Chris Litchfield - Digital Marketing Consultant | SEO And Sponsored Search | Online Business Development | Charlotte NC

Staying competitive and relevant for your highest converting keywords requires persistence and diligence, as well as a mastery of tools and analytics available to you or your PPC manager. Testing and retesting creates improvements and preserves the performance of your highly competitive keywords.  Following these strategic guidelines, you can continue to convert leads at a higher and higher level all the time.  This translates into more conversions and a fatter paycheck.

Optimize your account structure

To manage your keywords effectively, it’s helpful to separate them into their own ad groups.  Well structured campaigns for your top tier keywords should fall into groups of 25-30 key terms per ad group.  This allows you to tightly define your campaign by demographic or characteristic.  You should set a goal to tightly define your purpose in running PPC, and therefore an efficiency in the purpose of an individual ad group.  Separating your campaign into “purple shoes”, “blue shoes”, and “yellow shoes” is effective for a website that is categorized by color and is about shoes.  Creating ad groups by colors makes sense if your website is optimized and categorized in this way.

Also consider segregating your highest tier keywords from the rest, and use small ad groups with 1-5 key terms only, so that you can quickly adjust your top earners.  By proportion of conversions, these are the top 5% performers and deserve an even closer monitor.

PPC trends move fast.  Structuring the ad groups in this way saves time when it comes to reporting and analysis.  Set a goal to eliminate these time inefficiencies; you don’t want to spend all your time reporting on a list of 100 keywords if all you are after is the one or two that actually return the big bucks.

Google, MSN & Yahoo gives you brownie points for quality structured ad groups by way of Quality Score or similar.  When done correctly, you will see the difference, by way of lower CPC and higher ad positions.  And anything you can do to increase your QS is the same as putting money back into your pocket.

You can use Google Adwords to test multiple creative ads and filter down which create the highest Click through Rate (CTR). You’ll need to make sure all your ads are running on an equal basis, so make sure this is configured to “Rotate: Show all ads equally”. This way, you aren’t using the ad that converts the best as a default. Your A/B test should include 4-6 ads initially. This way, you can quickly weed out the bottom three ads.

Once you are ready to run your campaign, you’ll notice that even very small changes have a big effect on your CTR and even ROI (Return on Investment). Try setting up two ads and just changing one word between them. If your metrics show improvement, you’ll know to show that format over the other.

There’s a bunch of testing that you can do to optimize ad copy. Try A/B testing these: