Advanced PPC Techniques
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Advanced PPC Techniques

17th May 2012

Next up for me at SAScon is the Advanced PPC panel moderated by Yahoo’s Jon Myers.

Duncan Fisher, Latitude – Quality Score

First speaker is Duncan Fisher from Latitude and he’s talking about Quality Score (QS). The Quality Score of your keywords is a vital aspect of your AdWords campaign, ensuring only the most relevant ads are shown on Google’s search results. It’s a ‘complex mathematical formula’ scoring the relevance of your ad & landing page to the keyword you advertise on. From the advertiser’s point of view it helps determine how much you end up paying per click.

The average Quality Score of your campaign can be an indicator of its health. Duncan shows an example where 85% of a campaign’s keywords have a QS of 7 or higher, which shows the campaign is in pretty good shape on average. When digging deeper in to the data, however, he shows that for this campaign 63% of impressions come from keywords with a QS of 6 or lower, which means there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Duncan advises to dive deep in to the data to get the most useful insights. Focus on the ad group level instead of taking campaign-wide averages. He lists a number of ways to improve your Quality Score, highlighting a few approaches such as deciding if a keyword is relevant enough, review actual search queries, and creating smaller ad groups.

Polly Pospelova, Fuse8 – Improve ROI

Next up is Polly Pospelova from Fuse8, who’s talk is on improving the ROI of your PPC campaigns. She starts off by explaining how your ad’s position in AdWords – Ad rank – is a result of the “CPC bid X Quality Score” formula. So boosting your QS is a great way to improve your campaign’s ROI without having to increase your CPC.

Polly says improving your landing page is very important, as this can have a big impact on your QS. However on a large scale, for 1000’s of keywords and ad groups, this is hard to do. Fuse8 has a product that solves this problem by adapting the landing page dynamically depending on the keyword that is used to find it.

Gilli Goodman, Google UK – AdWords Quick Wins

Last speaker in this panel is Google UK’s Gilli Goodman. She highlights a series of Google tools and products that can help make quick wins in your PPC campaigns. She starts by explaining automated rules for bid management in AdWords, which can help make campaign management much easier. She highlights the capabilities of automated rules and gives a whole range of examples of how you can use them to get maximum mileage from your AdWords campaigns.

Next Gilli talks about remarketing – what it is, and how you can make optimal use of it – and mobile – a hot topic at this year’s SAScon that is part of many speakers’ presentation. She has some good tips on making the best use of these strategies.

All together a solid session for PPC practitioners with some great tips to improve your campaigns.

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Barry Adams is the chief editor of State of Digital and is an award-winning SEO consultant delivering specialised SEO services to clients worldwide.
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