Lately it seems that everyone and their brother is calling themselves a Search Marketing Professional, but what do they actually know about it and how do you find out if they really know what they are talking about or if they are just a student in a dorm room trying to make some money and will leave your AdWords account to fend for itself?

If you are looking for someone to manage your PPC Marketing check out PPC Hero and their article titled “10 Questions You Should Ask a Potential New PPC Management Firm” then consider 7evenLeafClover for all your needs If you still have your heart set on doing it yourself then let me offer you some tips:

Account Structure

Account structure is arguably the most important aspect of your PPC campaign. If you have put together a great keyword list and then just threw it all into a campaign named “Company PPC Campaign” then you have just thrown all of your hard work out the window.

Structuring your account not only helps you to better organize your keyword list it also has some advantages when it comes to your overall online marketing strategy. Lets say you sell Red, Blue and Green widgets. If you through all of your keywords into the same account you wouldn’t be able to get a very clear picture of how each type of widget was performing and selling. It would take a long time to sort through this data to make any sense of it. If you have some account structure and did something like a Campaign for each type of widget you would be able to see what keywords were working for each type of widget, you would also be able to write custom ad text for each campaign to really tailor the ad to what you are selling.

Negative Keywords

Negative Keywords are another important aspect of your PPC campaign, while in my opinion much less important than account structure they are important nonetheless. Let’s say you sell widgets for camping the red, blue and green kind again. Your keywords consist of red widgets, blue widgets and green widgets, you are getting a lot of traffic but you see that a lot of it is just wasted or has nothing to do with your product. Many keywords like red widgets for weddings or green widgets for cameras keep showing up. These are not qualified leads to your site so you would set negative keywords in your account to combat keywords like this from wasting your money. By making weddings and cameras negative keywords you will ensure that you are honing in on your niche of widgets for camping. This is one of the easiest ways to optimize your account.

Match Types and Long Tail

One of the easiest ways to cast a wide net while still staying focused on your target market is to use the multiple match types (broad, exact and phrase). Using these match types will help you find how people search for your products and then you can create new keywords based around that. If some of them aren’t working for you turn them off or create new negative keywords  to combat their negative effects. Long tail keywords are another great way to help you get quality leads. Long tail keywords are often found by using a full product name, through phrase match keywords or just through trial and error. If someone is searching for a product in such a specific fashion (big red camping widget with three headlights) then they are probably ready to buy and if you have that word or something similar as one of your keywords I can almost guarantee that you will make that sale.

So go take a look at your adwords account, make these changes and let us know what changes happen as a result of them. I guarantee that things will start happening to your account that I didn’t mention here (*cough* Higher Quality Score *cough* More Sales *cough*) Excuse me, the smog here is Los Angeles is really rough sometimes.

Share on Facebook

Filed under: Adwords, Google, PPC Marketing, Search Engine Marketing by Dean Karasinski
1 Comment »