pay-per-click keywords

Tuesday, September 29, 2009
By Joseph Kerschbaum

Staying competitive for your most sought-after keywords requires diligence, persistence, and a strategic utilization of the tools and reports that are available to you as a pay-per-click (PPC) manager. Improve and preserve the performance of your highly-competitive keywords by following these strategic guidelines.

Optimize Your Account Structure
To manage your highly-competitive keywords, it is helpful to separate them into their own ad groups. Any well-structured ad group should contain no more than approximately 25 terms (on average), allowing you to group your keywords tightly by theme and user intent. However, with keywords that need constant monitoring and optimization, consider very small ad groups; some with perhaps only one keyword in order to focus intensely on that term.

PPC trends move fast. Segregating your competitive terms will save time when it comes to reporting and analysis. You can run a series of reports for these tightly structured ad groups and get the data you need quickly, rather than running reports for numerous ad groups then needing to hunt down specific terms. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, agility is crucial — especially when you are analyzing and reporting on mission-critical terms.

This tactic can help improve your Quality Score as well. Most paid search programs — including Google, MSN and Yahoo! — take into consideration your ad group structure when evaluating your account. When done correctly, you will see a difference — you might see your cost-per-click (CPC) decrease, while ad position increases.

Write Targeted, Benefit-Driven Ad Text
Restructuring your account will streamline reporting, save account management time, and enhance your Quality Score. And, with this strategy you’ll be able to write more relevant ad texts. This is at the core of creating a successful paid search campaign: keywords and ad text.

An entire series of articles could be written on successful PPC ad text, but to remain ahead of the competition keep in mind relevancy and benefits. First, your ad text has to be relevant to a user’s query otherwise your ad won’t get a sideways glance. Second, you not only need to convince users that the ad is relevant, you need to show why they should disregard everything else on the search engine results page (SERP) and click on your ad.

It’s not difficult to prominently display your keywords within ad text if you have only one or two terms per ad group. And you need to make sure to include awesome benefits, calls-to-action, and any special deals you have to offer. This will make your ads more relevant and convincing that you have the best solution for their query.

Don’t forget to regularly review others’ ad text as well — this is competition, after all. See what they are saying, and how they are positioning themselves. Then think of new and better ways to connect with your shared audience.

Utilize Your Match Type Options
Once you have optimized your account structure by moving your most competitive keywords into their own ad groups and have written ad text that is highly-targeted and benefit-driven, you can then properly utilize the various match types for these terms.

For your core terms, incorporate each of the available match types: broad, phrase, and exact match. PPC managers can overlook this tactic easily. These match types may be derivatives of the same keyword, but they will generate different results. If you focus solely on broad match, you might be casting too wide of a net, while only focusing on exact match may be limiting your growth potential. Remember, each match type is going to perform differently and you should analyze and manage them accordingly.

Use Negative Keywords for Positive Impact
After you decide to also use phrase and exact match keywords, Google AdWords’ Search Query Report can sharpen the focus of your highlycompetitive terms.

To narrow the focus of these keywords, strip away all search queries that are not relevant to your needs. These irrelevant queries can decrease click-through and conversion rates. The search query report shows the raw search queries for which these keywords are displayed. This report is most useful for broad and phrase match keywords.

You might discover that a highly-competitive term displays for queries that are not relevant to you, your business or the particular campaign. You can add these irrelevant terms to your negative keyword list. This prevents your ads from displaying for these searches. This will enhance your ad group’s focus and maximize your ROI.

Diversify with Long-Tail Terms
Separating your most-highly trafficked, most-competitive keywords into their own ad groups does not mean you should neglect the longtail variations of these competitive terms.

As you optimize your account structure and write better ad text, continue building your long-tail keyword list. These terms may have lower search volume but they can also have a lower CPC and higher click-through rate (CTR) — therefore boosting your campaign’s overall performance. Also, increasing your keyword list outside of your core terms will help diversify your account, lessening the reliance on your most competitive terms.

A quick way to create new ad groups for long-tail variations can be as simple as adding “purchase modifiers” to your core terms, such as: buy, find, purchase, seller, manufacturer, etc. Here is a quick tip when building out a long-tail list: Only use phrase and exact match within these ad groups. This way, you’re ensuring the purchase modifier is included in the search query.

Implement the Right Bidding Strategy
Your main objective with PPC is to execute a bidding strategy that will generate the highest ROI. If your sole focus is targeting the first ad position, prepare to spend a huge portion of your budget on users who are “just looking.” Remember, you are in this for the long haul. Monitor your performance closely and bid to the position that generates the best CTR, conversion rate, and ROI — don’t get into a bidding war.

Each of these strategies will help you optimize your account, enhance your performance, and remain as competitive as possible in this ever changing, always challenging paid search landscape. All of these tactics are on-going — you need to continually look for new ways to make your PPC campaign work better.

This is exactly what your competition is doing. In fact, they’re probably doing it right now.

