PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING SERVICES AND PPC MANAGEMENT

Pay per click advertising services and PPC management * setting bid prices * setting up a Google Adwords campaign * negative keywords * making more sales

Having covered the basics, let's take a look at some of the other things you might want to be aware of when setting up a Google AdWords campaign.

Split-testing Ads

I mentioned earlier that it is a good idea to have more than one ad per Ad Group. This is so as you can monitor which ad performs best and then change the one that has the lower CTR.

PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING SERVICES

When providing my pay per click advertising services to a client, I often start off by having one advert for each group which uses dynamic keyword insertion and one which does not.

After a week or so, you will hopefully have enough data to be able to analyse the results and see which advert is likely to perform best in the longer term. The important figures for this are how many times each advert has been displayed and what its click-through rate is.

Armed with this information, you can then use this free utility - www.splittester.com - to find out whether there is any statistically significant difference in the performance of your two ads.

PPC MANAGEMENT

If one advert turns out to be noticeably weaker than the other, then you should edit the poorer performing advert and then repeat the split-testing process a couple of weeks later. This can be time consuming but management of your PPC is essential to make it effective and profitable.

By repeating and repeating this exercise over time, you will be fine-tuning and fine-tuning your adverts until you eventually achieve the optimum possible CTR for that Ad Group. Think of it like the evolution of a species - but over a much shorter period of time!

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SETTING BID PRICES

The Split Tester tool is provided by Perry Marshall, who is widely regarded as the ultimate authority on everything to do with AdWords. A lot of what I know about pay per click strategies, I learned from Perry - either from his free email course on Google AdWords or from his extremely valuable e-book. You can join his free email tuition course here.

You'd be surprised how sometimes something very minor can make a difference to the CTR of an advert. As I said earlier, the final line of your four line ad is always given over to the URL of the website you are sending people to - for example www.whereonearthgroup.com.

But don't forget that there are other ways you can write this URL, such as without the www. (so simply whereonearthgroup.com) or perhaps with some of the letters capitalised - such as www.WhereOnEarthGroup.com for example.

SETTING UP A GOOGLE ADWORDS CAMPAIGN

I know from experience that doing this can often make a difference to the CTR of the ad. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Just create an Ad Group with two adverts which are identical apart from the way you write the display URL. Have it all in lower case on one ad and have it with capitalised letters on the other. After a few days, stick the results into the Split Tester and see if there is a difference.

NB - by default, if you have more than one advert for an Ad Group, Google will favour the advert with the highest CTR and show that advert more often. To be able to properly test different ad variations, you need to turn off this automatic optimised ad rotation in your campaign settings and pick the option to show ads evenly.

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NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

As well as setting up lists of keywords that you want your advert to appear for, you might also want to specify some keywords for which your advert definitely will not appear.

For example, suppose you have a website selling clipart images. You might end up with a list of keywords such as: clipart images, website clipart, clipart downloads, etc.

With a list like that your advert would also be likely to appear if someone typed in other search phrases that included the term "clipart images". For example, your ad would probably appear if someone searched for: best clipart images. Similarly, if they searched for: collection of clipart images. This is because the search phrases include the term "clipart images" which is a search term you are bidding on.

That's unlikely to cause you a problem. In fact it is one of the nice things about pay-per-click that your advert will appear for related search phrases that you perhaps had not thought of and so had not bid for.

MAKING MORE SALES

But what about if someone searches for "free clipart images". Your advert will still stand a chance of being shown and clicked on. That's ok if you are actually offering free images, but yours is a site which is selling clipart images. So, anyone who searches for free clipart and then clicks on your ad is likely to be disappointed. And, not only that, they will also have wasted your money by clicking on your ad with no hope of being able to find what they wanted at your website.

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Pay per click advertising services and PPC management * setting bid prices * setting up a Google Adwords campaign * negative keywords * making more sales