Posts Tagged quality score

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

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Modified Broad Match – How To Increase AdWords CTR and Reduce CPCs

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on October 19th, 2010

Back in July, after 2 months of successful beta testing, Google rolled out a much awaited improvement to their often notorious AdWords broad match. Modified Broad Match – or the Broad Match Modifier – allows Google AdWords advertisers to place plus signs in front of their keywords to better control the types of searches which trigger their ads. Since every word in the keyword which contains a preceding plus sign must be included somewhere in the user’s search query, modified broad match provides advertisers with an extra level of control over the search queries which trigger their ads.

While this extra degree of control was largely welcomed by PPC advertisers, modified broad match no doubt adds an extra degree of complication to Google AdWords management. However, as we will see from four seperate modified broad match experiments, if modified broad match is used correctly, it can be extremely effective in significantly increasing click through rates (CTR) and lowering cost per click (CPC) prices of Google AdWords campaigns.

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One Keyword per Ad Group: Pros & Cons

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on August 11th, 2009

I recently stumbled across a Google AdWords video by Derek Faylor describing how to boost AdWords relevancy. He suggests picking one keyword that is core to your business, setting it to exact match and giving the keyword its own ad group with its own tailored ads. The idea is this: if your ads closely match your keywords, you will be seen by Google as being highly relevant, so your Quality Score will increase. This will lead to a higher ad rankings, higher click-though rates (CTR) and lower costs per click (CPC).

It makes sense, and I completely agree that a highly relevant approach such as that outlined by Derek is essential to achieve great results in paid search.

However, although Derek emphasises that his one keyword per ad group strategy should only be applied to one keyword which is core to your business, there will rarely be a case where a business will only want to advertise on a single keyword. There will likely be hundreds of possible phrases that will be highly relevant to a business, and having a portfolio of hundreds, even thousands, of long-tail keywords (instead of just bidding on one or two highly generic short-tail keywords) will often achieve better results.

So is Derek’s strategy of one keyword per ad group practical if applied on a larger scale?

Let’s have a look at the pros and cons.

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Relevancy: The Holy Grail Of PPC

Posted by Alan Mitchell in Techniques on July 18th, 2009

I’m going to focus my first post on what I believe is the most fundamental concept in PPC: relevancy. Giving users what they are looking for. Directing them to where they want to go. Answering their questions.

Why? Because paid search relevancy can pay massive dividends. Not only is a highly relevant pay per click (PPC) campaign more likely to receive a higher click-through rate (CTR), higher Quality Score, higher ad rankings, lower costs per click (CPC) and benefit from less wasted spend, but users will more qualified so bounce rates are likely to fall (the number of people who immediately ‘bounce’ back), conversion rates increase and return on investment (ROI) will ultimately improve. So a highly relevant paid search campaign is definitely a good thing.

To achieve PPC relevancy, keywords, ads and landing pages need to work together in tandem. Messages in ads need to match users’ search queries, landing pages need to match messages in ads and landing pages need to relate to users’ original searches. (For a more detailed explanation of how each component interlinks, you might like to consult Acquisio’s great article on AdWords relevancy and Quality Score).

Closely matching ads and landing pages to keywords to encourage only targeted and qualified users to visit your site is a simple theory, and one that’s been around since the dawn of Google AdWords.

So nothing new then – does that mean relevancy is no longer relevant?

Well, not exactly, for two reasons…

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