After everything is setup and running possibly the most important step is reviewing all keywords every 2 weeks to a month to see how things are going and make potential corrections.  In this step it is important to have a quality ad tracker to ensure reliable data in order to make educated decisions.

The frequency of checking your ad tracker depends on how many clicks are being made, the more clicks and conversions that are recorded the more reliable the information.  It is important to not make immediate decisions but to wait until you have sufficient information.  A bad example would be after your first conversion comes through to assume that the keyword that generated the actual sale is the only good keyword when in reality it could have been luck.  Make sure you have enough data to make an educated decision.

After logging into your ad tracker it is time to go ahead and analyze the data to see which keywords are successful and which keywords are not.  The common error at this point is to look at clicks and not conversions.  Clicks are not the definition of success if a keyword receives 1000’s of clicks and no conversions it is not a good keyword by any means.  After looking at the profit or loss indicator from your PPC tracking tool you will know which how to change your bids.  Profitable keywords need to remain profitable or become more profitable.  If the profit margin on every click is high you may want to consider increasing your bid.  For example if you are making $2 on every click and you are only paying .50 you may want to consider increasing your bid to $1 per click to receive more traffic and more profit.

If a keyword is making money do one of the following

• Keep the current bid
• Increase the bid – if the profit margin is high
• Decrease your bid – if profit margin is very low.

The last series is extremely important and often overlooked which has undoubtedly led to PPC failure; we will talk about the last issue what to do if your keywords are loosing money!

Related Articles:

• Dominating PPC 101 – increase conversions (part 6 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – PPC Setup (part 3 of 8 series)

Next is the landing page selected, a major error is always selecting your home page as the landing page.  The user does not always want to see your home page another page on your website is likely to produce a higher conversion rate.  A good example is tennis shoes if you send all users to your home page which is in fact about everything that is about tennis equipment you will likely have a lower conversion rate than if you sent that same user to your page on tennis shoes.  It is also a good idea to try split-testing in order to know exactly which landing page is best.

This is the step that you will want to implement a great ad tracker tool to start collecting as much data as you can that will mean life or death to your PPC campaign.

When writing an ad it is important to have in mind if you are writing the ad to get a higher number of clicks or a higher conversion rate.  If clicks are your goal you will use everything possible to attract the searcher to click on your ad which will include discounts, bolding text and describing everything that they would want to hear.  This will result in a large number of clicks which will rank you higher for a cheaper price (because of how PPC advertising works).  However, the conversion percentage will be much lower because people who are not interested in your advertisements will be clicking on them anyway.

The other option is to focus on conversion; this includes writing the price of your product in your product description so you know that they are potential buyers.  Using words such as buy, get and purchase in your ads.  This will result in a lower number of clicks and a higher cost per click however the clicks that you will receive will have a higher conversion rate.

In our next series we will talk about the importance of using an ad tracking tool to optimize all campaigns and get the best bang for your buck.  This is potentially the most important series to making money with PPC advertising.

Related Articles:

• Dominating PPC 101 – ad tracking (part 7 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – PPC Setup (part 3 of 8 series)

The first step to getting your PPC campaigns setup is to actually setup a budget.  It is important to setup a good size budget with each of the big 3 search engines.  It is also important to note that your budget is a maximum so when the budget is reached all advertising will be halted so it is far better to have as big budget.  In the ideal situation your budget would never be reached because if it is reached that means your ads are offline, possible quality clicks are unavailable and people searching for your website will be unable to find it.

Next you have the opportunity to set bidding options meaning automatic or manual.  Most of the time you will want to select manual because you will be changing your bids later.  Automatic will run with the goal of getting the most clicks possible where as manual you will be able to control with the goal of getting the most sales possible.  Automatic is generally for someone that is interested in setting it up and never optimizing their campaign again.  Note – most automatic PPC bidders don’t make money.

After setting up your campaign it is time to add all keywords into your campaigns start with the first ad group and add the keywords for that ad group and keep doing so until you have added all ad groups.  Having more ad groups is better than having less because each ad group will have its own set of advertisements.  Match type is extremely important and there is a lot of information to know about it so we have dedicated the next series completely to match types.

Match type is extremely important and this next series is defiantly worth your time reading if correctly understood you will prevent future money loss and PPC failure..

Related Articles:

• Dominating PPC 101 – ad tracking (part 7 of 8 series)
• Dominating PPC 101 – increase conversions (part 6 of 8 series)