Managing a Paid Search Campaign even for a seasoned paid searcher can be overwhelming at times and one can easily forget some important steps and best practices. I usually follow the following steps when either managing or setting up a new campaign:
Step 1
Step 2
- Monitor & evaluate daily/weekly/monthly performance
- Segment Keywords
- Refine Keyword List
- Search Query Report & Competitive Research
- Ad New Keywords to respective Ad Groups or create new Ad Groups
Step 3
- Identify Keyword Themes to test (potentially keyword named domains)
- Repeat Steps 1, 2, & 3
There are a lot of actions involved within each of these steps. I think the PPC Workflow diagram below will help understand them better:
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Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a very time consuming, tedious, and an ongoing process, and it needs to be carefully planned and executed to for your website’s pages to show in the SERP.
- Search Engine friendly design should be the foundation of your SEO campaign. Your site should be easily accessible to the search engine robots and crawlers in order for them to index the site and its content.
- Make sure all your links works, so these robots can index those pages as well. Broken links mean the search engines will not index that page and hence it will not show up in the SERP.
- Flash, Images, Shockwave files all make a website look esthetically pleasing, enable the user to interact with the website, and can also help in keeping the users involved with your website. However, designing an entire site with only these will result in your site not being indexed for all the relevant content. Reason being, the search engine crawlers cannot read flash and image content yet. Hence, keep these to the minimum and focus more on text.
- Each page on your site is relevant and needs to have a carefully crafted SEO strategy around it. Simply implementing your SEO strategy on the home page will not be helpful. Each page should have its individual strategy.
- Meta Tags give you some level of control over how you influence the search engine robots. Carefully choose your keywords, title, and description for each page. For Example:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization Basics I</TITLE>
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”search engine optimization, seo, serp”/>
<META NAME=”description” content=”mysemblog.com provides helpful Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and overall Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tips and tricks.”/>
</HEAD>
- Keep these tags short and sweet. Carefully choose the keywords, and description for each page and it should be a reflection of the content on the page.
- There are plenty of books stating different figures on the number of keywords you should add to the keyword tag and the overall length of the description.
- Personally, based on the keyword research you do, I would add the top and most relevant keywords to the keywords tag - mostly 4-5 keywords and keep the description to about 150-200 characters including spaces.
- You could have a longer description, but when you see the SERP you see a lot of descriptions ending with “…”, so keeping a short, sweet & carefully written description helps not only makes it look professional, but also helps catch the users attention when they don’t have to read an incomplete statement.
- Again, this is not an exact rule, I do have some descriptions that are longer than that and end with “…” in the SERP, sometimes it is just impossible to cut down the description, but wherever you can, try to do it.
- URLs are a part of your website and shouldn’t be overlooked. They can be used to your advantage and should be used to your advantage and should be crafted meaningfully. For example:
http://www.mysemblog.com/post/987237hcecbew90/12
This URL would not make much sense to anyone, not even the Search Engines, even though it has the exact same content as the link below:
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/11/quality-score/
The second link is more descriptive to not only the reader or someone trying to link to your site, but also for the Search Engine crawlers. Some other examples of links on this blog that are descriptive are:
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/07/shopping-for-an-effective-ppc-bid-management-tool/
http://www.mysemblog.com/2008/12/estimating-max-cpc/
- Lastly, content is king. Have relevant content on your pages. I will go into more details later about some strategies to keep in mind when writing content for your pages.
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This post is to share a formula I have found extremely handy when setting up a new PPC account, or simply adding new keywords to my existing PPC account.
- Max. CPC, Volume, Avg. CPC, Pos High, Pos Low, Clicks, & Cost are all estimates from Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool.
- Conv% is the rate at which an account converts. If there is historical data, it is best to use that, if not, you can enter any conversion rate and see what Max. CPC would suit your business goals and objectives best.
- Revenue Per Conversion is the amount you would earn per conversion
- Target CPA is the maximum you are willing to pay per conversion. Keep in mind, this amount should ideally be less than your Revenue Per Conversion, unless you are trying to breakeven.
- The last row, is a subtotal of all the rows. Important thing to note, even though the individual Max. CPC for both the keywords is different based on their individual traffic volume and performance, $2 Max. CPC at the very end is an important figure directionally. Since it is based on subtotals, it shows what your account’s overall Avg. CPC should be.
Note: All figures in blue are values that can be entered manually, all figures in white are calculations.
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Every Search Engine Marketing Professional tries to maintain a high Quality Score. Lets face it, a high Quality Score means better position on SERP, and lower CPC compared to competition. Below are some quick facts I found have proved to be helpful, but none of us will be able to crack Google, Yahoo, or MSN’s Quality Score Algorithm.
Google’s Quality Score is based on [Exact Match] version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, & Current advertiser competition on that Keyword. Also, historically I have noticed, [Exact Match] always has the heighest Conversion Rate and lowest Cost Per Conversion, even if the overall conversion contribution is low.
Here is what we as search marketers have to work with or can do in order to achieve a high Quality Score:
Basic Account Structure:
- Splitting Keywords into smaller, more targeted Ad Groups
- Relevant Ad Copy for each Ad Group
- Optimizing Creative - using verbs and calls to action
- Experiment with Match Type Testing, and Pause Poor performing Match Types
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
- Link Building
- Implementing Keywords within Content - i.e. Keyword Rich Content
- Adding best performing keywords as meta tags, and best performing ad copy as meta description
- Essential Site Pages - Privacy Policy, Contact Us page, External links to other pages of the website
Overall Landing Page:
Steps to Improve Quality Score:
- Identify Keywords with low Quality Score and start with adjusting their bids or pausing those Keywords
- Creating Landing Pages specific to highly targeted Ad Groups will help increase conversion and Quality Score
- Keyword Tailored Ad Copy will improve Click Through Rate (CTR) and Quality Score
- Start Campaigns with [Exact Match] and build list with other Match Types overtime (although, I personally start with all 3 to speed up the optimization curve of the account)
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I have been asked many times, how can you expand on your keyword list as the landscape is constantly changing and people are always using new queries or combination of queries to to search for what you have to sell. I will summarize my practices in combination with previous post, in this post:
- Know your product/service - it is easy to define your product/service in keywords
- Know your competition - always know what your competitor is bidding on, or is using as meta tags or even reading their content
- Search Query Report - using Google’s Search Query report will help you build a solid negative keyword list as well as add a lot of new keywords that are relevant to your product/service but are not in your account
- Existing keyword list - always reflect back on your existing keyword list. One thing I have tested and have had great success with is concatenating top converting keywords. It might work it might not work, it simply depends on the product/service. This could also prove as a good Long Tail Keyword strategy
- Keyword Research Tools - As mentioned in my earlier posts, always use a keyword research tools available online. Some are free, some come with a monthly subscription
- Misspellings - Testing on misspellings can help generate incremental conversions as well, but keep a close eye on their performance and pause/delete them if they prove to be effecting the overall account negatively
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