Month: October 2011

Here at SEO Liverpool, we offer virtually all web marketing services. Having said that, I always seem to be discussing PPC with clients, and thought I’d go over some points and FAQ’s.

We all agree that it’s very important to understand all the steps if you’re starting you own SEO PPC campaigns. Here’s the second part of our post.

Building the Ads

• Because CTR  (click through ration) affects your position , do NOT get lazy. Don’t use one ad for everything. You do need to put the effort into writing your ad, you want your quality score to be high.
• Use keyword in title and/or description. Users follow scent trails.
• Remember, you must pass an editorial review.
• Choose appropriate landing page URLs (Usually NOT the home page) you may want to A/B Test.
• Use dynamic keyword insertion – this is a little complicated to explain here, so check out tutorials on each site. The usage is different between engines.

Note… Searchers prefer uninterrupted logic. Make sure that the ad text and the landing page all talk about what the person is searching for.

Schedule

• Don’t just set it and forget it.
• Map out a calendar in terms of;
  • Campaign roll-out.
  • Reporting/analysis.
  • testing periods(s).
  • Other promotions (offline, online, trade shows, etc., like an editorial calendar).
  • Budget changes (e.g. overspend on Google during kickoff).
• Schedule promotional and seasonal messaging.
• Day-parting – time of the day – days of the week. If you are only open during the week, you may not want to advertise at the weekends.
• Schedule quarterly ‘housecleaning’.

Budgeting

• Daily budgeting technology isn’t perfect, so engines usually under-deliver or over-deliver. Set it for a little more than you want to spend, so the engines don’t under-deliver. So do look at your spend.
• Put your high-traffic or high-pound words in their own campaign, with their own budget.
• Start out with a bang, so you can lock in a high CTR which will help your quality score – then pull back
• Google has different ways to manage budgets;
  • Conversion Optimiser.
  • Budget optimiser (most clicks for a defined budget).
  • Preferred cost bidding (set average CPC preferred).
  • Manual bidding (you control it).

Managing Bids

• Bid management software can help.
  • Popular tools: search engines’ tools, Atlas, Keyword Bidmax, Omniture, SearchRev, Performics, Clickable, Adapt.
  • Note: “bidding rules” don’t work well on hybrid auctions.
  • Low volume keywords won’t have much data to optimise automatically against ROI or other projected values.
• People are still required!
• Paying too much? Improve your CTR and landing page.
• Delete low performing keywords, or pause/isolate them so they don’t bring down the overall campaign. Don’t have pity, get rid of them if they don’t help you

My Final Thoughts

• Don’t be afraid to start small and grow your success.
• Build a risk portfolio for yourself – set aside some budget for experiments and branding. Be creative, try some things, see what you can figure out.
• Reinvest a portion of  ‘profits’ back into the budget.
• Leverage the engines for knowledge, but don’t believe everything they tell you.
• Provide enough resources to support the campaign.
• Strive for integrated strategy across all media.

Hope this helps