From the category archives:

PPC Advertising Practices

What Is Google’s Quality Score and How Do You Improve It?

by DigiMarketing on July 19, 2010

Pay per click (PPC) Advertising Tips for Online Advertising Campaigns

A ranking developed by Google, Quality Score is an algorithm that calculates how relevant your paid keywords are to the end-user you’re targeting.  Because of this, your Quality Score is just as important as your bid when it comes to where your ad will be positioned.

How does this really impact you? If two competitors have similar or equal bids, the higher Quality Score will earn a higher position.

Pretty important to understand right?

Here’s a few ways to analyze the data and create a plan to increase your Quality Score:

#1-Prioritize & Optimize

Review all of your current campaigns and sort based by:

- spend

- then > ad groups by spend

 -then > keywords by Quality Score.

In those top spending campaigns and ad groups, any keyword with a Quality Score below 7 should be the priority for Quality Score improvement.

#2-Coordinate Search Queries and Text Ads 

Since your Quality Score also factors in click-through-rates, the more you can refine your ad groups so that the keywords are highly relevant to the text ad copy, the better results you’ll see.

Make sure you have different ad groups set up based on how a user may search for your product.  If you’re selling beauty products, you wouldn’t want to have the keywords “anti-aging” and “mineral makeup” in one ad group.  You will want two separate ads to break out these products and target the ads specifically for people searching for these specific products. Hence, your ad copy and your ad groups should be aligned based on this type of user-search structure.

#3-Revise and Test Ad Creative

Now that your ad groups are aligned and organized, you need to make sure your copy is proving to be compelling and effective.  Persuasive and targeted copy is the most optimal way to get good click-through rates.

Take a look at all of your text ads now and analyze the current data.  Find your lowest performers by click-through-rate in your top Ad Groups (by spend).  Delete any non or poor performers and start to integrate and test copy that is stronger and even more persuasive.  Continue this exercise to weed out the under performers and gain higher Quality Scores.

#4-Eliminate Bad Keywords

Get rid of low performers. 

Take a look at the overall distribution of your Quality Score in your account.  If you see overall good performance, you don’t need a major overhaul.  However, this is all part of the vigilance needed in maintaining or increasing our Quality Score. 

Since your Quality Score also looks at historical click thru rate (CTR) on your keywords, you do need to review and  eliminate keywords and text ads that you see with historical low CTRs. These non-performers pull down your overall average and historical rates, which will impact your QS negatively.

Maintain and eliminate as necessary.

#5-Have an Effective and Relevant Landing Page

Your Landing Page can have a huge negative impact on your Quality Score if it’s not functioning, has irrelevant copy, broken links, etc.  If your Quality Score has been driven down, make sure to watch for the issues below and fix asap.  Because Google doesn’t look at landing pages as frequently, be patient, your improvements to your landing page will be soon be realized in a higher Quality Score.

-Pop-ups

-Landing pages that are “bait and switch” offers or that have very little to do with the ad or search query

-Very slow loading pages

Below are the factors you should have on your landing page to ensure a high Quality Score.

- Set up landing pages in Silo Structure

- Content MUST be relevant

- Have at least 5 pages of content

- Have a sitemap on your page: www.xml-sitemaps.com

And finally, include your business pages: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy,  Contact Us,  About Us

Digispace Solutions, is an online performance-based advertising and technology company focused on providing proprietary web technologies to power online advertising strategies and solutions.

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PPC Advertising Practices

by admin on July 15, 2010

Creating Ad Groups for Online Advertising

For those who run pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns, much has been written about the importance of ad group organization and calibration based on your PPC campaign targets.

To do this, you must first understand the goals and objectives of ad groups as explained and simplified here in a snapshot from the latest Pay Per Click Insider Tips article:

The Goal of Ad Groups

• To perfectly align questions (search queries) with answers (text ads)

• Every query that comes into an ad group should smack straight into some ad copy that directly and perfectly addresses its topics, issues, intent, and desires.

• It not good enough for all the keywords in an ad group to be similar or narrowly focused or contextually similar or anything else.

• If the people whose queries come into a group don’t see text ads that satisfy them, the ad group is a failure.

