Step by Step Guide to Building a Great PPC Keyword List

A Four-Step Process to Get You on Your Way

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for…

How to Get a Great Quality Score

Three Key Steps to Get into the “In” Crowd

Quality Score is an important component of Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A great quality score will get your ads better exposure and actually save you money (which are the advertisers in Google’s “in” crowd). Conversely, if you let your quality score slip, Google will actually penalize you by increasing the cost for each click on your PPC ads (that would be the not “in” crowd). So, it’s time to spend some quality time on your quality score.

One of the most effective actions you can take to get a great quality score is to have “tightly knit” ad groups. That sounds easy enough.

However, the interpretations of “tightly knit ad group” we see varies quite a bit and is frequently the largest contributing factor to a poor quality score. Who…

Pay-Per-Click Can Save You Money

And Knowledge Can Equal Profitability

For the most part, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is all about goal achievement and profitability. However, there are situations when spending PPC dollars to attain valuable knowledge can lead to great cost savings for your business.

PPC is a truly unique medium – enabling you to test business strategies on volumes of people across the world in very short time periods. Given its speedy broad reach, it is a valuable data-mining tool that can help you make informed decisions.

Here are three key situations in which PPC can help your business save money:

1) New Marketing Message or Positioning

New marketing positioning is a very expensive venture. It often involves changes to your website, marketing materials, sales materials, employee training and more. PPC is a great way to get a lot of exposure fast and see…

But Google, that Keyword IS Relevant

Nothing frustrates a marketer more than when their golden keyword, that is, in fact, their product or service, has a quality score of two or one from Google, usually accompanied by this lovely message: “Rarely shown due to low quality score.” When you click for more info on how to fix it, Google says the keyword just is not relevant and you should delete it.

Outrage!

Can’t Google see this keyword is in all of my ads and it’s all over my landing pages? This is the core of my business!

How could this possibly be?

With a little investigation, we usually find that proper account structure and maintenance have not been in place, and have left the advertiser in a punished state — Google has effectively issued a restraining order and your ads are no longer allowed to…

Three Big PPC Mistakes, Part II

. . . And How Newbies Can Avoid Them

In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.

Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.

A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and…

Three Big PPC Mistakes Newbies Make…

… And How to Avoid Them (Part I)

Like any new kid on the block, it would not be surprising if you’re losing money on your PPC (pay-per-click) ad spend and seeing little, if any return. That’s because many beginner and intermediate PPC advertisers routinely make three common errors when it comes to setting up campaigns.

In this Part One of a two-part post, I cover these errors in detail.

Huge mistake #1: Using keywords that are too general.

The problem here is that while “too general” keywords (for example, “women’s flip flops”) get lots of impressions and maybe even lots of clicks, they typically generate little in the way of conversions, which costs you big money.

When you neglect “long-tail” keywords (keywords that get less traffic but are highly targeted), you stand to lose significant leads and/or sales.

Suffice to…

It’s New to You Series: Setting up PPC Campaigns

Best Practice Tips for Newbies

Whether you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google only or across the three major U.S. search engines (including Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing until the two merge their platforms), setting up a pay-per-click campaign is fairly straight-forward. That is, until you have the campaign up and running and realize you’re shelling out a ton of money for little or no return.

Because we work so often with small and mid-sized businesses just beginning to dip their toes into the PPC waters, we’re introducing a new series — the “It’s New to You” Series — and we’ll be covering how to set up a campaign for the first time, including methods for getting started, making keyword lists, developing your first ads, setting up groups, and how to focus on keywords in each group.

There are a number…

How Safe are Your PPC Links?

Anti-Spyware & Anti-Virus Programs “Rate” Your Links

More and more people are using a couple of anti-spyware / anti-virus programs that alert Web searchers whenever a search result link is considered “unsafe.”

By “unsafe” I mean that the link goes to a landing page or website where nefarious activities take place: the searcher’s machine is infected with a virus, Trojan, worm, malware, etc. These programs also alert searchers whenever a website is invading their privacy, the site’s shopping cart is “unreliable” or the company inundates them with spam.

One such program is AVG, the free anti-virus, anti-spyware program. It places a little red, yellow, or green icon next to each search result in order to alert the searcher if it’s safe to click on the link. And, users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser can also add a plug-in called…