Five Tips To Organise Your PPC Account For better Optimization

Source : PPC Hero

In this post I’d like to go over five best practices for keeping your PPC accounts organized for optimal performance

1. Create an outline before you begin to re-organize your account or before you start a new account.If you don’t have a clear idea of how you want to organize your account you could waste a lot of time setting up campaigns and ad groups, then come to realize that’s not how they should be set up. I’ve included this tip in this post because it is one problem I have encountered in the past, and having a clear direction or outline before I get started really helps.
2. Keep your keywords to a maximum of 10 - 20 for each ad group.There is much talk in the forums about how many keywords one should have in each ad group. Some say 2 or 3, while others say 50. The best practice here is to limit the number of keywords in each ad group so that you’re targeting your customers with ads that display exactly what the customer is typing in as their search query.
3. Keep your Higher Converting Keywords together.Google reps. suggest one way to optimize your account is to keep your highest converting keywords together, and move all under performing keywords into their own ad groups. A lot of people start out their account with a keyword dump into each ad group. A keyword dump is basically adding every version of a keyword that not only you can think of, but what the keyword tools offer as well. Then, once a few weeks have passed, you can then determine which keyowords peform best, keep them in that ad group, and move all the others. This will help your click-through rate in the ad group overall, as well as your quality score.
4. Separate your Content Network Keywords from Your Sponsored Search. The content network audience is a completely different audience from search. Adwords takes all your keywords in an ad group, and comes up with one over arching theme. That theme then triggers your ads to display according to a like-themed website. The best thing to do is turn off the content network in your sponsored search ad groups. Create a new ad group just for the content network and make sure each keyword group is based on one theme. Your keywords in the content network ad group should be more general to help ad sense advertisers recognize your theme. Don’t just copy your keywords from your sponsored search ad group and paste them into a different ad group with only content network on.
5. Organize your account based on customer buying patterns. One way of organizing your account is to base your campaigns and ad groups off customer buying patterns. People who begin their search online looking for a new keyboard will start with the most general of terms by nature. For example,” keyboards.” As their search continues, they realize what they really want is a wireless keyboard. So their next move is to look for a ‘wireless keyboard’. The longer they continue to do their research online, the more long-tail and specific their keywords get. For example, one could start with, keyboards > wireless keyboards > Dell wireless keyboard > T490 Dell wireless keyboard. Your most general terms will get the most traffic, but those people are more than likely just beginning their research. Bid lower on general keywords. As their search terms get more long tail and specific, you can begin to bid higher. Organize your campaigns/ad groups into these different buying patterns.

Long Tail And Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords

by Star Smith

If you want to get any kind of traffic to your website or blog, you must use keyword phrases in your content.

Is this the only way to get traffic?

No, but it’s the best free way to attract visitors to your site.

Using a free or paid keyword tool, you will type in the word you want to target and see what results come up. Usually you’ll get a long list of keyword phrases that you can use for your content. At first glance this list looks great, but are all these phrases really going to produce the results you want?

No.

The next step in your keyword research education is learning about Long Tail Keywords and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are two additional elements to keyword research that you must know in order to get the maximum results from your efforts. This knowledge alone can put you miles above your less informed competition.

Long Tail Keywords

While doing your online marketing research, you will often come across discussions about long tail keywords. Okay, so what are they?

Long tail means, not so popular or low hanging fruit. Basically some keyword phrases are more popular than others. The more popular phrases naturally produce the most searches, and therefore, the potential for bigger traffic numbers. However, because of their popularity, every Tom, Joe and Mary will be using them in their content.

This means that the competition to rank well in the search engines for the most popular keyword phrases will be pretty stiff. So, what’s an eager internet marketer to do?

Go for the low hanging fruit, of course. Yeah, this means you’ll be giving up huge chunks of potential traffic, but your odds of ranking in the top 20 for those phrases are pretty slim to begin with so, why not give yourself a better advantage?

You can dramatically increase your chances of ranking in the top 20 results by using long tail keywords.

Here’s how to look for these gems:

Lets use the keyword – mortgage.

You go to your keyword tool and type in – mortgage. You get the following results:

Mortgage rates = 9617 searches per day
Home mortgage – 1798 searches per day
Mortgage how much can I borrow = 298 searches per day
How low can 30 year fixed mortgage interest rates go = 19 searches per day

Okay, here’s how you’re going to analyze your results and quickly decide whether or not these keyword phrases are good choices.

Go to Google and do a search for each of the above keyword phrases – make sure you put them in quotation marks i.e. “mortgage rates”.

By using quotation marks, you’ll get an accurate picture of how many sites are using those exact same keyword phrases. The fewer sites using these phrases, the better your chances of ranking in the top tier of search engine results.

