18 PPC secrets to help you improve your efforts and maximize your ROI

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I cannot tell you how many companies and individual’s I have seen over-paying for keyword terms, getting no conversions, low ctr and bidding their way into ad depletion. When I find companies or individuals in this situation I am honestly not shocked. It’s not easy to know how to create a succesfful PPC campaign so that is why it is important to either do your research before jumping into a PPC campaign or hire someone with experience.

PPC can seem easy to the”do it yourselfer”, I mean all you have to do is just bid on words that you think are the most trafficed, right? WRONG!! This is where a lot of people get into trouble. If they have a bussiness about “home appliances” a common mistake is to go after search terms that are to broad like “home appliances”, “kitchen appliances” or “ovens”. Yes these terms get a lot of traffic BUT how good is the CTR, how much are you spending per click and what is your cost per sale if you even get sales off of this ad?

I am going to give you some secrets that many industry professionals already know but the majority of PPC campaigns do NOT use. Hopefully this advice will help start-up businesses, people who are new to PPC and maybe even more experienced PPC vets.

Are you ready for the secrets?

1) Focus on long tail keywords (they are less expensive, less trafficed but MUCH more targeted)
2) Build landing pages for these terms
3) Develop your ads with creativity - see what your competition is doing and capitalize on their weeknesses, be interesting and eye catching.
4) Vary your ad placement - Range from being #1 to #6 on given ads sometimes it might be worth it to show up sometimes for a keyword like “home appliances” but you do not need to spend an arm and a leg on it. Bid the lowest amount.
5) Do not get into bidding wars
6) Use negative words so your ad does not show up for unwanted phrases or words
7) Test, Test, Test and Test some more varying your keywords and bid prices. Usually a day is sufficient for testing.
Use tools like Keyword Compete - This program is one of the best services online for competitor analysis and implementation
9) Expand PAST Google Adwords - Google can comprise of over 50% of search traffic - What about the other 50? Do MSN ad center (low cost per click) and Yahoo!s new Search Marketing.
10) Go after commonly misspelled words and phrases using this ontology tool
11) If your business is specific to an area then GEO Target your search terms with geographical specifications
12) Advertise on Foriegn search engines like Google.es and Google.co.uk etc (make sure your ads read like a native tongue)
13) Manually research sites you can place your adwords on. Digg and slashdot are popular and highly traffic for the computer and internet industry. Find popular sites in YOUR industry as well.
14) Put PPC ads up for your competitors search terms and for their branding. (this is worth a shot and I have been able to do this and I have seen this being done…. Some engines do not allow this and from my experience it depends strongly on the company who is seeing ads placed for their own brand name who speak up. The sqeeky wheel gets the oil as they say)
15) evaluate your market and see what people are searching for using MSN Ad labs
16) Maximize your ROI by disecting your highest margin and optimizing your PPC around your highest margin of profit.
17) Track Google Trend, demographics and competitor keywords
18) Think outside of the box as much as possible - If you can find search terms that are highly traffic in a keyword or industry roughly related to yours you can pay little to nothing for a very high conversion.

I have been very successful using and implementing these secrets. If you are new to a company, new to PPC, or recently responsible for evaulating and improving a companies pay per click ad campaign then you are facing a big task. Without the right HOW TO guide you are most likely going to fail unless your company is selling “eternal salvation” you are going to need this guide.

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