Pay Per Click Secrets

Although Google and Yahoo claim that managing a Pay per Click campaign is easy, we strongly disagree. Sure, opening an account, choosing some keywords, and setting up a budget is a piece of cake. But making more money than the campaign is costing you is a real challenge.
This article will provide you with a great insight on some advanced techniques that we use for our own clients. Three out of five people that start a Pay per Click campaign lose money and every single one of our clients makes money; so we must be doing something right. Pay attention and get ready for the most useful article you will ever read on PPC campaign management.
Concentrate on the Segments of the Market that You Can ServeMake sure that you are very specific about how you can solve a need. For example, one of our clients is an English school in Denver. They offer accent reduction courses for foreign executives that want to sound more American. When they were managing their own campaign they were losing a lot of money going after the keyword “accent reduction”. The reason was that people wanted to get rid of their accents in a lot of different ways (cassettes, CDs, computer software, teleseminars, and one-on-one phone consultations) but our client offers classes on the subject. We did three things about it: we started using keywords like “accent reduction class” instead of just “accent reduction”, we changed the ad to something like “Accent Reduction Class in Denver, CO”, and we used negative keywords (software, phone, book, CD, cassette, etc.) to filter out unqualified prospects.
Create a Landing Page for Each of Your Top KeywordsFigure out what keywords get you most of the traffic. If you have 1,000 keywords in your campaign, chances are that 10 of them are getting 90% of the traffic. Create a landing page for each one of them. Driving all your PPC traffic to your home page is probably the most common mistakes that people make.
Use Long-Tail Keywords A long-tail keyword is the opposite of a general keyword. For example, “cars” is a broad keyword and “2002 Honda Accord” is a long-tail keyword. A specific term doesn’t have as many searches as broad terms but it will cost you a lot less and will bring you much more qualified prospects. Someone searching for “cars” is not very likely to become a paying customer any time soon. But someone searching for “buy 2002 Honda Accord in Chicago” is.
Use Locations, Brands, and ModelsLet’s go back to the cars example. Bidding for the term “cars” will cost you a lot and bring you a great percentage of unqualified visitors. So why not break down the market based on the areas you serve, brands, and models you offer? For example: Honda Accord Chicago, Honda Accord New York, Honda Civic Chicago, Ford Mustang Austin, and so on.