6 Tips To Make Your Tiny PPC Campaign Compete with the Big Spenders
by Neil on December 28th, 2007
Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are not all about how much money you are willing to spend as an advertiser. Besides the Cost Per Click (CPC), there are several components factored into the ranking of advertisers’ sites on Google. Many large Online Travel Agencies such as Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity have huge online marketing budgets that allow them to simply ‘buy’ top rankings within the SERPs. Many times these OTA’s are willing to pay extremely high CPCs to maintain a certain position.
What can advertisers with smaller budgets do to compete? First a recap of what factors Google considers when determining rank.
CPC is determined by the maximum amount you are willing to pay every time somebody clicks on your ad.
Quality Score is determined by a keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.
‘Other Relevance’ factors are Google’s version of a secret sauce. Precisely what constitutes ‘other relevance’ factors is never clearly explained.
As shown above there are 2 factors that comprise Google’s ranking formula. The point of this post is to help you improve the performance or increase the ranking of your ads without spending more money. With that objective in mind there is only one component to focus on, the ‘Quality Score’. The bullet points below are all techniques that can be incorporated into an existing account or better yet, for a campaign being built from scratch.
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Tip #1: Campaign structure is the most important tool to running any successful Adwords Campaign
- It is very important to organize your campaigns by topic, product, or brand.
- Doing so allows you to track performance of different ‘products’ or ‘brands’
- The example of a solid campaign structure can be seen below.
- Note: it would not be a best practice to have a ‘king’ term within the ‘Queen Bed’ ad group.
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Tip #2: Ad Group structure and organization is just as important as Campaign structure.
- Having extremely ‘tight’ ad groups or groups of keywords allows you to create super specific copy for keywords within these ad groups.
- Why so important? Consider this example: For all of the keywords grouped in the ad group below the corresponding piece of copy to the right is being served. The copy might be appropriate for the first three keywords; however, it is not relevant to the last two ‘Evanston’ related keywords.
- Now consider the improved relevance of the copy for the ‘Evanston’ related keywords. This was accomplished by breaking those two keywords out into their own ‘Evanston Hotel’ ad group and creating new relevant copy it.
- Extremely relevant Ad Copy can improve your CTR, Ad Relevance and drastically improve your Quality Score.
- Below is another example of what can be done with tight ad groups of closely related keywords. You can write headlines that closely mirror the keywords in every ad group.
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Tip #3: Call to Actions in AdCopy Will Increase CTRs
- A solid call to action in your copy can increase your Ads’ CTRs. A user may feel more inclined to click on your ad if they are compelled to do so by a call to action.
- For example:
- Book now!
- Reserve today!
- Save now!
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Tip #4: Make sure that your Ad Copy is Clear & Concise
Avoid unnecessary verbiage in your copy. You only have 70 characters to get your point across and you want to do so in the most straightforward way possible.
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Tip #5: Go Overboard With Negative Keywords
If 15% of your total keywords are not negatives, there is a good chance you are showing up for terms that either have nothing to do with what you are selling or, worse yet, have bad connotations with what you are selling. For instance, if you are a Cruise line and you are bidding on cruise related keywords, you should have the following negative keywords in your campaigns as an example: ‘viruses’ or ‘illnesses’. You do not want your Sponsored Ad served for someone searching for the term ‘stomach viruses on Cruises’. If used properly, negative keywords can reduce irrelevant ad impressions and give your Quality Score a nice bump.
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Tip #6: Test Multiple Ads Per Group…Then Test Some New Ones.
Experiment with different offers and call-to-action phrases to see what’s most effective for your advertising goals. Google allows you to have an unlimited amount of ads in each Adgroup and will rotate them until they find the most effective one. As you figure out which types of ads perform the best, try creating variations on that ad. The subtlest changes can increase CTRs by 200%!
