There are a number strategies and ways how to increase your ppc campaign’s CTR (Click Through Rates). So I’ll try to give you some tips, how to improve your PPC campaign‘s Click Through Rates (CTR).

1. Target right Audience. The most important thing before planning any PPC campaign is to select right keywords and phrases you want to target. These keywords should be related to your product or service you want to advertise via your PPC campaign.  It is not recommended to choose very obvious keywords which may generate a lot of impressions and huge amount of low quality clicks. To get higher CTR you may have to use descriptive keywords, so your text will be displayed only for users who are interested to your product.

2. Use Appropriate Keywords Matching. Google Adwords uses various methods of targeting like: Broad Match targeting (PPC Management), Phrase Match targeting (“PPC Management”), Exact Match targeting ([PPC Management]) and Advanced Broad Match targeting (“+PPC +Management”). By using these keyword targeting methods you may reach more targeted audiences and avoid irrelevant impressions as well as clicks.

3. Negative Keyword Strategy. By implementing negative keyword strategy you can reduce your advertising costs and bring more relevant visitors to your website. It is important to select negative keywords properly, because you have to make sure that your negative keywords won’t influence search phrases you want to be advertised for.

4.  Create relevant ad groups for different keywords. You will be able to maximize your Click Through Rates by creating relevant ad groups for similar keyword sets.

4. Write a compeling copy of text ads. Another important factor for maintaining healthy CTR is to write a compelling ad copy, by including keywords used in the search query (Automatic keyword insert) and using strong call to action elements.

A lot of ecommerce websites, might have thousands of products that might temporarily change their stock availability, or just adding a lot of new products to their website on daily basis. So, even if you’ve got very well managed Google Adwords campaigns with thousands of keywords and very themed ad groups it is hard to keep your adwords account updated with every product change.

To resolve this problem Google are launching “Dynamic Search Ads” which will help to keep your ads automatically updated with your stock changes.

So, how “Dynamic Search Ads” functionality will work:

• Dynamic Search Ads will get fresh data about your ecommerce website listings via Google organic crawl system.
• Dynamic Search Ad will be triggered whenever relevant search occurs in Google.
• Google will  dynamically generate text ad’s headline, use description template written by advertiser and use the most relevant destination URL.

This additional functionality will allow you to stay in full control and target various part of you website, even if you want to target entire website, specific product category or pages with specific keywords.

Impression share is one of the most important metrics’ which helps to measure a reach of search network campaign. This particular Google Adwords metrics shows the percentage of impressions where the text ads were shown out of the total possible impressions for targeted keywords.

Lost IS Budget column shows the percentage of impressions were lost because of too low budget.

Lost IS Rank column shows the percentage of impressions were lost because of too low ad rank. The reasons for low ad rank can be various:  too low max cpc and low quality scores.

The cheapest way to increase impression share is to improve ad rank whilst increasing max CPC or optimising entire Adwords campaign with an aim to improve quality scores.

To fully understand your Google Adwords account performance is important to analyze your paid search visitor’s behavior using Google Analytics stats. As Google Analytics and Google Adwords being one fully integrated system, Google allows to import Google Analytics goals to Google Adwords Conversion tracking interface. This functionality allows to measure different conversions than view of key page. Let’s say one of your goals is based on time spent on site or number of pages visited, Google Adwords won’t be able to measure that kind of conversion, but Google Analytics will, so you just have to setup time spent on time as a goal and import this goal to Google Adwords.

To import Google Analytics into the Google Adwords you have to follow the setps:

1. Login to you Adwords Account and Hover over “reporting and Tools” then select “Conversions”

2. Click on the button “Imported from Google Analytics”

3. Then select The Goals you want to import and click on “Import”

Happy analysing!





As negative keywords management and selection being very complex task is very important to keep the keywords listed in small groups. Keeping negative keywords in small lists will make negative keyword management much easier, because you just can assign negative keywords list for multiple campaigns.

Lets say you are an online store selling wood flooring and want to avoid visitor who are looking for local store or showroom. So you can use negative keyword lists to add all the UK’s towns and counties.

Google Adwords has just anounced about showing “Top v Side” performance in the segments section. Whilst managing Google Adwords account it is very important to distinguish that average position metrics are not very accurate, because it shows the average position of the top and right hand side ads. Top v Side segmentation will help to understand which ads are performing better shown on the top slot or right hand side, whilst taking into the account relationships between the conversions, clicks and other KPI metrics.

Top v Side segment is available in campaign, ad group, ads and keyword level. To start using Top v Side segment click on the “Segment” button and select “Top v Side”

Happy analysing!

In order make smarter decisions while making changes for your Adwords account there is very useful tool called “Search Funnel Analysis“.  You can find this tool under the “Reporting and Tools”  tab and link to to “Conversions”. As you may know Google is attaching conversions to the last click made. But before making the last decision to buy or not users tends to come back to the website via different sources, because they are comparing prices and looking for the best deal. So it is important to know what was the role of adwords before getting the sale.

Search Funnel Analysis are providing 8 types of different reports:

• Assist Clicks and Impressions;
• Assisted Conversions;
• First-Click Analysis;
• Last Click Analysis;
• Top Paths;
• Time lag;
• Path Length.

I am following my next post about each of the search funnel report.

Google has just announced about new location targeting feature for search network. This feature will allow target your ads more precisely and reach more targeted audience for your business

• The first new advanced location option is “Targeting method” which allows to “Target using either physical location or search intent“, “Target using physical location: Device-based location signals” and “Target using search intent: Location terms in user queries“

Example:

You have MOT test service in Chelmsford and you want to advertise for people who are physically located in Chelmsford. You are not interested to show your ads for people who are located somewhere in UK and adding “Chelmsford” to their search queries. You can reach these potential clients with a new targeting option “Target using physical location: Device-based location signal“.

• Second new option is “Exclusion method” which allows to “Exclude by physical location only” or “Exclude by physical location and search intent“

Example:

You run uPVC doors installation company and are advertising installers based Leeds. You don’t want to advertise Doncaster installers and people who are based in Doncaster. There is an option “Exclude by physical location and search intent” which help to advertise your service only for people who are based in Leeds only.

First of all you have to install Google Checkout payment on your website. One of the main requirements to get Google Checkout badge activated is to place Google Checkout badge before login pages. It most cases this page has to be Shopping Basket. Google recommends to put this button below the general “Go to Checkout” button.

Also this Google Checkout button has to be sourced from Google servers. Another important requirement is that this button has to link directly to the Google Checkout page, not to the internal Checkout page.

Full list of Google Checkout Badge requirements can be found here.

After all the requirement above is meet than you have to link your Google Adwords and Google Checkout accounts. Login to your Google Checkout then search for the “Settings” tab and select “Google Adwords”. Add your Adwords Customer ID number. After your submit your data Google Checkout team will manually review your account and will send you confirmation email.

Google Adwords has just announced about implementing Adwords Automated rules for all accounts. This feature allows you to make automated changes on you Adwords account based on criteria you specify. You can make specify rules to make automated changes for:

• Changing daily budget;
• Pause / Enable Campaigns;
• Pause Keywords
• Change Max CPC
• Raise Bids To First Page Bids
• Pause/Enable Ads
• Pause/Enable Ad Groups
• Change Ad Group default max. CPC when…

It is important thing to review automated rules logs periodically and monitor what automated changes has been made for your account.

Please find Adwords Automated rules explained in the video below: