St. Louis Pay Per Click

Archive for March, 2010

Local Extensions allow you to show your local business address with your PPC ad.  These ads will display a plus sign next to the ad on search engine results pages, allowing users to click on the plus sign to access additional information about your business. Along with the address, the ad will display a map and directions to your business.  This type of localization of a PPC ad is a great way to increase the trust level and authenticity of your business while allowing visitors to easily find your location.

Add an address at the campaign level:

Campaign level extensions will appear with all relevant ads in your campaign.

To add and address at the campaign level, go to the Settings tab and make changes under the Ad Extensions section. If you are a business owner, select this option to link your existing Local Business Center account to your campaign. There is no limit to the number of address you can add.  If you are a non-business owner, select this option to manually enter your address. You can enter up to 9 different addresses.

Select an address at the ad level:

When using ad level extensions, you can choose one address to be the only address that displays with a given ad.  If the address is not relevant to the user, no address information will be shown. This allows you to promote specific information for one location.  For example, if one location of your business is offering a special and the others are not.  This also allows you to direct those users to a targeted landing page with that special offer.

To display a certain address with an ad, click on the edit icon next to the ad, and then select “Always show with one address”.  A box will appear with all of the addresses you entered at the campaign level, allowing you to just choose one to appear with the ad.

According to Google, Quality Score is determined by a variety of factors and that a higher Quality Score will result in higher ad position at a lower cost-per-click.  Clearly Quality Score is a vital component of any successful AdWords campaign.  But, how can you improve it?

 Here are some steps to increase your Quality Score:

1.)  Organize your campaigns and ad groups well.  Make sure your keywords within an ad group are related and relevant to your ads.

2.)  Use negative keywords to increase your CTR and decrease unqualified traffic.

3.)  Bid on your brand to increase CTR since your ad will most likely be relevant to those searching for your brand.

4.) Move underperforming keywords to their own ad group and write new ads for them.

5.) Manage your ad copy so that all ads in an ad group are closely related to the keywords in the ad group.

6.) Test destination URL’s to determine which ads produce the highest CTR.

7.) Test different ads to determine which produce the highest CTR.

8.) Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ad and keywords.

9.) Test different landing pages to determine which produces the highest CTR.

10.) Optimize your landing page, because Google also looks at landing page load time, navigation, links on the page, etc.

Increasing your Quality score is critical if you want to increase ad visibility and decrease your spend at the same time. The most important thing to remember is relevance.  Make sure your keywords, ad copy and landing pages are all relevant to each other.  This will increase both CTR and Quality Score and improve the success of your overall campaign.