7 Areas Where Your PPC Account Is Leaking Money and How to Plug the Leaks
Did you know that small businesses can easily waste as much as 25% of their PPC (pay-per-click) budgets? That’s an awful lot of money being flushed away with nothing to show for it.
The good news is you don’t have to sit, bleary-eyed in front of your computer trying to micromanage every single keyword or bid. By paying attention to these seven leaky holes and taking some proactive steps in managing your PPC account and its features, you can trim a lot of the waste.
PPC Campaign Management: Why the Process Is Just as Important as the Goal
When you’re cooking dinner and everything is simmering away perfectly, do you walk away and leave it to cook indefinitely, or do you check on it periodically, to make sure nothing is boiling over, sticking to the bottom of the pot, or charring and burning?
It’s common sense to regularly check, stir, turn temperatures up or down, and so on—even when everything is cooking exactly as it’s supposed to.
Are You Focused on the Most Important PPC Metric?
So, how’s your PPC campaign going?
How do you know?
What metrics are you using to gauge your campaign’s success?
There’s certainly no shortage of PPC metrics you can look at to try to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. But what’s the MOST important metric to look at?
How to Create an Effective Negative Keyword List for AdWords
If you’re managing an AdWords PPC campaign, you need to be familiar with negative keywords and the benefit they provide.
So what exactly are they?
An Introduction to Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are keywords you add to a campaign in order to exclude those words from the campaign.
Here’s how it works.
What Google’s NEW Exact and Phrase Match Variations Really Mean for Advertisers
A few weeks ago, Google AdWords announced that they would be removing advertisers' ability to exclude close variants from phrase and exact match keywords.
This changed sparked much confusion and controversy in the industry, and I’d like to help clear up some of the mess. However, before we can look at how Google’s latest change will affect advertisers, we need to really understand the basics of close variants.
Should You Bid on Your Own Brand Terms in AdWords?
This is a question that comes up a lot with new AdWords managers or business owners who are doing PPC for the first time.
“Should I bid on my own brand terms in AdWords?”
The rationale for not bidding on your own brand terms goes something like this: Most companies already rank #1 in Google for their own brand. With that in mind, should they “waste” any of their precious ad budget on brand terms they already rank #1 for?
5 Steps to Driving Massive Traffic with Long-Tail Content
A few weeks ago we conducted an in-depth interview with Richard Jacobs of Speak Easy Marketing, Inc. The short version is that Richard successfully used long-tail content to generate 400,000+ organic searches in a single year for one of the most competitive industries—law.
Anyone who has dabbled in keyword research knows that legal terms are some of the most expensive and competitive keywords out there, and getting even a fraction of the traffic is both expensive and a huge accomplishment.
PPC Moneyball Style: How to Get a Bigger Return with a Small Budget
Here’s the challenge: You’re faced with managing a relatively small PPC budget in Google AdWords. It's no easy task since you want to ensure visibility on competitive keywords while trying not to exhaust your click budget too quickly.
A recent study by Wordstream proves this challenge for small businesses and reveals that SMBs tend to waste approximately 25% of their already small monthly PPC budget.
How to Use the AdWords Search Terms Report to Lower Cost Per Acquisition
AdWords is all about getting the best results.
The goal is to raise click through rates (CTR), lower cost per click (CPC), and decrease cost per acquisition (CPA), all while getting enough impressions, clicks, and conversions to stay in business.
One way to do this is to weed out terms that aren’t performing because nobody wants to bid on a phrase that isn’t converting, even if it does have a high CTR and low CPC.
New AdWords Feature: Increase Keyword Profit with FREE Call Conversion Tracking
With mobile usage growing in popularity, more and more conversions happen over the phone versus online. A quiet announcement last week by Google to offer FREE website call conversion tracking is something all PPC managers and agencies should utilize. This post will explain why this is important and how to set it up to drive more keyword profit.