Optimize your way to PPC success

If you ask the top pay per click marketers what is one of the factors that have allowed them to achieve their success it’s their ability to optimize campaigns. Being able to adapt to the changing demands of the market can determine whether a PPC campaign will be successful or just a drain on your budget. Affiliates of all skill levels need to understand the importance of optimizing their campaigns. In this article we will focus in on 2 areas of optimization – ad copy and keyword selection – that will have a direct effect on the outcome of your campaign.

Ad Copy
One mistake that many new marketers make is when forming their PPC campaign they will write only a single ad copy for their campaign. For a professional writer this may work but for the average marketer chances are that they won’t be able to write the perfect ad copy on the first try. When first forming your ad copy I would suggest taking a look at what the other top marketers in that vertical are using. Look at how they have formed their ad copy and take the best part of each to form your own version. You’ll notice that many of them have incorporated the keyword into the ad title or description which will help improve your PPC quality score. Once you have created your first copy don’t be afraid to build out several different versions for your campaign. By doing this you will be able to test a keyword with several different ad copies to see which combination works the best. Once you have determined which combination is the most effective then you can turn your resources to promoting that ad copy. With the first portion of optimization in order now let’s turn our focus on selecting the correct group of keywords.

Keyword selection is the cornerstone of a successful PPC campaign. There are many tools out there that can help you select a good foundation of keywords to begin with. Google’s external Keyword Tool and Wordtracker are two popular resources used by many marketers. I’d like to focus in on how to optimize those keywords once you locate them. For this example we will be looking at the conversion tracking option given in Google’s Adwords. When this script pixel is placed on the offer’s confirmation or thank you page it will funnel priceless keyword information back into your Adwords account. Let’s say that you are promoting the hottest new weight loss offer and you just formed your keyword list which contains 100 different targeted keywords. Your initial test will promote using all the keywords but at some point you must optimize that list to be cost effective. Your default Google Adwords account is set up to show you which keywords are being shown along with how many times people are clicking on those keywords. That information is important but doesn’t necessarily tell you which keywords are generating the leads on your offer. That’s where the tracking pixel that you had placed on your offer’s confirmation page or thank you page comes into play. That pixel will capture the keyword information that sent the viewer who completed the lead on your offer. What you will come to find is that the keywords that generate the most clicks are not always the most effective keywords when it comes to conversions. Using longer tailed keywords can help you cut the cost per bid down while improving the quality of the user searching for your offer. So now with that information captured by your conversion tracking pixel, you can focus your budget on the keywords that are generating leads instead of the keywords that are just clickers.

While optimizing a campaign can take some time and effort you will find that the return on investment will be worth it. Simple tweaks to the ad copy and the knowledge of resources like the conversion tracking pixel will allow you to make the necessary changes to achieve a successful campaign. Take the time to get familiar with all the different resources available to you in your PPC account. Whether you’re using Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other PPC platform, they all have different levels of resources available to you. Too many affiliates run into stumbling blocks and give up on their campaigns before ever getting a chance to see them flourish.     Don’t be afraid to get back up and keep optimizing.