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Paid Search: PPC Best Practices
| Search engines are difficult to ignore! As per data available, 90% of Web users utilize search engines; and 73% of all transactions start with search engines. 13.1 billion searches were made in the month of February 2009, in the US alone! It is not a surprise then that advertisers spend more on search engines than on any other online channel. Advertisers reach out to users through the sponsored links, which are placed alongside the other results that appear when a user carries out a search based on a ‘keyword’ (or phrase). |
| Google and Yahoo, the two dominant search engines, have their own advertising platforms for advertisers to push their ads. They provide extensive and easy-to-understand documentation, and step-by-step processes to set up campaigns. |
| It is deceptively easy to throw in a bunch of keywords straight from keyword suggestion tools that the search engines provide, feed them with a good budget, do a couple of quick ads, and start generating clicks, leads or maybe even sales - but getting the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign to run at its potential, and optimally, can be tricky! |
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| Here are a starter set of best practices to help manage a PPC campaign. |
| a. Choosing the Right Search Engine |
| Identify the search engines where you would want your ads to appear: |
On the basis of geography: If your target is Japanese market, for example, Yahoo would work better than Google for you. With new players and avatars coming into the fray like Microsoft’s Bing (and its increasing market share in US), one might need to allocate appropriate spends.
On the basis of type of campaign: For some B2B campaigns Yahoo Search might work much better (lower cost of acquisition as well as higher absolute number of leads) than Google Adwords – this might mean testing campaigns on different search engines in the initial phase. |
| b. Identify the Right Keywords |
| Create a starter set of keywords from the company’s business collateral – website, articles, whitepapers, brochures, and more. Collateral about the company’s product and services is particularly well suited to find valuable keywords. Next, identify keywords from the company’s competitors’ collateral. Keywords about the domain can be identified by visiting association sites/groups, wiki articles, and more related to this domain. Expand these keywords with different free and paid tools available – such as the Google keyword tool, or Wordtracker. From the expanded set keep only the keywords relevant to your business, and ignore the rest. |
| c. Campaign Structure |
| Sort the keywords into ad groups based on a common theme – they might share the same word or words or they might share some other relevance. For example, keywords such as ‘property California’, ‘property Texas’, ‘property Palo alto’, etc could be put in one ad group, as they share the word ‘property’. For a banking client, all competitor names could be part of an ad group. As part of the ad groups include relevant negative keywords. For example, if your client is in the money transfer business, but does not service certain geographies, include those geographies as negative keywords. Ad groups can be classified as core and non-core (or more variations such as core, regular, and tail) to help bid better (see the Bidding Right section below). Structure the ad groups into campaigns based on themes such as product and service categories or sub-categories. One can also create different campaigns based on geographies – such as a different campaign for the US, Europe, and Asia. |
| d. Get Your Ad Copy Right |
| Write specific ads for each of your ad groups. Make sure the core keyword in the ad group is covered by your ad copy. For example, in the ad groups with keywords ‘property California’, ‘property Texas’, ‘property Palo alto’, the word ‘property’ should be part of the ad copy. This will not only help you get clicks, and hence conversions, but also help you get great click-through rates (CTR) and a good quality score, and thereby lower cost-per-click (CPC). Check what your competitors are saying and find a way to be unique, else you might lose clicks to them. A good practice is to write ads that address a user’s needs – this helps create a better connect with the user and thus a higher CTR. |
| e. Create Relevant Landing Pages |
Effective landing pages are the key to conversions through PPC. Have clear headlines that encourage your visitor to stay on the page and scan down for more. With your messaging, address users’ pain points, as in the ad creatives. Give enough details on the page, and make the page user-friendly to enable and assist people to accomplish your goal – sale, sign-up, or download.
Create connections from the keyword to the ad creative to the landing page. Insert relevant keywords from your ad creative and ad groups on the landing page to help improve Google quality scores. One can conduct A/B or ‘multi-variate’ testing on landing pages to discover the best performing combination in terms of messaging, design, layout, and more. |
| f. Bidding right |
| Bid on the keywords in line with the final cost-per-acquisition (CPA) expectation from the campaign. You can expect higher CPA from some ad groups, and lower from others – this could based on the amount of competition present for certain groups of keywords, or the relevance of the keywords to your business. For keywords with higher competition, if they have high relevance to your business, it might be okay to bid high and end up with a high CPA; as there may be brand keywords that give you much lower CPA, and the campaign as a whole could provide a sustainable CPA. For keywords that are not core to your business, but provide an opportunity to cross-sell, you should bid lower (as the CR for those keywords would be lower) if you wish to maintain a manageable CPA. |
| g. Ongoing Optimization |
| Make changes to the campaign with a view to the final goals – number of leads and/or CPA of leads. To increase number of leads check if you have captured most of the demand – identify more keywords that might be relevant to the business and include them in the campaign; increase CTR of your ads to generate higher clicks from the same set of keywords. A/B test creatives methodically to continuously increase CTR. Another way of increasing number of leads is to increase CR – create higher relevance between the keyword-ad creative-landing page and improve messaging (could include quality of promotion) on the landing page. To reduce CPA, increase CR, or bid lower. |
| h. Analytics Integration |
Integrate your PPC campaign with Web analytics software such as Google Analytics or Site catalyst. Web analytics can provide additional information and help take optimization to the next level. For example it can give us information about bounce rates for different keywords, average time spent on site or landing page for different keywords or ad texts and lots more. This kind of information can help understand what messaging is working and what is not.
PPC is a simple idea but can as easily become very complex to execute optimally. Continuously optimizing the campaign in the right direction with the right set of tools, without losing focus on the objective of the campaign, is the key to success of a PPC campaign. |
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