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6 PPC Tips That Will Give You The Competitive Edge

I’m a big fan of a focused PPC campaign. Focused on conversions. Here’s are some tips to achieve that.

  1. Always remember that the beauty of Adwords PPC over other channels is that you are reaching potential customers at the exact point at which they are making a decision to buy a product like yours.  Or at least starting to think about it. Reach them with relevant keywords, ads, and landing pages.
  2. Always use negative keywords. Review the Search Terms used to show your ads. What keywords are being used that do NOT relate to your product? You’ll probably be surprised at keywords that slip in that lead to keyword combinations that bear no relation to your product. Lose them.
  3. Always look at your keyword Quality Score. Regardless of the impact it might have on your  bids, it’s such a good indicator of the relevance of a particular keyword to your campaign (and landing page). If the QS is 5 or below, do something: lose the keyword, or work it into your page somehow – Page Title, body of the page, just somewhere it can be seen by the system.  If the keyword doesn’t match the page,  people aren’t going to convert, let alone click.
  4. Utilise Sitelink & Callout Extensions – they’re such a good way to enhance the ad.  For free. See the example below – only the AO ad uses relevant sitelink extensions, showing additional, relevant links I might want to click on.
  5.  Test your Ads,  Test your Headlines. Ads can have 2 headlines of 30 characters, and while it’s tempting to go to town on these, sometimes keeping it simple avoids losing part of the message when a headline is truncated. Here’s an example:
    Example PPC ads
    Here we have a couple of pitfalls. Which? magazine seems more to be pushing it’s subscription – I saw your ad because I’m looking for a laptop, not a magazine. Also we see a couple of message lost because they are over-long. The last ad urges us to ‘Hurry, Must…’ Must what?
  6. And no ad in the above example using the Path fields of an ad. Path is two fields in an ad definition that shows on the second line of an ad.  How much more likely would I be to click on the John Lewis ad, or indeed any of these ads, if the shown link was www.ao.com/laptop rather than just www.ao.com, or  www.which.co.uk/laptop/reviews rather than just www.which.co.uk.  This goes to my first point – always think about the mindset of the viewer of your ads.I realise this post and specific example deals with some big brands  whose ads are automatically created rather than hand-crafted as a small business ad campaign would be. But it does illustrate how, which a bit of attention to detail, one can create PPC ad campaigns that leverage all the elements available in Adwords and in doing so, help you gain a competitive edge.

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