Moderator December 14th, 2009
This is a guest post by Jerry McGovern, a content strategist for Acquisio, a search engine marketing software company.
There are more advantages to PPC advertising than just targeting users who are searching for specific keywords. PPC advertising also lets you target users within a limited budget.
There are a few things that PPC advertisers can do to make sure they get the most out of their budget. First, they can set up their campaigns so that their ads are only shown to pre-qualified users. Second, they can ensure that their ads are more relevant to the keywords they’re bidding on. Finally, PPC advertisers can closely monitor their campaigns, and make adjustments according to how keywords are performing on an ongoing basis.
Pre-Qualifying Users & Clicks
Most mainstream PPC advertising networks offer advertisers several features to better target their campaigns. And advertisers can use these features to potentially pre-qualify their traffic.
The most common way to pre-qualify traffic is to geo-target your ad. By geo-targeting your ads, you can ensure that you only attract traffic from relevant locations. Geo-targeting filters often let advertisers target users by continent, country, state/province, or city. This allows advertisers to filter out traffic form regions they are not targeting, and save on having to pay for click from users that they don’t want to do business with.
Another common filter offered by many PPC ad networks is the time filter. This allows advertisers to make sure that their ads only run during certain times of the day. Such a feature is useful for filtering traffic outside of business hours or form other time zones. For example, if you’re trying to get users to click through to your site and then call a customer service number, you can avoid paying for traffic during times when your call center is closed.
Better Targeting Ads
As a PPC advertiser, you can bid on any number of search terms. But if your ads don’t seem relevant to that search term, the chances of users clicking on them is pretty slim.
There are several elements of a PPC ad that can be used to increase its relevancy: (1) the title, (2) the ad copy, and (3) the URL displayed in the ad. By writing specific ads for each keyword you’re bidding on, and making sure that keywords appear in both your ad title and ad copy, users are more likely to click on them.
This tactic is particularly pertinent for advertisers running campaigns on Google Adwords. Google rewards PPC advertisers whose ads are more relevant to the keywords they are targeting by giving those ads a higher Quality Score — and the higher your Quality Scorve, the lower you have to bid to have your ads rank well.
The most important way that Google measures Quality Score, however, is according to an ads click-through-rate (CTR). After all, the more often that an Adwords ad is clicked on, the more relevant it must be to the keyword it is targeting. So by making your ad content appeal to the user’s search query as much as possible, you can further enhance your Quality Score — and, as a result, pay less to have your ad rank well in the sponsored results.
Campaign Management
Different ad campaigns are going to perform differently at different times. Some are going to perform better at certain times of the day, others will only perform well on certain days of the week, and others, still, will only perform well on a seasonal basis. So PPC advertisers want to ensure that they (1) monitor campaign performance closely, (2) deactivate poorly performing campaigns, and (3) invest more in campaigns that are exceeding expectations.
Effectively doing all of this requires regular and routine maintenance. After all, if a poorly performing campaign goes unnoticed for several days, you can end up spending more than is necessary on un-targeted clicks.
In the case that you’re managing more campaigns or keywords than you can personally monitor, then you might want to consider an automated tool. Our own PPC software, Acquisio SEARCH, for example, features bid management tools that can (1) quickly identify which keywords are performing well as well as those that should be paused, (2) notify you via email you when campaigns or keywords develop poor Quality Scores, and (3) set maximum CPCs on a campaign-by-campaign basis according to dynamic criteria, such as the minimum estimated bid necessary to have your ad rank on the first page.
All this being said, however, it’s important that you choose an automated tool that’s appropriate for your needs. Acquisio SEARCH, for instance, is an enterprise level platform, meaning that it’s intended for companies or PPC agencies with multiple advertising accounts. So if you’re a niche advertiser that’s only targeting a certain geo-location, and only advertising on Google AdWords, you might want to opt for a smaller platform that’s more suited for the scope of your PPC efforts.
Maximizing the ROI of Your PPC
The real advantage that online advertising offers over its offline counterparts is that campaigns can be measured more regularly, more accurately, and then be adjusted on an ongoing basis. This lets marketers understand trends more quickly, and then act on them to get the most out of their ad spend.
When it comes to PPC advertising, the trick to maximizing the return on your bids is to make sure that your campaigns are optimized at each of the set-up, content, and management stages. PPC advertisers can do this by first making sure that campaigns are properly segmented according geo-location and time. Then, they should ensure that their ads are as relevant as possible to the keywords that they are targeting. Finally, advertisers should put aside the time they need to measures and monitor campaign performance on an ongoing basis.
And depending on the size of their PPC campaigns, they might want to consider an automated PPC management platform that’s appropriate for their needs. After all, while something that’s too big for your needs would require too much of an investment to be worth it, a platform that doesn’t offer all the feature and functions you need to manage your campaigns could end up costing you thousands in missed opportunity and poorly managed bids.
