conversions. (Keep in mind that although irrelevant impressions may not have an immediate impact on your budget, they can – and do — commit crimes against your quality scores.) Continue Reading