About the Author: Joseph Kerschbaum is a member of the PPC Hero team, a blog that discusses PPC strategy, as well as SEO Boy, a blog that focuses on SEO strategy — but with a heroic flare. Kerschbaum is a senior paid search marketing consultant for Hanapin Marketing, a search engine marketing/development firm based in Bloomington, Ind.

Google Analytics

I found this written by Bryan Eisenberg
It Is great advice…..

Just because Google Analytics is free, don’t let that mislead you into believing it is somehow disabled, cheap, or insufficient.

Big corporate websites or sites with complex selling structures might need a paid analytics solution like HitBox or Omniture but, for most of us, Google Analytics provides enough customer insight to stay busy for years.

The one thing that Google Analytics lacks, however, is human support. For this reason, many businesses just scratch the surface of its capabilities. Some are afraid to dig deeper and others are just downright confused by it.

The Basics
Tagging your site for Google Analytics should be a simple affair. Google simply requires that you include a snippet of code (tag) on any page you need to track. Google itself offers a simple set of instructions on how to do this on any type of site.

In fact, Google Analytics created Conversion University — a series of lessons on several Google Analytics related topics. It is fairly easy to understand and a good place to start if you have questions about the tool. You can find it at: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/

Once you get the code installed, there are several other tools that will test to ensure proper set up. Sitescan by EpikOne will check your site for proper installation with a free scan at http://www.sitescanga.com/. Firebug is a free, open-source Firefox plug-in that offers some features helpful for tagging. Get it at http://www.getfirebug.com. If you want something a bit more specialized (a paid version that will crawl all the pages on your website) you can use W.A.S.P., available at http://webanalyticssolutionprofiler.com/.

1. Setting Up Goals
If you are only using Google Analytics for traffic and source reports, you are missing out on a huge amount of useful data and insight. One of its most powerful features is the ability to track goals for your customers. Whether you want them to buy something, subscribe, or become a lead, it is mission critical that you set up goals. Not only will this allow tracking of conversion rates, but also better enable you to find out where visitors are falling out of your conversion funnel.

With the cost of online traffic getting higher and higher, not knowing how good your site performs against its goals is not just wrong — it costs you money.

There are many great posts about setting up goals. The ZenCartOptimization.com blog has a series titled “Google Analytics Demystified.” Part 5 deals with goals, and is a highly recommended read.

2. E-Commerce and Lead Gen Tracking
To make changes based on analytics data, you should have confidence that the numbers from which you are basing your decisions are accurate and clean. I’m still surprised to see many clients still not filtering out traffic that is clearly unqualified.

The most common misstep is the failure to filter out internal traffic. On your Analytics home page, at the bottom right is a link called “Filter Manager.” Here you can exclude internal traffic, as well as traffic from any other domain — some companies filter out their competitor’s domains, as these are most likely people simply checking up on developments with your site. If you have members that make repeat visits to view subscription content or access a tool that requires a log-in, these should be filtered out as well.

Filtering out unqualified visitors will help you get a handle on exactly how well you are converting qualified visitors.

Google Analytics also allows analysis of visitors by defined segments. For example, we recently worked with a client who began a partnership with a very large retailer. The inclusion of a link from his partner’s home page quadrupled his traffic. However, he only saw a very small increase in sales. By segmenting this traffic it was determined that, unlike traffic from other sources, his partner traffic was either unqualified or early in their buying process and unfamiliar with his products. We helped build a specific landing page for this partner traffic and focused on increasing that segment’s conversion rate. Then, by providing content on that page specific to the partner traffic, sales increased.

Google Analytics also allows segmentation and tracking of results from Adwords campaigns. Google’s Conversion Rate University has great instruction for setting this up and even offers some advice on building better converting ads and landing pages.

The Bottom Line: Take Action
Don’t get hung by the rope that is “analysis paralysis.” And don’t get caught up in running report after report but changing nothing.

The purpose of Web analytics is to turn the information into something you can optimize on your site. If you look at your analytics and don’t walk away with a to-do list, you are wasting time and likely missing valuable opportunities.

Getting Started
Here are a few things you can do to start your action list:

• Look at your top entry and exit pages, and optimize those with a 40 percent plus exit rate.
• Look at your top referring keywords, and optimize landing pages for terms with a 40 percent plus exit rate.
• Look at your goal conversion funnels, and start optimizing the step that has the highest exit/drop rate from one step to the next.

Finally, ask yourself why site visitors might be clicking here, bailing out there, or spending five minutes on one page versus 12 seconds on another. Never forget: When running reports and staring at averages in Google Analytics or any other analytics, those clicks are real people making decisions.

For all the above links and dozens more Google Analytics resources, visit GrokDotCom.com/GoogleAnalytics.

About the Author: Bryan Eisenberg is an internet marketing pioneer and is professional marketing speaker. Bryan is the recognized authority and pioneer in improving online conversion rates and was recently recognized as one of the top 10 User Experience Gurus. Eisenberg is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, USA Today and The New York Times bestselling books “Call to Action,” “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Always Be Testing.”

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