Let me elaborate on some of the finer aspects of conceptualizing and implementing a campaign:

1. First and foremost, know the target actions users are supposed to take on the site and worth of each action to the business. In effect, decide a specific goal that your PPC campaign should fulfill. This lets you develop it in a manner useful to the business in order to produce measurable results.
2. Now comes the stage of defining your audience! This is important to work out the strategy behind your campaign. Before you develop your keyword lists, know the audience you are targeting, their geographical and social profile, the utility value of a product or service, and the mindset of your customers.
3. More granular keyword research allows you to strike a chord with potential users through target ads, optimized landing pages, and other campaign elements so that they appeal to your target audience.
4. The Google Keyword Tool helps you identify pick relevant domain-specific terms to target, keeping your audience in mind. You can use it to develop keyword lists. Putting yourself in place of your users, you may think of search terms that you would use to look for a product or service online. Group them into logical bundles or specific ad groups, with each having its own theme, topic, based on the users’ needs.
5. List down negative keywords to isolate, and also block irrelevant keywords’ combinations. A thorough list of negative key terms will reduce wasted clicks, improve clickthrough rate, and help cut campaign costs.
6. After identifying relevant lists of keywords, structure your campaign aimed at to your target audience, woven logically around these themes. Use about five-ten keywords at a time.
7. Split the keyword list up into precise ad groups, and devise the campaign structure. The number of ad groups will depend on the complexity and diversity of your business offerings and audiences for them.
8. Once a campaign structure with relevant keywords in each ad group is finalized, develop ads suited to those set of keywords as well as to the landing pages.
9. Each theme or offering should have its own USP that you need to highlight to prospects. Your copy must contain a value proposition for each ad group and target page on your site.
10. Try out different versions and formats to emphasize the user-friendly nature of your products and services within the characters of ad space permitted. To start with, pen two ads at least, for each ad group, to test different propositions, and the manner in which people react to each message so as to refine your PPC campaign.

As we have grasped in the previous post, a few things to keep in mind while setting up your PPC campaign are ethical, tested and proven methods; Customized strategy to meet specific goals and benchmarks; an awareness of competition landscape; Sticking to core, converting keywords and ad variations. Here is further checklist for a successful PPC campaign”

Set the right budget for each day. Do not set it too low, and at the same time, do not set your daily budget at a level that you are not comfortable managing. If you can afford to spend $1,500 per month on PPC, don’t set the daily budget to say $400, or you may blow through the whole amount in 3-4 days!

Ideally, search and display campaigns shouldn’t be lumped together. In case you wish to use Display, it makes sense to set up a separate campaign for the purpose so you can well optimize accordingly.

Employ Google Analytics, Adwords and adCenter free conversion-tracking tool, Omniture etc to monitor conversions in your campaign. All your spending will efforts will come to naught, until you track the outcome, analyze it and make requisite modifications. Before you launch a campaign, first have in order all your tracking codes.

If you witness fierce bidding on some of your preferred keywords making it unviable, do not get into a bidding war. Instead look for effective key terms that might have been overlooked to help you stand apart in the most crowded PPC market. Be original and innovative instead of following the herd in your bidding. It is advisable to focus on tangible rise in CTR, quality scores and improved conversion rates that can have a positive impact on your campaign’s performance.

Age and gender form crux of demographic targeting. Work around your specific demographic class to enhance the perceived relevance of your offerings. Define the fine line between ‘cheap’ and ‘value for money’ in your quest to write a ‘populist’ copy. Write a description that suits the prestige level of your brand product. Just as you look to target a number of key phrases, vary the ad copy accordingly. A mix of different ad texts let you know what exactly works for any given bid term.

With elaborate A/B and MANOVA tests, you can tweak certain variables in the ad copy of your landing pages. Quantifiable results help you make more appropriate campaign changes. Website Optimiser allows you to measure each small change in order to improve overall performance. Make sure that you make relevant landing pages to well support your ads. You can then define funnels, which turn visitors into customers, boosting conversions.

Essential ingredients of a well-structured PPC campaign are:

• Advanced pay-per-click strategies
• Proper testing methods
• Detailed keyword performance analysis
• In-depth web analytic reports

Other aspects to keep in mind are as follows:

Ethical, tested and proven methods

A PPC campaign management service that you hire should stick to ethical, tested and proven methods to achieve best possible results. A holistic program creates optimal value and maximizes ROI for your PPC accounts through strategy formulation, precise campaign management and regular reporting.

Customized strategy to meet specific goals and benchmarks

An elaborate consumer and keyword behavior research needs to be conducted during the initial stage as a launch pad for specific strategies suitable to your PPC campaign. Experts are supposed to work in close coordination with you, keeping in mind your short term and long term goals. These are achieved by sticking to specific benchmarks for each key element of your PPC campaign.