Here’s the results of our Google search:

“Mortgage rates” = 51,300,000 competing pages
“Home mortgage” = 43,300,000 competing pages
“Mortgage how much can I borrow” = 16,500 competing pages
“How low can 30 year fixed mortgage interest rates go” = 0 competing pages

Mortgage Rates and Home Mortgage gets thousands of searches per day, but look at your competition. Wow. There’s just no way you are going to rank well for those two phrases. The best thing to do is forget about them. Move on down the line to find some low hanging fruit.

Ideally, you want to find phrases that have under 50,000 competing pages.

Mortgage how much can I borrow has 298 searches per day and only 16,500 competing pages.

How low can 30 year fixed mortgage interest rates go has 19 searches per day and zero competing pages.

If your niche is mortgage and you put these two excellent phrases on your site, you will be in prime position to rank well. You may get less traffic for these, but these people are just as hungry for information as all those bigger traffic people. Using long tail keywords can result in getting highly targeted traffic to your site.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords

LSI is something that is fairly new on the scene. Google and other search engines are now taking LSI into account when ranking web pages, so this is something you need to know about.

LSI is basically a set of related keywords that are sprinkled throughout your web page content, or article, in a completely natural way. These words tell the search engines that your content has a high relevancy value to people looking for certain information.

Kwbrows.com is a good free tool that can help you find LSI keywords.

Let’s find some LSI keywords for – mortgage.

Here are the results:

FHA, mortgage loan, second mortgage, mortgage broker, mortgages, interest, calculator, bank.

Using these words throughout your content, in addition to regular keywords, can result in higher search engine rankings for your website pages.

Online marketing Startegy-That WORKS

HI All,
In my previous posts I gave you an Introduction to most of the important Internet marketing tools, like search engine optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing, pay per click (PPC) campaigns, broader view of SEM.

In my future post I will give more focus on inside of all these internet marketing tools but before that I would like to draw your attention towards one of the mot important issue or concern faced by most of the advertisers that is low conversions.

There can be ‘n’ number of reasons of low conversion rate like irrelevant keywords targeting, bad creation of ad copies, poor message on landing page etc. etc.

But in my view all the online marketing consultants or service providing companies already have knowledge about all these issues so they work good on that but the place where they miss is something related to marketing and online activities.

Generally people take marketing and online marketing as two different domains but in fact no online marketing strategy can work until it is well merged with all the marketing and sales activities of the company or say business objectives of the company.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising, Email Marketing, and Social Media Marketing are all critical components of online marketing, but they produce tangible results only when used within a well-designed framework of sound online marketing Strategy with clear business objectives.

Do you know why a large number of PPC initiatives fail today? Because of the disconnect between Online Marketing and Marketing: the online marketing team and the marketing team works separately.

Marketing > Business Strategy > Marketing Activities

Online Marketing > Promotion > SEO > SEM

But in real sense Online Marketing as an integral part of our customer’s core marketing strategy.

Business Strategy > Marketing > Promotion > SEO > SEM

So for having a great online marketing campaign any online marketer should align all his/her marketing activities with online marketing, and then look out your self how your online marketing changes his face.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites, such as blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advertisement to visit the advertisers' website. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When a user types a keyword query matching an advertiser's keyword list, or views a webpage with relevant content, the advertisements may be displayed. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above the "natural" or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster or blogger chooses on a content page. Content websites commonly charge a fixed price for a click rather than use a bidding mechanism.
Although many PPC providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Minimum prices per click, often referred to as costs per click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword list—with some CPCs as low as US$0.01. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular search engines. The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt webmasters.
CategoriesPay per click campaigns can be categorized into two major categories: sponsored match (or keyword) and content match. Sponsored match campaigns involve the display of advertisements on search engine results pages, whereas content match campaigns involve the display of advertisements on publisher websites, newsletters, and e-mails.
There are other types of pay per click programs that target product or service searches and product comparison sites. Search engine companies may participate in more than one category. PPC programs do not generate any revenue solely from Web traffic for websites that display the advertisements: Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the advertisement itself.
Keyword-based PPCKeyword-based pay per click advertisers bid on search terms—keywords consisting of words or phrases, and possibly product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular keyword, the list of advertiser links appears, where the ordering of those links is based on the amount bid for the given keyword. Keywords are the very heart of PPC advertising, and are guarded as highly-valued trade secrets by the advertisers. Many advertising firms offer software or services to help advertisers develop keyword strategies. Content Match, a service offered by Yahoo!, distributes the keyword ad to the search engine's partner sites and/or publishers that have distribution agreements with the search engine company.
As of 2008, the following are notable PPC keyword search engines:

• Ask.com
• Baidu
• Google AdWords
• LookSmart
• Microsoft adCenter
• MIVA
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Yandex

