PPC Campaign management tutorial

So you have developed your PPC campaign and got together lots of long tail and targeted keywords which are bringing customers with buying intent to your site. You have waited a minimum of 2 weeks to gather some information and statistics on your campaign, now you’re ready to start managing your account.

Now PPC management comes in three sections, CPC (cost per click), CTR/adverts and your ad positioning.

Lets start with Click Through Rate and adverts as these two are very closely related Now Click through rate is extremely important for many reasons, as you will see in your AdWords account you will have a CTR for each of your keywords/phrases. Now Google wants you to have a minimum of a 1% CTR, however I suggest that you have a 2% CTR, there are a few reasons for this number one it is good for your site in that a high click through rate means a good relevancy to the keywords you chose. It also means that you CPC will be lower, as Google basically uses the formula position = CTR x CPC so if you have a high CTR you need a lower CTR to maintain the same position.

What does it mean though if my click through rate is less than 1-2%? Well it means that your advert does not speak to the targeted customer it doesn’t "call them to click", and at the end of the day that’s the point of an advert to call your targeted audience to act.

Now this is called split testing seeing which keywords are performing well and badly, deleting those that are performing under 1% and replacing them with another advert.

For example; say you have a B&B/guest house in Yorkshire you have created your campaign and 400 keywords, now you have waited some time and have the stats to work from. You developed this general ad for the keywords

"B&B in Yorkshire
A lovely warm B&B in Yorkshire a perfect getaway for all"

After checking your account you see this ad is working great i.e. 2-3% CTR when people search
B&B's in Yorkshire
bed and breakfast in Yorkshire
nice b&b Yorkshire
etc

However you see that it is performing under the threshold less that 1% CTR for phrases like:
Guest House in Yorkshire
Yorkshire’s guest house
nice guest house Yorkshire
etc

Now why? Well the bottom line is that you are not calling the customer to act because you are not speaking to them, so you think about this and you change your ad to this

"Luxurious Guest House
A beautiful and decadent Guest house located in the heart of Yorkshire, perfect for a wonderful break"

Now after some time you check those stats again and WOW! Your CTR is now at 3.5%! well done you are now talking to your customers you are concentrating on their search phrases and creating adverts to match their mindsets, your CTR should improve!

Now let’s move onto position. Position is important in a few respects and should always be evaluated in conjunction with cost, as there is no point in keeping a keyword which has an average position 4 onwards and is costing you a substantial amount, unless it is driving massive amounts of traffic to your site. Otherwise delete it!

The bottom line is that you are trying to get in position 1-3, there is actually some evidence that position 2 is the optimal position, however it is still not yet confirmed, so any of the top three positions is great. This is mainly due to the positioning on the page, only the top three sponsored links are displayed at the top of the page the next ones are displayed on the side of the page (See image) and the organic results dominate the space below the sponsored links.

This is a basic overview of PPC campaign management and AdWords regularly change things if you are running a campaign try to stay on top of these changes. Finally I will say there is a specific advanced feature called conversion tracking see here for more details, however at a basic level, if you have a landing page and then a separate page which you guide people two which is considered a call to action or conversion then you can use this feature to see how your CTR relates to conversions and hence profit per click, a very powerful analysis tool.

I hope this article helps; there are plenty of good books out there which will help you develop your AdWords PPC skills, just check out some of the books listed.

• Search Engine Optimization - How important?
• Coverting A Website To A Site Which Converts
• Pay per click - Google sponsored Links
• Letting Agents Web design
• Creating A Good AdWords PPC Advert
• Adwords Conversion Tracking