It has been a long time since I last wrote about CPC, specially Google adwords.
Here are a few tips/tools I have recently started using a lot, with very positive impact.
1) Quality scoreQuality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.
This is a very important parameter, which can be used to troubleshoot the performance of each keywords, specially related to the content of the ads and of the landing pages.
I am usually targetting at 7.
- run a report showing quality score for each keyword
- identify each keyword which can potentially bring traffic to the site (significant volume of impressions) and highlight all keywords with a Quality Score <>
- Verify that the ad copy contains these keywords. If not, create a new ad group for this type of keywords, and create a relevant ad containing the keywords in the copy
- Verify that your landing page is optimised for this keywords (meta tags, h1 title, image alt tag, copy contain these keywords). If not, create a new landing page targetting these specific keywords
Note: this process can be very time consuming if you try to apply this to ALL keywords (specially if you have got 1000s listed...). This is why it is important to focus only on keywords bringing potentially significant traffic to the site.
Benefits: A poor quality score usually means that the ad will not be clicked as much as it could be (poor CTR), that conversion rate will not be as good as it could be. By improving your quality score, you ensure that the ad copy and the landing pages are optimised to some extents. Also, a good Quality Score will ensure that you pay less than competitors for a same position.
2) Watch out position 1-2-3 format for your ads. If your ad is in position 1-2-3, it may be formatted differently by Google (see picture below)

You need to ensure that your ad still makes sense (right punctuation) in both formats.
3) Use the editorThe adwords editor is nice piece of software allowing you to manage your ads more effectively that for the google.com/adwords interface
4) Use the media plannerThis is a tool I have very recently started using, and turn your CPC content campaigns into a real media buying tool. Use this tool to build a map of all the sites you want to advertise on.
5) Use Google Insight SearchIt is a combination of Google Trend, and Google keywords suggestion tool, providing you with a good way to create your different adgroups. This tool would deserve a post itself, which I will probably add to this blog later on this month.
Labels: cpc, google, online marketing