My thinking was, don’t spend money on keyword phrases that should be sending you traffic organically anyway. Many PPC managers think marketing dollars should only be spent on keywords related to the product or service the client offers. The funny thing is, these keywords often include the brand of successful competitors – and you can bet that they may take notice of your brand and do the same to you.

Don’t let anyone get the jump on your own brand. The cost per click should be low for you and it is just another doorway to your site on the search results.

At first glance, this seems like strange behavior from the two competitors; but in reality, it actually is a win-win situation for both of them. Yahoo! does not have the inventory of ads to efficiently fill ad space for long tail keywords and such. Google does. Yahoo! will retain the option to show its own ads over Google’s. So Google will basically be filling empty shelf space with their ads. Yahoo! is claiming that this deal will boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months. So this is a great move for Yahoo!, whose shares fell by 10% from the fallout of the Microsoft ordeal.

This is also a great strategy for Google because it brings them that much closer to total world domination! What is the saying? The more money you make, the more people want to take it from you? Well the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee has already taken notice and have said they will be investigating the deal closely.

We will all be watching closely; because when big moves are being made, it always opens up new opportunities to make more money!

In a perfect world of proper PPC campaign management, each campaign would be fully optimized in everyway possible. If only it were that simple!

A great way to make you PPC budget spend efficiently in Adwords is activating Position Preference and setting your keyword position preferences to 2^nd position or less. After reading up on numerous blogs, forums, and testing out keyword positions, there is no doubt in my mind the 1^st position is a costly position to maintain – too costly! The cost per conversion is too high for my blood and I eat through my budget much faster. So, preventing myself from showing up in the 1^st position by setting the preference to 2^nd position or less, is music to my ears.

But, (there is always a but) this is only true for keywords that are competitive. Here’s a scenario: you find a great long tail keyword for exact match and it has very low competition. So low, in fact, that your ad is the only one showing. Guess what? If you have your position preference set to 2^nd position or less, how can you possibly show up for a search phrase that automatically puts you in the 1^st position by default, regardless of max bid set?

Use this feature carefully without shooting yourself in the foot. The good news is, in most scenarios for most people, this kind of problem won’t rear it’s ugly head too often. If the time is taken to set up position preferences properly, your budget can be stretched further and spent on ever improving ad groups as you continue your guest to live in a perfect world of proper PPC management.

1. You can run PPC campaigns for seasonal promotions.

If my busiest day of year is Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, then I will definitely be pumping up my marketing efforts to rake in the dough for these days as they approach. With Pay Per Click Advertising, I can do just that. Best of all, I can create campaigns for each holiday; where each on has tailored keyword phrases, tailored ad copy, and a tailored landing page for the destination URL of the ad.

2. You can turn on/off your seasonal campaigns year after year.

Taking the time to set up different campaigns for different seasonal marketing strategies allows you to simply turn them on when the season or holiday has arrived, and turn them off when it has ended. When the next year’s season hits, the campaigns are already there and the work has already been done – they just need to be turned on.

3. You can easily identify seasonal keyword searches.

When doing the keyword research for different seasonal campaigns, use Google Trends to identify which keyword phrases get a good search volume increase during the season or holiday you are building your campaign around.

This screen shot shows the search volume for flu shots. It clearly shows a spike, year after year, during the autumn/winter months; aka: “flu season”.

You can drill down geographically with this tool, as well. Here’s an example of how this is useful. If you own a window repair company and did a search for “hurricane damage” in Google Trends, not only would you see seasonal increases in search volume year after year; but you would also see that most of the top 10 states that had the most search volume for these terms, are from the coastal regions of the U.S.

Seasonal marketing could lead to customers you have previously been missing out on.

Look for the spikes and hills in Google Trends and know this – “There’s gold in them there hills!”

Negative keywords are essential for proper PPC Management. I lump negative keywords in to the category of PPC basics. Why are they so important? They keep irrelevant keywords from triggering your ads to appear when a search is done. This means it keeps the irrelevant clicks away, which costs you just as much as the relevant. It also increases your click through rate (CTR), which improves your quality score. For those who don’t know, negative keywords are words that are related to a keyword theme, but unrelated to the product or service the ad groups are built around. Here are some methods I use to identify negative keywords.

1. Keep a list of common negative keywords.

You will find there are some negative keywords that are common among many products and services. It’s good to make a list of these commonly used negative keywords to help save time on identifying negative keywords in the future. For example, most products and services PPC campaigns are built around are not free. In this case, “free” would need to be a negative keyword. “Free” is probably a negative keyword that you will use time and time again - unless you are promoting something that is “free”. Once you have your list, the keywords that you may use off of it may differ from one campaign to the next. Just use good judgment and you will find this list very useful.

2. Use keyword research tools.

There are many keyword research tools out there; such as, Wordtracker, KeyCompete, or Google’s Keyword Tool. The thing to highlight here is, many of these tools will give you relevant keyword ideas, this is where you may find many negative keywords. However, they will also give you irrelevant keyword ideas. They will give you an idea of how competitive keyword phrases are, which is not completely accurate. They will give you an idea of the search volume a keyword has, which is not completely accurate. The point is, they will give you an idea.

3. Use Googles search query report.

Once your Adwords campaign has generated a few hundred clicks, you will be able to run a search query report and dig down deeper into the traffic. The great thing about this report is, it tells you what the people, who clicked on your ad, actually typed into the search engine to bring up your ad. This works best when you have keywords set to the “broad” match type.

This report is a great way to uncover the way people search on topics in that particular niche. It’s an excellent tool to uncover negative keywords at the ad group level, as well as the campaign level.

4. Use site analytics.

Analytic tools such as All Stats or Google Analytics reveal possibilities for negative keywords similarly as stated above; by telling you what keyword phrases visitors came to your site on.

You can dig even deeper with these tools and get very specific about the traffic sources. For instance, you may see that a lot of your traffic is coming out of state, which might not be applicable to your marketing strategy. You would then add all states that weren’t applicable as negative keywords to you campaign.

Use these tools to help get the gears in your brain turning. Use the data as a guide, but in by no means, as solid factual information that will formulate your campaign strategy. That can only come from the data your campaign gathers and with testing, testing, and more testing.

It’s no different for PPC.  Money will be wasted in ad groups whose “themes” aren’t tightly focused.  Recently, I tested this out for myself and found this to be the plain and simple truth.

I began with a decently targeted ad group.  An example is as follows: (these are only the keywords of a fake ad group to illustrate the point)

Ad group:        Miami bicycle

Keywords:      Miami bicycle

Miami bicycles

Miami bicycle wheel

                        Miami bicycle wheels

                        Miami bicycle seat

                        Miami bicycle seats

                        Miami bicycle handle

                        Miami bicycle handles

In this example you can see that the theme is Miami bicycle and that every keyword phrase has “Miami” and “bicycle” in it.  So the quality score might be “Good” and have a minimum bid of 10 cents.  But I wanted the quality score to improve to lower the minimum bid - to 5 cents for example - and lower the CPC (cost per click).  So I broke them up into much tighter themes. For example:

Ad group:        Miami bicycle wheel

Keywords:      Miami bicycle wheel

                        Miami bicycle wheels

Now I can get much more specific with my landing page and my ad to reinforce these keywords which will improve my quality score all around.  In the first example, there are just too many secondary words to fit into one ad.  So by tightening the themes, I can taylor a visitors experience from, the moment they search for the relevant “Miami bicycle wheels”, to the ad they see in the results that talks about “Miami bicycle wheels”, and finally to the landing page I’ve created specifically for “Miami bicycle wheels” once they’ve clicked the ad.

This is just a basic example of having focused ad groups.  There are more advanced methods which will be discussed later.  If you don’t believe this method to be true, I challenge you to test it out on one ad group and look at the quality score when you are done.  Remember, focusing the ad group means, focused keywords, focused ads, and focused landing page.  The results will make you spend countless hours restructuring your campaigns if you are anything like me.  Cheers!

