Keywords & PPC Management

You have finally put together a great PPC campaign and feel that you can now relax and see the sales pour in. Unfortunately this is not the way PPC advertising works. Once you have set up your campaign your work is far from over. You will need to manage your campaign carefully to make sure that you are earning the maximum amount from it. One of the critical areas to examine is your keywords.

You will be using two different types of keywords. These are general, broad ranged keywords and the more targeted keywords.

General keywords are those that attract a large crowd of searchers for a certain topic but not necessarily a niche within that topic. For example a broad based keyword could be “home business.” This will attract a lot of searchers. However they may not be interested in your particular niche and you will get few sales or leads.

The targeted keywords however will draw much less traffic, but the traffic it does draw will have more interest in your specific product or service. This will lead to a higher sales conversion.

Now that you understand the basic types of keywords you will know how to manage this important area of your PPC advertising campaign. One of the main reasons a campaign is not doing well is often due to keywords. Bear in mind if a keyword is not performing well and just getting clicks with no sales or leads you are throwing a lot of money down the drain.

Use your PPC engine’s tools to track the amount of traffic being drawn in by you keywords. This can be done for each separate keyword for your campaign.

Another factor you need to look at is the conversion rate, or the number of clicks required to generate a sale. This ratio will be much lower for the broad keywords and much higher for the niche. Since you pay for each click you will need to evaluate the value of your keywords.

Thirdly check the cost per click as opposed to the sales per click; this will be your profits. How much are you bidding on a particular keyword? Is it converting enough sales to justify the bid? If not your PPC campaign is costing your too much money and needs to be adjusted so that you can profit and not lose money.

Keyword trends change. Searchers may look for one set of keywords at one point in time than change to another set later. This factor must be considered and you will need to monitor your keywords and check if they are pulling as well as they used to.

If a keyword is failing to make you money, something needs to be changed. You will need to look at your bid, sales conversions, and traffic generated. As trends change these keywords will continue to need adjusted to keep them successful, or perhaps replace with more successful keywords. This will ensure a suitable ROI.

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