An awareness of competition landscape

Competition analysis and keyword research are equally vital aspects of your campaign. A proper understanding of the prevailing competition landscape is necessary to define end objectives. An optimal campaign structure makes it easier to implement advanced bid strategies, carry test campaigns, and conduct continual keyword research-analysis. Remember, countless other PPC marketers are out there with their own strategies. Find out what your competitors, partners and customers are doing. Accordingly adjust your bids. Monitor your immediate competitors’ bidding on your brand name. Thus you may avoid losing prospects.

Stick to core, converting keywords and ad variations

Start small and gradually scale up. Identify certain target keyword areas. Bid across these. Do not spread your budget too thin. Launch with a restricted campaign and slowly upgrade it to test efficacy of various descriptive terms and competitive keywords to know which work best. Revolve your broader paid search activities around the best performing key terms or ads in your campaign. Know the core of your converting traffic and draw the most out of those particular keywords and ad variations.

Targeting ads is as important as optimizing the ad copy. Know who your prospects are and write with their interests in mind. Being aware of your local customer base matters, so tweak your copy for different geographical markets so that it appeals to users from that particular region in your campaign settings…

1. Measuring and monitoring results by setting up basic conversion tracking is absolutely vital to ensure a long-term success. This helps grasp average conversion rates and projected revenues, and also lets you estimate the performance of keyword bids in future. Test singular and plural forms of your keywords to know which does better. Accordingly, adjust your bids and ad copy.
2. Be methodical in your approach. Make use of a logical campaign naming structure/ organization. Give your bids enough time to deliver. Don’t make hasty changes based on early poor performance. Keep a tab on your campaign and see it’s up to date.
3. Based on your PPC platform, set your budget as maximums, averages or other relevant target figure! If you are reasonably certain of your average customer value as well as target CPA’s, you can decide the optimum budget in order to maximize the gains from your campaign. Be realistic in your expectations.
4. Bidding tools like Conversion Optimiser can help in maximizing a campaign’s performance through bids for quality, efficient converting clicks instead of focusing merely on traffic volume. Set up Google Alerts to track those terms listed alongside your chosen top keywords as well as brand terms. Thus you can block anything irrelevant, not thought of previously, using negative matches.
5. Most PPC platforms provide in-built data reporting. Make it a point to segment paid search traffic in your site’s analytics so as to display the keywords fetching you traffic. You can then easily measure keyword performance, and find converting long-tail keyword variations with the AdWords search query report and likewise, non-converting keywords to insert as negative matches.
6. Go for a clear and compelling message. PPC ads should be brief and simple. Their titles need to be eye-catching and compelling. Highlight your USP like a special offer. The body text should be concise and pertinent to the terms you’re bidding on. Shun clichéd phrases. Focus on precise descriptions. Make each word count.
7. Links matter a great deal. The URL of your ad is most likely to appear in the results. Avoid as far as possible, meaningless numerical page addresses. A keyword-optimized URL (Highlight them in bold) will denote relevancy and fetch more traffic and ultimately business.

The steps above will sure boost your ad revenues. It’s more often than not a trial & error method that will produce a winning campaign combination and will guarantee you a good ROI from your ad campaign.

Each of these can lead to their own irritants within a new PPC campaign, so here are some potential solutions to handle them efficiently.

When you launch a campaign, it may well fail to drive any traffic or you may feel the need for more leads. Usually, the reaction to lower volume than that anticipated is trying to increase budget allocation and/or your bids. Ideally, finding a way to fetch more traffic and/or generate lead volume without increasing your spend is the key. Of course, this is easier said than done.

Given that you’ve time and resource constraints to accomplish this, focus your energies on the following two areas:

1. The first one is expanded targeting. By revisiting your keyword targeting strategy, see if you are able to locate new niches to explore. Identify specific search queries you can build on, or try to leverage other alternate PPC keyword expansion tactics. You can also seek to generate more amount of traffic from your content network campaigns.
2. Other option is to increase CTR. Refine your ad text and ensure better segmentations for turning a greater number of impressions into clicks. Reconsider your landing page optimization if your area of concern is leads and conversions more than traffic.

Another tricky issue in a new campaign, as stated above, is that of higher CPAs than you would want. Sometimes you will generate requisite volume, but your campaigns won’t create cost-effective conversions. Again, increasing your spend is not the right thing to do. There are other alternatives, which can help bring down your AdWords CPA.