Now I must admit, I was in the category of believers of this misconception when I first started doing PPC. *Hangs head in shame* But, as I gained experience, I noticed something. For certain local niches, “exact” match had a way higher CPC than the “broad” match type. But why?

Think about it. If you were a personal injury lawyer in Houston, someone searching for “houston motorcycle accident lawyer” and using the exact same phrasing in the search, are more likely to turn into an actual client; which is worth more than the visitor that came from a “broad” match type. The “broad” match type visitor saw the ad and clicked it even though they used the phrase “houston motorcycle accident lawyer stories” in the search box. Someone looking for stories is obviously less likely to turn into a client and more likely to be doing a research paper for class. Now there is a way to avoid this using negative keywords, but that is another topic.

Now, I did mention that I noticed this for certain local niches, but that doesn’t mean this only applies to local niches. Every industry is different. The competition is different, the search volume is different, the demographic is different, etc. etc. The golden rule in proper PPC management is, analyze the data, make adjustments, test, analyze the data, make adjustments, test, analyze…well you get the point.

So the trade off is often, pay more for highly relevant and qualified leads, but eat through your budget faster; or pay less for less relevant leads, but stretch out your budget further to get more traffic. How do you decide? Well, as stated before…….test, analyze the data, make adjustments, test analyze the data, make adj……

With the ever increase of competitors in Pay Per Click Market, Google has become more and more harder on advertisers on the quality. Still there are thousands of keywords in each niche which needs to be explored. Tools like longtailadwords.com will help you to find such keywords.

Effective use of phrase and exact match can drastically reduce the cost per click. If you are planning to use broad match then figuring out the negative keywords on a regular basis is key. Setting up a Google analytic account would be a good idea if you want to figure out the negative keywords. You can stop that keyword by adding into your negative keywords list.

Do an extensive research to find unique keywords in your industry. Try creative ideas to find the best unique keywords people would be typing in the search box to find your website. Creating a list of unique keywords needs time and you will be able to expand in due course. PPC Campaigns are getting harder and harder as more and more players are getting into online advertisements, who have money and want to increase the brand awareness so smaller players would be eliminated in due course. The rate of CPC is going to go higher and not lesser anymore.

The bottom line is to reduce the CPC of your campaigns is your find the unique keywords which are still out there. All you need to do is test and research and research until you find them. There is no short to a successful PPC campaign.

Even today some of my Campaigns loose money on untargeted keywords you need to check your Web stats to find the keywords which is not relevant to your campaign. Every day I check my Google Analytic stats and figure out those keywords and add into the negative keyword list.

Negative keywords can bring in good click through rate but it is not going to help your PPC campaign. Negative keywords can cost you a fortune for beginners. If you’re a newbie in Online Advertisement using Pay Per Click the best advice before starting off yourself is learn from successful Pay Per Click Expert or give your start of your campaign with some good successful PPC Management Companies and master yourself slowly and read the monthly reports provided by the company and educate yourself about PPC.

One of the ways to protect you from negative keywords is use of exact and phrase match in your keywords. This could reduce the negative keywords in your campaign drastically. But the problem here is you will loose potential customers with long tail. There is a very informative post about negative keywords in Google Adwords at Webmasterworld forum called - Finding & Implementing Negative Keywords started by eWhisper. Check it out.

One solutions for this is to create multiple landing pages, as you all know to be a sucessful at pay per click campaign is to do tests. Test your pay per click management campaign with different muliple pages and see the results.

Getting higher click through rate can boost your quality score but not your converstion. Here is what most of the advertisers fail. Also use programs like Crazyegg.com to find where visitors are click on your landing page depending on that tweak your pages until you find it successful to your campaign.

IF you want to know how to boost your conversions with crazyegg check out this blog post at 5startaffiliateprogram blog - Boost Conversions - Optimize Landing Pages with Crazy Egg .