Product engines
Product engines (a.k.a. product comparison engines or price comparison engines) are search engines for products, and let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases. When a user searches for a product, links to advertisers are displayed for that particular product. More prominence is given to advertisers who pay more; however, the user can typically sort by price.
Some product engines such as Shopping.com use a pay per click model and have a defined rate card. Other engines such as Google Product Search, part of Google Base (previously known as Froogle), do not charge for the listing, but still require an active product feed to function.
The following are notable PPC product engines:

• NexTag
• PriceGrabber
• Shopping.com
• Shopzilla

Service Engines
Service engines allow advertisers to provide feeds of their service databases. When a user searches for a service, links to advertisers are displayed for that particular service. More prominence is given to advertisers who pay more; however, the user can typically sort by price or other criteria. Some pay per click product engines have expanded into the service space, while other service engines operate in specific vertical markets.
The following are notable PPC service engines:

• NexTag
• SideStep
• TripAdvisor

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

Origin
The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.
The consensus of marketers and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program. During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing. CDNOW had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors may be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNOW to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNOW if it could design a program where CDNOW would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNOW could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.
Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.
When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely-known and serve as a model for subsequent programs.

In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others.

Historic development
Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.
Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors. Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix.

Viral Marketing

The main vital aspect of this recent marketing technique which every business man should be aware of is that it is totally free. Viral marketing can return thousands of clients on a business website when it is implemented with right idea, way and planning.

Viral Marketing through social networking websites
Social networking website is defined as networks of people and friends, who use internet to communicate, socialise and share information with each other through one website. Popular websites in this nature are myspace, faceboob, bebo and others. Such website is utilized through viral marketing sources. In this concept the people are offered incentives to provide marketing material. This incentive prove to be usually interesting, entertaining, generally not related to the business involved.

Effective messageing through video

Although viral marketing may seem as ineffective but when this system followed in these networking. websites. This technique becomes effective here. When a business finds a video which could become popular, if this video is interesting, entertaining it will force viewers to pass it on to their friends to share it. By adding your website link or marketing message in to that video as footer, adding your burl to the video description, your business details are being passed whenever the video is sent. This is what makes viral marketing on social networking websites so powerful for any businesses of any size.

Also put emphasis on content

The other important concept for successful viral marketing is that do not cover the entire media with your material. The media, journalists and the members of public will value your contribution much more if every one of them has strong content and a good angle. If your content is not worthwhile, distributing viral releases or PR as much as you can will result in people devaluing your presence.

Make an effective profile

Websites like Myspace offers profiles that can be used to some extent. Making a profile for your business allows you to add people all over the world as friends, they can see your profile and you can deliver any marketing message you choose to present. To make effective use of this method an interesting unique angle is required. It is good to make an interesting, make believe characters as the profile owner and Offer attention grabbing incentives to visit your website.

Benefits of viral marketing

The great benefit of viral marketing on our social networks and anywhere also is that it is 100 percent free and provides good results. Good marketing agencies also need public relations and marketing knowledge to get the right angler for your material. This will result in more publicity. So if the budget permits it is highly recommended to look into viral marketing when a person chooses management for their viral campaigns.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad term encompassing all forms of marketing through search engines. SEM accounted for approximately 7 percent of the total ads spend in the US and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20percent till 2010. Google, Yahoo and MSN collectively represent approximately 80 percent of the search engine advertising market.

Evolution of SEO

With the evolution of Internet, the earliest search engines started to appear around early 1990s. The searchalgorithms used during these early days were primitive and thus did little or no link analysis to rate the relevancy ofthe pages retrieved. Examples of these engines were JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. The problem with these was that they listed results in the order that theywere found and provided no discrimination based on the quality and relevancy of the results.

By the year 1996, site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites ranked higher in search engine results. This paved the platform for the advent of keyword based search engine optimization.

Initially, search engines were supplied with information about the pages by the webmasters themselves. Initial versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information, such as keyword meta-tags, which providedan indication about the contents of each page. But indexing pages based upon meta-tag data were found to be lessreliable, because sometimes meta-tags included irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for thewebsites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta-data in meta-tags caused pages to show up for irrelevantsearches, and failed to appear for relevant searches. Search engines responded by developing more complex algorithms, taking into account various additional factors as well. Examples of these included the PageRank algorithm developed by Google, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links found2. Thesearch results now retrieved are better than the earlier search results as the new results are ranked in order of relevancy and frequency of the appearances of the searched keywords.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a term used to describe a process to increase the value of a particular website and its respective recognition by the search engines. The end objective is to generate more qualified traffic through natural search results.Web pages especially created with SEO in mind have a strong focus on content as well as a structure that is favorable to search engine algorithms. To the human visitors, the website should look be easy to read and address their needs, ideally particular to their search inquiry. Effective SEO efforts focus on terminology being used by targetsegments to describe needs, problems or solutions. However, the website must be structured on making it convenient for search engine programs to index the site’s content. This involves changes such as optimizing a site’s presentation or structure, which are not noticeable to human visitors.