Hints To Help Manage Your PPC
Kirt Christensen
Some places are synonymous with certain businesses. Look at this, say you have a casino, you could get added cheap traffic by making a bid for "Niagara Falls" not just a bid on "Casino."
For local businesses, take whatever keywords apply to your business and then add your state and as many close-by cities as possible. For example, a Cincinnati IT firm might use this list, which includes suburb names and deliberate misspellings of "Cincinnati":
Ohio computer consultant
Cincinnati computer consultant
Cincinati computer consultant
Cincinatti computer consultant
Tri-state computer consultant
Tri state computer consultant
Eaton computer consultant
Jamestown computer consultant
Miamisburg computer consultant
Sidney computer consultant
Troy computer consultant
Milford computer consultant
Loveland computer consultant
Use a mapping site to compile a list of nearby cities and paste that into an Excel spread-sheet. Using term like 'computer consultant', 'IT company', 'IT consultant' you can mix and match it with the cities and towns for a great addition to your keyword list.
The passkey to untapped markets is to have loads of keywords. You will also find lowered bid prices, better CTR, and a successfully managed pay-per-click. The effort will pay off.
Would you like to increase your keywords by 3x and also get to bid on keyword terms that your competition has overlooked? Here is how:
There is more inside quotes and brackets than words. The tool AdWord Acceleration (www.AdWordAcceleration.com/by Stephen Juth will help with the identification of the variants that cost you less and have less competition fighting for them.
While struggling through the daunting and frequently tiresome task of selecting a comprehensive keyword list, you may miss one or two singulars and plurals and leave out synonyms of your niche phrases.
There is an additional feature that Google provides that can help you with that difficulty, Expanded Phrase Matching adds singulars, plurals, similar phrases, and relevant synonyms where they may be lacking in your keyword list.
You'll need to be careful here, however. This service will work for broad-matched keywords in your list, but it won't work for phrase matches or exact matches.
Broad-Matched Keywords
When you insert keywords at the time you're setting up your campaigns, these are the keywords that don't have any delimiters around them. For example:
used cars
Japanese used cars
used cars for sale
Caution is also warranted at this point. If you do not use negative keyword phrases on "used cars" you will end up with your ad showing for these search phrases also:
used cars
german used cars
used cars cleveland
used police cars
It may even show your ad for this wonky search:
cars used in filming dukes of hazzard
Phrase Matches
These keywords are placed with quotes around them. For example:
"used cars"
"Japanese used cars"
"used cars for sale"
These will make your ad show in searches that include these terms in this order, without extra words inserted, such as the following:
used cars
old Japanese used cars
used cars for sale chicago
But for this search your ad won't be shown:
used police cars
Exact Matches
Place square brackets around your words to make exact matches. Such as:
[used cars]
[Japanese used cars]
[used cars for sale]
With these keywords, only people who typed in these exact phrases, in this order, will see your ad. None of the following keyword searches will show your ad:
used cars chicago
german used cars
old japanese used cars
used cars for sale chicago
used police cars
With negative words included in your keyword, your page impression number will be fewer because your ads will show in a lesser number of searches. That will result in an automatic raising of your click-through-rate. This is the greatest part though: by lowering your page impressions by 20 percent, your click-through-rate actually is raised by 25 percent, not the expected 20 percent. Now check this out:
If you cut unwanted impressions by 30 percent, your CTR will increase by 42 percent.
If you cut unwanted impressions by 40 percent, your CTR will improve by 67 percent.
If you cut unwanted impressions by 50 percent, your CTR will double.
The use of negative keywords can really give your broad/phrase matching keywords a boost, but they won't change anything for your exact match keywords. By managing your pay-per-click well, the use of negatives can make a big difference.
About the Author:
Need to optimize or "fix" your Adwords & PPC campaigns? Kirt Christensen manages over $600k in PPC spending & knows what it takes to make your account hum! When it comes to adwords campaign management, he's the man!
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