Archives for "keywords"
PPC Management Tools: Contextual Targeting
Well, Google, we have to give it to you: sometimes you come up with really awesome tools. Our newest favorite is the contextual targeting tool, located under the Reporting and Tools tab. We like it because it provides keyword suggestions that are already grouped together in proto-adgroups. For example, type in ‘composting’ and the tool will come up with possible adgroups and keywords that have to do with composting. Ostensibly the tool is designed for the display network, but there’s no reason why its suggestions couldn’t work equally well for search. Take a look! Continue Reading
Expert PPC Management: Increase Conversions and Safeguard CPA
When it comes to pay per click campaigns (PPC), everyone wants the same thing: increase sales/leads but moderate their cost per acquisition (CPA). There are various strategies out there that attempt to satisfy these criteria. All center around the adage: test adcopy and landing pages to focus your clicks, and expand your keyword list to drive in more possible sales.
However, in the kind of harsh competition that more and more of us find ourselves in, we need a specific plan that always works – as long as we have the time and energy to enact it. Over the past year, more and more entrepreneurial spirits came to us with that simple task: grow conversions, safeguard CPA. Some were big corporations with hundreds of thousands of dollars they had to spare on testing to find the magic mix, but others were people with great ideas that needed PPC to get them off the ground.
Was there common ground between all of the clients we encountered? We were determined that the answer was yes. After a few failures and more than a few attempts playing with our own test campaigns, we discovered our trick to PPC management: segregating keywords into high risk and low risk, and then turning the high risk keywords into higher performing low risk ones. At the end of 2010, we saw our results. Dramatic increases in our clients’ holiday sales (including one dramatic 30% increase over the previous year) and just the kind of CPA that would make our mothers proud.
For an introduction to this method, please check out the attached video. Our very own Chris Moberg describes how it can effectively increase conversions while protecting CPA despite rising competition and consumer intolerance in a brief recorded webinar. Enjoy.
New ClickSweeper Feature: Add Negatives Easily
You asked for it, and here it is: a shiny new ClickSweeper feature that will make it a whole lot easier and faster to add negatives, either to a single adgroup or a campaign. You won’t have to copy and paste more than once. Honest.
Here’s a quick screenshot. As usual, we use drop down menus to make it easy to duplicate keyword additions. Start by selecting the search engine and campaign. If you want to add negatives at the campaign level, pull down the adgroups menu to ‘all adgroups.’ Set the match type to negative, enter your keywords, and hit save. You’ll receive a success alert and a short notice in the keyword creation history box. Your keywords will still be in the box so you can change the pulldown menus to other adgroups, search engines, or campaigns without copying and pasting.
Couldn’t get much simpler than that. Want to give our award-winning PPC management tools a whirl? Get a free two week trial today, and get your PPC accounts off to a good start in 2011.
Troubleshooting Your PPC Campaigns, Part 1
Pair Adwords reporting with Google Analytics, and you have a pretty good way to tell when things are going wrong. Knowing what to do about them, however, is a whole ‘nother story. But good PPC management means staying on top of every aspect of your campaign and being proactive about addressing problems.
We’ll be looking at a few problems you’re likely to encounter in this series. To start with, here’s one almost all of us face at some point:
Problem #1: High bounce rate/low time on site.If you’re getting disappointing averages from Google Analytics (average bounce rate over 75%, average time on site under 1 minute), it could be either or a combination of two major factors: landing page (s) and keywords. Continue Reading
Getting Started with PPC: Keyword Research
You wouldn’t embark on a trip to somewhere new without checking on driving routes, weather, hotels, and tourist traps to avoid, right? We’re often surprised by the number of people who jump into a PPC campaign without doing their keyword research first. Sadly, the best PPC management software in the world can’t save a campaign without a solid foundation in good keywords. It’s easy to avoid this trap by just spending the time to do the research.
So, what makes a good keyword? Generally speaking, it’s a keyword that is specific enough to trigger relevant queries, has the search volume to generate clicks and conversions, is not so competitive that you lose your profit margin, and most importantly, converts profitably. Continue Reading
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