Wednesday, July 27, 2011

PPC Adwords Optimization with EXACT Phrase Match

As Pay-Per-Click (PPC) web consultants, we often discover clients aren't aware of the significant amount of money they are spending on non-relevant or poorly converting keywords.

Google makes a majority of their income through PPC ads and although they try to provide incentives to advertisers to optimize their PPC campaigns (with good ads, landing pages and keywords being bid on) they adequately fail to provide enough insight into how a small business can lower their monthly budget.

Although, it is important to use the "broad match" types with wide range of keywords at first (in order to "discover" keyword phrases your consumers are using) you will eventually want to evaluate what keywords have a high click-through-rate (CTR) and/or conversation rate.

When using the "broad match" type with a small monthly budget you will most likely hit your daily or monthly spend limits and Google will start suggesting ways to increase your budget but most instances this is the opposite of what you want to do (unless you are using an advanced technique like Google's Conversion Optimizer and are seeing a positive ROI).

After you have a good idea on what are some of your best keyword phrases are (based on conversions, click through, relevancy to the products/services on your landing page) setup a new campaign with extremely focused ad groups set to EXACT match type only. Extremely focused ad groups should met the following criteria:

1. Keyword Phrases - All keyword phrases being bid on should be very similar to each other. For example, the ad group should contain keywords like "men's blue sneakers", "male blue sneakers" "adult male blue sneakers", etc.
2. Ad copy should contain the keyword phrase in the title. Include a keyword variation a second time (in the URL or 3rd line of the ad copy if possible).
3. Landing page – should prominently contain the keyword phrase (eg. in the headline) and variations of the keyword phrase should be used throughout the copy of the page. In addition, put an image of the keyword phrase on the landing page – a men's blue sneaker in our example.

Most importantly setup all your ad groups to EXACT phrase match. This will force Google to only display your ads when consumers search for the exact phrases that you put into your ad group thus lowering your total campaign spend (since Google won’t show your ads on semi-related keyword phrases). In addition, your click-through-rate (CTR) will increase significantly.

A benchmark CTR of between 1-5% percent is considered good in the industry but using the EXACT match bid method described above you will most likely see your CTR’s above 10% and as high as 20%! Best of all, you will be spending less money on the PPC campaign while increasing your CTR’s and most likely your conversion rates at the same time.

Have you tried the tactic above? Did it work for you? Feel free to leave your comments below or contact RWeb Consulting to have one of our PPC web consultants look over your PPC campaign.


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