1. One approach, especially if you’ve a test budget for a campaign that you are piloting, is to control spending until you have had an opportunity to iterate on the initial campaign structure, ad text and landing pages so that you are not actually spending as much of your allocation on a high CPA.
2. Other option is to analyze match types and relevant search query reports. May be, your match types are leaving your PPC ads exposed to the wrong traffic source. So you perhaps are required to leverage a better negative keyword approach. This well also means matching options such as modified broad match or phrase & exact are preferable.

Increasing CTRs and creating better segmentations can yield good pricing discounts from AdWords. Also, reserve your precious spend for more specific terms, which could mean lowering bids on broader terms and opt for better converting, more specific terms. It could well also mean exercising the same for more granular, new keyword options.

• You need to know the steps that form part of a proper preparation for your experiment, some of which we have already discussed in the previous post. Keep in mind the fact that you need an active AdWords account for using Website Optimizer. You can carry an experiment with it on any site or page you wish, and not just one you direct online traffic to using AdWords.
• The tool can test all traffic sources, and not just those from AdWords campaigns. It is easily possible to test various different versions with the Website Optimizer so as to compare the content quality. Generally, you are required to select a page where site users go through a defined action or the one that suggests tangible business results for you, leading to conversions.
• If your website is comprised of an array of products and you are looking to gauge overall conversion improvements, a ‘Thank You’ page might be used as your conversion page. This will allow you to successfully capture any successful action that your users take.
• On the other hand, if you are keen to test completion of a specific goal, narrow your test focus with a conversion page unique to a product – for instance, only the purchase page for that unique product. Remember, the further the code happens to be from your chosen tested webpage, the more traffic flow you will require.
• Also keep in mind the fact that you can only opt for one conversion page per any given experiment. Not each conversion will actually result in visiting a new or different page. Conversions, at times also mean simply an action like a click of a button on the same page. In this instance, the URL that you should enter in the first step is the one in which a particular action will take place. In the next step, where your site administrator will tag your pages for the purpose of tracking conversions, place the tags within the code triggered by the conversion action.
• You can though have more than one conversion you would like to count in any given experiment like a purchase as well a mailing list signup). All the conversions you have tagged will get counted. The numbers for them will be added cumulatively in the final report. Each conversion will not be separately tracked.

It’s high time to make marked improvements to your website. In this endeavor of yours, Website Optimizer can come in handy. Here’s how it can be of help:

1. It’s a tool that can greatly help you enhance the effectiveness of your business site. This is highly critical to assure a decent return on your investment (ROI).
2. By letting you test different versions of the content types on your site and its pages, you are in a position to decide what will best hold the users’ attention and lead them to actively convert on your website.
3. The Website Optimizer tests the different content versions on your live business site to find out the best possible way to higher conversions with your original content and its variations you want to try out.

Experiments to enhance your site’s conversion rates

An experiment in context of your broader site traffic pattern by using those variations helps to check the effect each variation has on your site’s conversion rates. The findings can help you establish the plan to your site’s modifications.

In factorial experiments, multiple factors like headline, image, etc with multiple choices for each of them such as headline1, headline2 etc  are simultaneously tested (as against to A/B experiments). One would learn from a factorial experiment about each combination of the available or given choices. If you for instance, had two page sections (say, headline and image) with each having 2 variations, you would know about all the 4 possible combinations. These experiments are designed to limit the number of combinations, so they won’t need as much traffic volume, while they are tested,.

The benefit of cutting down the combinations might come at the cost of reducing the end result possibilities from the experiment. Testing only a fraction of the possible combinations won’t let you to grasp interactions between factors like whether a particular headline does influences the performance of a particular image. The cost factor plays a role in producing the number of combinations.

A website experiment though, can employ a full factorial design. It can deduce the same conclusions with exactly the same number of impressions as a fractional design. An increased number of impressions can allow the full factorial design to provide deeper conclusions. A full factorial design allows you to understand interactions among factors often ignored by fractional designs.

There are two different reports, namely a combination report and second, a page section report. Each column in them gives an insight into the performance of aspects like combinations, page sections, variations etc.

Analyzing performance results

The performance results will be shown in a combination report. They will be for all of the possible page combinations done from the page section variations that you have generated for your experiment. You can pick the most successful combination by checking how well a particular combination is performing as compared to the original one. This will help improve conversion and boost your business.

What does page section report tell?

On the other hand, the page section report will focus on the different variations of each page section that do well. Merely choosing the best-performing variations for a particular page section may not be as helpful as opting for a winning combination. This is because there might be interactions among variations, which the page section report sometimes fails to capture.

Both page section reports and combination reports have the same columns, but for the additional relevance rating that the former has. It indicates the level of impact a page section has had on your experiment. For instance, a relevance rating of 0 shown for your headline page section, you may assume that the headlines used did not really distinguish themselves significantly.

