Despite the current economic conditions, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising continues to grow with new advertisers entering the market each day and current advertisers expanding their adCenter portfolios. In recent months, return on investment (ROI) and related success metrics have become even more important. Given the wide variety of verticals such as auto, financial, retail, etc., ROI can be viewed in several different ways. These include cost per acquisition/sale (CPA), cost per lead (CPL) and return on ad spend (ROAS). The most common calculation of ROI is (Revenue – Cost) / Cost * 100. Search engine success metrics include cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), click volume and average position (are users seeing you ad prominently place in the top positions?)
Today, I am going to share 5 basic tips to improve your search engine success metrics which can help to improve your overall ROI.
Test ad copy with adCenter
Often times, advertisers test ad copy with one engine and apply to all engines with mixed results. We recommend that you test specifically with adCenter as the demographics are different with Live Search which can influence success metrics. For best results, it is recommended that you include 2-4 versions of ad copy per ad group. Shefali Singla’s post “Optimizing Your Ads for Relevancy” goes into great detail on improving ad copy performance.
Bid on all keyword match types
Bidding on all keyword match types (within the same ad group) helps to increase impressions, clicks, CTR and CPC. There are pros and cons of each match type in regards to performance. Exact and phrase match tends to have stronger success metrics, however, with the right list of negatives, broad match can perform well. Broad match also helps you to maximize your exposure on Live Search for keywords that you have yet to add into your account. Hana Ondrusek has a great in-depth review on “How Match Types Affect Your PPC Campaigns in adCenter”.
Add/Update negatives based on news and current events
Adding or updating negatives helps to eliminate low quality clicks and minimize costs that impact your ROI. It is important to update negatives frequently as current events can affect performance. For example, if you are broad matching on “toys”, your ad could appear for “toy recall”. If a toy recall is in the news, search traffic will increase resulting in higher costs and a lower ROI. Tina Kelleher provides a great overview on how to research negative keywords in adCenter.
Include 20 or less keywords per ad group
Including 20 keywords per ad group or less allows for your ad copy to be more relevant to the user based on the user’s search query. For higher traffic keywords, you may want to consider having less than 10 keywords per ad group. This approach helps to improve clicks, CTR and minimize CPC costs based on increased keyword-ad relevancy to the user.
Apply Geographic and/or Demographic Targeting
Depending upon your products or service, you may want to consider adding geographic targeting to your ad groups. If you are a local business, targeting metro areas and mentioned the metro area in the ad copy will greatly help to increase CTR, minimize costs and build strong quality score. If you offer products and services to a specific age group (example: Student credit cards to ages 18-25), you can apply demographic targeting. This approach will only target users searching for student credit cards between the ages of 18-25 (based on Windows Live ID’s and user information). You can also target by gender and bid boost when a particular demographic is searching for a keyword you are bidding on.
By covering the basics such as testing ad copy, bidding on all keyword match types, adding/updating negatives, including 20 or less keywords per ad group and apply targeting, you can better targeting converting users, resulting in higher search success metrics such as CTR and CPC. The end result is higher ROI for you! When researching or implementing these tips, please be sure to try the adCenter Add-In for Excel or the adCenter Desktop. Good luck!