Posts Tagged ppc

4 Practical Ways to Lower Your AdWords CPCs

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 27th, 2011

WordStream last week carried out some fascinating research on Google AdWords CPC prices of different sectors. One key finding was that the finance industry carried high CPCs of up to $54.91, while other service-related sectors such as education, law and health also exhibited expensive CPC prices of over $30.00.

It’s All Relative

Since CPC prices are often closely linked to the potential profitability of a sale from that keyword, the CPC price is often a mute point. A ‘bad credit history remortgage’ could be worth $15,000 profit to a remortgage broker, so having CPCs in excess of $50.00 can deliver a strong return on investment.

On the other hand, the keyword ‘New York weather’ has little commercial intention, so keywords such as this tend to benefit from low CPCs.

While this relativity of CPC prices makes CPC comparisons across sectors rather meaningless, most PPC advertisers would jump at the chance to pay lower CPCs. So below are 4 strategies I’ve found useful for achieving lower CPCs, while still maintaining a strong conversion rate.

 

Source: Wordstream

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2 Comments

3 Tips for AdWords Ad Scheduling Success

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 25th, 2011

Ad scheduling – an advanced feature of Google AdWords – allows PPC advertisers to set different bids for different days of the week and different hours of the day. If your business is closed on weekends, you can pause your ads on weekends. If most of your sales come through on weekday mornings, setting higher bids on weekday mornings can result in higher profitability.

But while ad scheduling in Google AdWords can be extremely powerful in boosting campaign performance, it is essential that ad scheduling decisions are reliable and informed. Since so many internal and external factors can bias your day of the week analysis, advanced ad scheduling strategies are best reserved for mature and relatively stable PPC campaigns with a large amount of conversion data.

Below are three tips for getting the most out of ad scheduling, and suggestions to help you make reliable and informed decisions to take advantage of this powerful feature of Google AdWords.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , ,

5 Comments

5 Common PPC Optimisation Mistakes

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on June 21st, 2011

You’ve researched hundreds of long-tail keywords, organised them into granular ad groups, and crafted ad messages which closely match the ad group’s keywords. You then set your Google AdWords campaigns live.

But after a while, you realise your PPC campaigns are not delivering the desired return on investment. You start making changes to bids, budgets, and keywords. Still no improvement, so you make more changes.

And so on.

It’s not long until you’ve lost track of what’s working and what’s not. Your keywords and ad groups become disorganised, your Quality Scores start to fall, and you start paying excessively high CPCs to chase after visitors and sales.

If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you need to take a step back and review your campaign optimisation strategy. Are you making intelligent and informed decisions based on reliable, insightful, and unbiased data? Or are your bids being changed and keywords paused in a random and haphazard fashion in a drastic effort to improve results?

Below are 5 optimisation mistakes I’ve found myself guilty of from time to time, and some tips on how to avoid these common pitfalls.

 

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , ,

5 Comments

The Art of Keyword Qualification

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on April 14th, 2011

Advertisers looking to promote their products or services through Google AdWords often face a difficult challenge when deciding which keywords to target. Some keywords will naturally be more relevant than other keywords, so where do you draw the line? When researching keywords in which to show your ads, how do you decide which keywords to use and which to avoid?

Unfortunately, there is no definitive rule on the types of keywords which are relevant (which you should show your ads), and which are  not relevant (which you should avoid). After all, what’s relevant to a large advertiser may be irrelevant to a small niche advertiser. This lack of a boundary can make it extremely difficult to decide where to draw the line when researching possible keywords.

But as long as you consider the principle of keyword qualification, everything will be fine! If you understand how different keywords in your AdWords account naturally have different levels of qualification, keyword research and ad group organisation become a whole lot more effective.

Let’s see how.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , ,

6 Comments

How to Strike Gold in Google’s Search Query Report

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on March 31st, 2011

Google’s search query reports provide PPC advertisers with two fantastic opportunities to improve the performance of their AdWords campaigns:

  1. Identify irrelevant keywords which can be added as negatives
  2. Identify new keyword opportunities for keyword expansion

The difficulty, however, is efficiently and reliably pulling out trends and insights from a raw search query report. According to Google, 25% of searches made each day are completely unique, and 70% of searches lie outside of Google’s Keyword Tool. While this suggests that the large majority of your search queries will have received only a handful of clicks (making trend-spotting extremely difficult), it also presents a great opportunity for identifying new keywords outside of the Keyword Tool.

This article will explore the techniques which can be used not only to identify negative keywords from a search query report, but also identify new opportunities for practical keyword expansion.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

9 Comments