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.

Write Benefit Driven Ad Copy

The web users mind is focused on one question, “What’s in it for me”.  Users tend to respond directly to offers that are relevant to their particular need.  Your job is to ask the right question about the user’s need and then answer that question in your ad text.  There are many ways to write this copy, but it all relates to human’s natural tendency to stop looking when they feel their particular question is answered.  Written in this way, you should start to convince the user to click on your ad and disregard everyone else’s ad on the page.

It’s not difficult to prominently display your keywords within the text itself if you have only one or two keywords per group. Make sure you use your sales 101 knowledge and action-pack your ad with calls to action, special deals, and amazing benefits.  Go for shock and awe where you can.

Use Match Type Options

Once optimized, a common mistake is to focus on the default ‘broad match” match type.  This would be a mistake because it could possible cast too wide a net.  Conversely, an ‘exact match’ could be too narrow in focus.  Each match type is going to perform differently and you will need to analyze and manage them accordingly.

Diversify With Long Tail

Long tail key terms shouldn’t be neglected for your star performers.  These keywords are effective because while they will have a lower CTR (click-through-rate), they tend to be the exact answer to a question in the users head, resulting in higher conversions.  Having high converters no matter the volume will improve the quality of the overall campaign and increase Quality Score ($$).

One of the easiest ways to create long tail high achievers is to add purchase modifiers to the keyword.  Terms such as ‘buy’,’ find’, &’purchase’ are effective modifiers that are used in search all the time.  When building out this long tail keyword list, only use phrase and exact match within these ad groups.  This way, you are ensuring the modifier word is included in the search query, and you’ll waste less money.

Don’t Get Into A Bid War

If your sole aim is to target the first ad position, be prepared to waste a lot of money on the tire kickers or lookey-loos of the search world.  This is a marathon, not a sprint.  Focus on the best CTR, conversion rate & ROI. Don’t get into a bidding war.

Each of these strategies will help to optimize what you have or create the most efficient ad campaign.  Remaining competitive is the top priority in PPC, and it’s probably what your competitors are doing… right now.