St. Louis Pay Per Click

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.

Earlier this year, Google AdWords added another way to track conversions other than the 1-per-click method.  The many-per-click method allows you to see the overall number of conversions occurring, but may cause some confusion.

First, conversions can be many things besides someone purchasing an item from a site.  You can choose an action you would like to count as a conversion, based on what is important to you.  For example, you can track purchases, form completion, or a certain page view as a conversion.  You can also track more than one of these types of conversions simultaneously.

With the 1-per-click method of tracking conversions, a user is only counted once within a 30 day period.  For example, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form and makes a purchase, it only counts as one conversion.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, it does not count towards the 1-per-click conversion number.  So, within a 30 day window, all conversions one user makes only counts as one conversion.

With the many-per-click method of tracking conversions, every conversion a user makes is counted within a 30 day period.  Using the same example as above, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form on your site and makes a purchase, the many-per-click conversions would be two.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, the number of many-per-click conversions would increase by one.  So, within a 30 day window, all the conversions that user made count, adding up to three many-to-click conversions.

If the number of many-per-click conversions seems too high to be true, it probably is.  There may be other things triggering this conversion, other than the ones you intended.  If a user refreshes the page or hits the back button to continue browsing your site after the conversion was completed, this may lead to an increase in the number of many-per-click conversions.  If a user bookmarks your converting page and returns to it within 30 days, this will also result in a conversion, although no purchase was actually made.  There are some ways to improve your code to prevent some of these issues, click here for more detailed information about how to do this.

If you are unsure about what you’re seeing, it’s always best to do a little research and look into Google Analytics to see if everything is matching up.

Under a new 10 year, $275 million dollar agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo!, Bing will power Yahoo! search and Yahoo! will sell all the search advertising through adCenter. This agreement has yet to be approved through the regulatory system, but is expected to go through in early 2010. After the deal is approved, it still may take months for the transition to occur. However, with this new system, utilizing adCenter in addition to Google AdWords is even more beneficial and will help you expand your target audience. But, learning two PPC platforms and understanding their differences can be tricky. Here is some information on a few of the differences between the two to help you get started.

Search Engine Options
With AdWords, your PPC ads will show up on Google, AOL, Ask, and a few other small search engines, with Google far and away the largest. You can choose however, to show your ads on Google Search only if you choose. With adCenter, ads will show up on both Yahoo! and Bing, and you will not have control as to which search engine your ads appear.

Targeting Options
With AdWords, all targeting options are done at the campaign level. For example, enabling content, targeting time of day, changing bids by time of day or day or the week is all done at the campaign level. However, with adCenter you can choose these targeting options by ad groups.
And, with AdWords, you can only target geographical location, time of day and day of the week. But adCenter allows you to target all of those elements, as well as by gender and by age group.

Ad Types
AdWords allows for text, mobile, video, and image ads. With adCenter only text and mobile ads are available.

Ad Options
In AdWords, you can choose to rotate or optimize the ads within your campaign. adCenter will automatically optimize ads to show the ad with the highest CTR most frequently.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion
With AdWords you can use dynamic keyword insertion in the title of your ad. In adCenter, you can apply this to many more parts of the ads, including the title, the body of the ad and the destination URL based on search queries.

Dynamic Text
In adCenter, you have the ability to use placeholders to change many ads simultaneously. For example, many of your text ads for a hotel include rates that change frequently. Instead of changing each ad manually every time a new nightly special occurs, you can use a placeholder and update all ads at the same time. Click here for instructions on inserting dynamic text into your ads.

Copy Campaigns
You can automatically import your Google AdWords campaign into adCenter. Click here for step-by-step instructions.

adCenter Resources
Brand new information is available on the adCenter fall 2009 upgrade, including a tutorial and feature guide PDF for adCenter. Check out the Microsoft Advertising Community blog for all of this information.