Ecom Access

Before launching into PPC campaigns, it is important for businesses to consider several factors. Understanding the place that PPC campaigns have in your overall acquisition strategy is job number one. You want to ensure that you are complementing your other channels, rather than compromising them.

Secondly, make sure that the ads you are using are targeted directly at your audience. The better you can accomplish this, the lower your cost-per-click (CPC) price will be. It will also improve your ranking, moving your ad closer to the top of the results. And lastly, ensure that you have the tools in place to monitor the ROI of your campaigns.

Quality Score

Your PPC campaign’s performance will be – like any other marketing channel – based on how your ads are targeted. Google has built its reputation on its ability to return the most relevant results. This makes PPC campaigns on Google a perfect match for those who are able to target their ads based on rules that Google has set to ensure the most accurate results for searchers. Therefore, the more you are able to target your campaign as a whole, the higher your ads will rank – and for a lower price.

Google assigns Quality Score on three factors:

1. Relevance of the ad content to keyword bid upon

2. Relevance of the landing page

3. Click-through rate (CTR)

To begin with, ensure that the copy is as relevant to the keyword that you are bidding on is as possible. Bidding on the keyword “garden shears” and having your ad read, “Garden shears at discount prices,” will leave you a lot better off than, “Tired of unsightly hedges?” even though the last one may work in terms of ad strategy. It doesn’t mean that the last one may not work; it just means that it will not receive as high a Quality Score as the former.

Landing page relevance is based on a number of elements. First: the URL. If we continue with our “garden shears” example, if the URL of the landing page contains the term in the title, this is looked upon favorably.  Hyphens are a good way to ensure that Google is reading your page’s URL correctly. A page with the URL, www.somesite.com/gardenshears, will not get the same score as, www.somesite.com/garden-shears, because Google sees the first URL as one word.

Of course, the copy and images on your landing page should also be optimized to fit in with your keyword selection. Ensuring that your content is relevant isn’t just important to Google, it’s important to your potential customers. By searching for a particular keyword, searchers are expressing an explicit interest in that term, and the advertisers who respond to their need are likely to be the most successful.

Another way that Google assigns Quality Score is by measuring the amount of people who click on your ad from the search results. A higher frequency of clicks will boost your Quality Score. This is where having the resources to properly measure CTR comes into play.

In the next post, we’ll look at Adwords and tailoring campaigns to fit in with your acquisition strategy.

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