PPC Management - Keyword Targeting
August 26, 2008
When building out your pay per click campaigns, an important area to pay attention to is keyword matching options. While this functionality is called slightly different things depending on with pay per click service you are using, most major PPC engines offer a variety of keyword match types. Understanding these types and utilizing them for your benefit can mean the difference between a successful ppc effort and a failed one.
Why so dramatic? Well, I can’t help myself as getting the keyword matching options wrong can ‘clean out’ your advertising budget faster than you can say ‘why didn’t I pay attention to that?’
You see, just because you are bidding on a particular keyword phrase, for instance “blueberry” doesn’t mean that your pay per click ads won’t show for something related, but totally not offered by your site, like “blueberry colored automotive paint”.
Obviously, if your site is offering blueberry recipes, a visitor searching for auto paint is likely not going to become a customer of yours(though you have to wonder what kind of a person would paint their car that color anyway).
Regardless, the keyword matching options are there for your benefit and should be used exhaustively to give you the best return on your pay per click advertising spend.
PPC Management — Adwords Quality Score Updates
August 22, 2008
If you have been advertising via pay per click using, you have likely come face to face with Google Adwords’ dreaded/beloved quality score.
By assigning a quality score to each keyword in your campaigns, Google is able to show ‘the most relevant’ ads to their users, in order to ensure the ‘best user experience’. Whether that is actually the result or not remains to be seen, but what is certainly true is that every advertiser using Google Adwords absolutely must cater to their quality scores. To ignore them only results in poor performance and decreased return on your advertising dollar.
This is really nothing new, Google’s quality score has been around for a few years now.
However, just recently announced changes to how the quality scores will be calculated and affect your ad performance could have a dramatic impact on your account’s success/failure.
It appears that quality scores will now be calculated in a near real-time basis, rather than an initial and periodic calculation we’ve seen in the past.
This has many possible affects on your advertising strategy, including how closely you monitor your adwords account. I will go into more details in future posts, but this seems like another reason why hiring a ppc management company might be a wise move if you don’t have the time to monitor your efforts consistently.
PPC Management and the Google Content Network
August 15, 2008
I’ll be honest.
I have a secret that I’ve been keeping. I can’t help but let it out.
My favorite PPC network is without a doubt the Google Content Network.
What was once a confusing and untameable beast has become a reliable traffic behemoth. Smart ppc advertisers have realized this and are reaping the rewards.
Google has done a lot of work to help advertisers win the fight against click fraud and ‘made for adsense’ sites. These drags on ROI used to make the content network a joke and waste of time, but times have definitely changed.
Whether with improved placement performance reporting or the ability to prevent ads from showing on unwanted and ineffective websites, Google’s content network has become a great place for informed businesses to advertise.
I don’t want to mislead you, the content network is still a beast that can drain your ad budget faster than you can imagine. But, it is now a tameable beast for regular content network advertisers like myself and my clients.
In fact, Google is promising future improvements to the ‘refinability’ of the content network campaigns, a welcome sign for those companies reaping the rewards of proper Google content network campaign management.