PPC management affects the sponsored listings area of a search engine results page, where the advertiser pays for each click to its site. Advertisers can appear in these listings by selecting keywords, bidding for a position, with the cost per click determined in no small part by something called Quality Score.
Keyword planning
A keyword is a word or phrase that someone might search for to generate a page of relevant results. A paid search campaign can have hundreds, thousands or multiple thousands of keywords that could or should be targeted. Therefore, determining and using the right selection of keywords and allocating budget to them are incredibly important.
The first stage is an opportunity analysis; a commercial brainstorming exercise to identify the commercially viable opportunities posed by searcher behaviour. This leads us to identifying groups of relevant words and phrases that target and cover the commercial opportunities we have identified, which we formulate into a Keyword Targeting Plan.
The idea behind this plan is to tap into qualified traffic and can often scope out a high volume of niche, overlooked and less premium search terms that enable you to cast a wider net at the less costly end of the cost per click spectrum, something we call ‘Long-tailing.’ See the example below:
Bid management
As markets have become more competitive and as click costs have continued to inflate, the role of bid management technology in the success of paid search campaigns has become a pivotal one. The Bid Management toolset allows for the programming and automation of complex bidding exercises, critical tasks and campaign management routines on large keyword groups, and across multiple engines.
Bid management tools themselves work by setting ‘bid rules’ normally this will include your marketing objectives and applying your ideal maximum Cost per Acquisitions (CPAs £). The system then comes to understand your rules, budgets and intelligently intervenes to preserve your budget and automatically maximises your Return on Investment (ROI £) - see diagram below.
Bid management technology is extremely useful, eliminating wastage and closing bid gaps.
Bid management also offers day parting, timed based bidding and daily limits. Inevitably, there are always times where it is better to deactivate, run, or boost activity based on times of day, days of week, or the all important weekend. For most of the bid management systems, you can time base bidding simply by including this in your campaign rules. Anything from individual keywords, to search engines; to whole campaigns can be individually activated, deactivated or intensified around key days of the week or times of the day. Again this ensures your campaign is running throughout the most active and effective times and more importantly reduce wastage.
Quality Score
Your keyword selections and your bid management process is only part of the equation needed for PPC success. Each keyword you bid against will be given a ‘quality score’ by the search engine in question. This quality score dictates (along with your maximum bid price) where your ad will appear in the list and what you will ultimately have to pay per click for it.
A quality score is calculated by analysing a number of factors, for example, how relevant your keyword is to the content of your ad text and the user’s actual query, and the click through rate that ad is achieving. Essentially, a high quality score tells the search engine that the ad is a good match for the searcher and you are rewarded by higher positioning and a more favourable cost per click as a result.
What this means is that a critical component to achieving cost effectiveness and the ability to scale within the paid search medium is to ensure that your ads are tailored creatively and intelligently to perfectly match a searchers queries, and contain the right copy and overall message to entice the user to click. In addition, landing pages need to be relevant to the queries too – SEO pages are often perfect candidates to ensure that this is the case.
Find out how you can take advantage of the paid search medium with SearchCatalyst’s PPC for SME Packages.