Tips for Better PPC Management
One of the driving forces in the PPC algorithms is your Click Through Rates. Spending time, effort and even investing in a PPC expert can help you to double or triple those rates. Not only will that increase your traffic, but it will lower your costs per click.
There are a lot of ways to improve click through rates. Most of them require some rolling up of the sleeves and some consistent effort. If you are not up for that, then consider hiring a PPC management company to do that work for you.
Relevant Keywords
Consider the person typing in the keyword you are advertising on. They want information on that topic. So, make your ad copy speak to them. Put the keyword phrase into your ad copy, if possible. Of course, this may not be easy to accomplish if you have one of those typical PPC accounts that pile keywords into ad groups. But the more you can address the person doing the search, the more your ad will interest them.
Unfortunately, if you have one of those accounts with tons of keywords under just a few ad groups, you may need to restructure your entire account. Again, not a pretty process scrapping all the work you have done. And, again, this might be an area where you consider outsourcing to a professional.
Hunting for Negative Keywords
Click Through Rates are determined by the number of ads that get clicked divided by the number of impressions that were served. With that in mind, you want to make sure you are not serving up ads on keywords you don’t want to appear on. When you search for keywords that you want to advertise on, also take note of those other variations that you don’t want to appear on. Compiling these and using them appropriate can help drive up your CTRs.
Ad Copy Improvement
Probably the most labor-intensive, but important items that can make an impact on your CTRs is better ad copy. And while things like a call to action or a value statement of some kind are key…split testing is even more critical.
Split tests are simply running and testing multiple ads on the same keyword. This may appear easy, but there are a variety of factors that come to play. What to test? How long to test them? How often to run split tests? Etc. We could get into discussing mathematical formulas to determine when is a valid split test done, but your eyes may glaze over. If you can commit yourself to daily testing, for continual effort and time…you will make an impact. Sure, you might make mistakes, but the real key here is effort. It will pay off.
While there is a lot more to PPC optimization than improving your CTRs, it is certainly a good place to focus on. If your business is in a competitive marketplace, where keywords are expensive, you ought to consider protecting and refining your investment by hiring a professional PPC management company. If that’s not a possibility, then make that commitment to more time and effort. It will make an impact.
Filed under: PPC Advertising