Now that you understand the goals of Ad Groups within your PPC Advertising Campaigns, it is imperative to understand that reorganizing and shifting things around within the groups is just as important.  Optimizing keyword groups is essential to consistently improve your quality score; which leads to cheaper costs per click and a higher ad position.

Targeting keywords that have an acceptable level of traffic and competition, (something you can effectively compete with) will help you rise up in the rankings as well as begin to tell you a story about the effectiveness of your current ad group strategy – - you will begin to see what works and what does not.

Using PPC Management Software to Achieve Measurable Results

Digispace Solutions created The Magic Bullet System as an all inclusive campaign management system which is an unparalleled optimization system for media buying.

The Magic Bullet System’s Ad Tracker module will help you track keywords, tell you how many days in a row a PPC ad has been seen, provide data on the competition’s keywords, and show which campaigns are profitable based on the categories you are targeting.

Keywords need to be tested and changed often. Utilizing a campaign management system, that pulls and monitors your ad groups is pertinent to achieving results and profits. With The Magic Bullet System, keyword optimization is an automated breeze enabling you to  focus on other aspects of your business while The Magic Bullet System does the rest.

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Killer Headlines For Online Advertising – - How To Create Them

by DigiMarketing on April 15, 2010

You don’t have to be a copywriter to create ads that work, but it’s crucial to understand what works and the methodology behind it all.

Let’s start with what headlines should do at minimum:

 -Grab Your Attention

 -Filtering the audience (speaks to your target market)

 -Generate Curiosity

 -Promise Benefits

 -Create an emotional attachment

 -Compel the reader to read more!

Essentially, your headline is like a first impression, but there are many other factors that convince prospects to keep reading….your headline needs to draw the user in and the rest of your copy should lead them the rest of the way…all the way to conversion.

 Here’s a great list of tips from Bob Bly’s, The Copywriter’s Handbook:

  • Direct Headlines go straight to the heart of the matter, without any attempt at cleverness. Bly gives the example of Pure Silk Blouses – 30 Percent Off as a headline that states the selling proposition directly. A direct blog post title might read Free SEO E-book.
  • An Indirect Headline takes a more subtle approach. It uses curiosity to raise a question in the reader’s mind, which the body copy answers. Often a double meaning is utilized, which is useful online. An article might have the headline Fresh Bait Works Best and yet have nothing to do with fishing, because it’s actually about writing timely content that acts as link bait.
  • A News Headline is pretty self-explanatory, as long as the news itself is actually, well… news. A product announcement, an improved version, or even a content scoop can be the basis of a compelling news headline. Think Introducing Flickr 2.0 or My Exclusive Interview With Steve Jobs.
  • The How to Headline is everywhere, online and off, for one reason only – it works like a charm. Bly says that “Many advertising writers claim if you begin with the words how to, you can’t write a bad headline.” An example would be, umm… oh yes… the title of this post.
  • A Question Headline must do more than simply ask a question, it must be a question that, according to Bly, the reader can empathize with or would like to see answered. He gives this example from Psychology Today: Do You Close the Bathroom Door Even When You’re the Only One Home? Another example used way too much in Internet marketing guru-ville is Who Else Wants to Get Rich Online?
  • The Command Headline boldly tells the prospect what he needs to do, such as Exxon’s old Put a Tiger in Your Tank campaign. Bly indicates that the first word should be a strong verb demanding action, such as Subscribe to Quick Fat Loss Secrets Today!
  • Another effective technique is called the Reason Why Headline. Your body text consists of a numbered list of product features or tips, which you then incorporate into the headline, such as Two Hundred Reasons Why Open Source Software Beats Microsoft. It’s not even necessary to include the words “reasons why.” This technique is actually the underlying strategy behind the ubiquitous blogger “list” posts, such as 8 Ways to Build Blog Traffic.
  • Finally, we have the Testimonial Headline, which is highly effective because it presents outside proof that you offer great value. This entails taking what someone else has said about you, your product or service, and using their actual words in your headline. Quotation marks let the reader know that they are reading a testimonial, which will continue in the body copy.

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