On the contrary, a higher relevance rating for your image page section would suggest the fact one or more images did differentiate themselves significantly from the others, and the fact that the particular images page section is quite important for the purpose of conversion.

How to improve your campaign and business site performance

• It is important to configure Google Analytics to effectively track and enhance performance of your campaigns and business site.
• You must best audit your website utilizing web analytics reports to spot ‘quick win’ conversion improvements across the home page, category as well as product pages.
• This is helpful in improving different page elements for landing and search results pages as well as faceted navigation, shopping basket or checkout pages, if applicable.
• Apart from refining your messaging hierarchy, it is vital to employ persuasive copywriting technique to boost conversion rates for your response pages.
• Improving SEO competency of page template elements like headings, copy, site navigation, images and videos will ensure a steady traffic via Google’s natural listings.
• Last but not the least, make it a point to integrate your website with various online as well as offline campaign referrers.

Testing also makes it possible to increase effectiveness of your site and ensure visitor satisfaction. It goes without saying that this can lead to improved conversion rates and a better return on your investments (ROI).

Facility to try out several content combinations

Website Optimizer helps you analyze the effectiveness of different content combinations and their impact on your users. Proper testing enables you to identify what they respond to better in order to populate a site with the kind of content that will be more successful in attaining the results in terms of business you want.

You can try several content combinations with Website Optimizer, to figure out what will lead to the maximum conversions, whereas Clear reports will let you know what worked the best. By going different columns you will notice on a reports page, you can study your report. These will be somewhat different if you are viewing your report for a multivariate experiment or an A/B experiment, though you can interpret them exactly in the same way.

A peep into your site’s overall performance

The most immediate and pertinent insight into your site’s overall performance is provided by estimated conversion rate. This column suggests how effectively each content combination or variation is performing. You can see this as a numerical range. It’s also visually displayed in form of color-coded bars. If a particular combination is doing better than the original content, the bar turns green. Yellow bars indicate no definite conclusion. Gray shade denotes that it’s delivering the same output as the original, whereas a red one means that the content combination is performing poorly than the original.

Parameters to check the effectiveness of a a content combination

The chance to beat original column displays the probability that a content combination will become more successful than the original one. When numbers in it are around 95%, it means that a given combination can probably be a good replacement to your original content. Obviously, lower numbers in this column indicate that the corresponding combination is not good enough for replacement.

Improvement denotes the improvement in terms of percentage over the original content variation or combination. Because this is a ratio of a combination’s conversion rate to the original column’s conversion rate, it may often widely vary. It is suggested that you only focus on the improvement when a large chunk of data has been collected and it can be treated as more reliable. On the other hand, the ratio of conversions/ visitor is the raw data regarding conversions per site visitor generated by a particular content combination.

• First and foremost, as long as the billing data is not submitted and also the account has not been activated, the ads delivery will not start. At times, though the adwords account has been already activated, the ads may not be seen as they are still in the ‘Review Process’. So the ads will appear only after they have been reviewed as well as approved by the relevantAdWords specialist.
• If the keyword required minimum bid in a specific case happens to be higher than the actual bid set, the key term will get inactive and thus not show up in search results. Also, the ad will not be displayed for the rest of the given day, if the daily budget is already depleted.
• If the recommended budget has turbed higher than the set budget limit, the ads might not appear all the time. If the daily budget has got used up in the beginning of the day itself owing to accelerated method and you’re searching later in the day, you may not be able to see your ad.
• If the Ads are disapproved (let us assume that there are 2 ads in a particular Ad Group and both have been disapproved for not meeting the AdWords editorial guidelines), when the key terms that belong to that particular Ad Group are looked for, those ads won’t be shown.
• If you have chosen only Content network and are searching in Google, you won’t be able to see your ad. In case the Ad Scheduling feature is ON, the ad may not be shown for the time may perhaps be outside the scheduled time-slot. In case the Position Preference is probably enabled in the ‘Edit Campaign’ Settings, the ads might not be visible provided the bid is not high enough for them to be placed in the position we have selected. If you’re searching outside the targeted geo graphical settings, that ad will not be available.
• Campaign and adgroup should be active for ads to show up online. If someone pauses the ads/ keywords/ campaigns by accident, the ads may not appear. As an instance, if the campaign was scheduled to run only till a particular day, and if you’re searching on the next day, your ads won’t be there online.
• Certain keywords trigger Google’s red flag. The content policy gives you an idea of keywords that are taboo. Sometimes negative keywords tend to overlap with the searched keyword. Google then will not feature your ad.  Check for negative keywords and remove them from the campaign.