How to Manage Pay Per Click Campaigns

August 26, 2011 0 Comments

I use a simple method to manage pay per click campaigns which I will describe in this post so that you can benefit from the same approach.

Once you have set up your pay per click campaigns it is important to manage them to ensure you keep your click costs down and improve the quality of the clickthroughs so that the leads you generate are the best they can be.

Before making changes to your account you need to decide what your main objective for your PPC campaigns is. Over all you want to get more leads I am sure, but do you want to manage pay per click campaigns to get more clicks, or to reach a higher conversion rate for your ads? If you are not sure I would suggest you optimize to achieve the best clickthrough rate for the lowest possible cost.

The areas to focus on to manage pay per click campaigns are:

keywords
ads
landing pages
ad placements

How to Check the Performance of your Pay Per Click Account

Before looking at each of these focus areas you should get a good idea as to how well or badly your campaigns are performing for you. Google Adwords has several reports you can produce, however the best ones to use for optimization are:

Keyword report
Search query report
Placement performance report.

The keyword report will show you how your keywords are performing so you can decide which ones need attention.

The search query report will show you which keyword queries are triggering your ads. You can often find keywords you may not have considered in this report and keywords that you don’t want to trigger your ads because they are not relevant.

The placement performance report shows you which websites in the display network are showing your ads and how well they are performing. This report can help you to determine which websites are working for you and which ones to explicitly exclude from your display network campaigns.

Optimizing Pay Per Click Keywords

Many adwords accounts perform badly because the keywords are not optimized. Failing to optimize your keywords will lead to higher click costs and lower quality clickthroughs so this step is very important.

The easiest way to optimize your keywords is to look at each one and do the following:

Delete high cost/low conversion keywords (those that get less than 1% conversion rate)
Keep your high converting keywords and make sure your bids are sufficient to display your ads in positions 1-3 for those keywords
Reduce the cost per click bids by improving the quality score (it should be at least 5/10). Improving your landing page will help to improve the quality score.
Find more related keywords you can target, place them into a separate adgroup if necessary.

Optimize Pay Per Click Ads

To optimize your ads make sure you have at least 3 ads per adgroup. Check the clickthrough rate (CTR) of each ad. Modify the two ads that are not performing as well as the one with the highest CTR. The aim here is to try and beat the best performing one.

Only modify one thing at a time in each ad so you know which change had the biggest impact. Here are some ideas for changes you could make to improve ad performance:

Include the keyword in the ad title
Include a call to action
Give a strong benefit
Capitalise the first letter of each word
Capitalise the first letter of each word in the display URL6. Include numbers such as discount percentage, price

Optimize Landing Pages

As I mentioned earlier, optimizing your ad landing page contributes to improving the quality score and therefore lowering your cost per click.

Google is looking for specific things in order to provide searchers with the best experience possible so pay attention to these on your landing pages:

Make the landing page match the keyword and intention of the ad
Include a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and about us links on the page
Have a clear call to action thjat can be seen without the visitor having to scroll the page down
Avoid links to only affiliate products
Don’t use your landing page to just collect email addresses
Give visitors instructions on how to purchase your product/service, or how to receive your free offer/download
Make sure the page loads quickly, preferably in less than 1 second.

Optimizing Pay Per Click Ad Placements

If you have some campaigns targeting the display network you should look at how well your ad placements are working for you.

For each website where your ads have appeared take a look at the clickthrough rate (bearing in mind clickthroughs are lower on the display network) and remove any where the clickthrough is lower than 0.5%. Find more candidate websites using the Google Ad Planner and include those in your account.

By following these simple steps each week to manage pay per click campaigns you will have campaigns that perform well for you for a lower per click cost.