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“Adwords PPC Cheat Sheet written by Your’s Truly” | |
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| Price: | Free! | |
| Link: | N/A: Read it below! | |
It’s All About Relevancy!
Both PPC and search engine placement are all about relevancy. Google rewards relevant authority websites higher search engine rankings. Similarly, relevancy is rewarded within Adwords with lower cost-per-click (CPC) rates. Here’s the skinny on making your Adwords campaigns more relevant, and thus, more effective in terms of cost:
Relevant Keywords:
In a perfect world, each keyword in your campaign would have its own Ad Group. Subsequently, each Ad Group would have exactly 2 ads: 1 control ad which represents the CTR for this keyword that you’ve found so far, and a test (a variation of the control ad that you are testing in an attempt to come up with an even higher CTR ad).
When testing it is important to set your Ad Group settings so that each ad is shown equally (i.e. don’t allow Google to run the higher CTR ad more often - you are trying to make that determination in a more controlled manner).
Once you see 30 or so clicks on both ads within the ad group, select the winner as the control, and then create another test ad and try to “beat the control”. Repeat this process continuously. Never stop testing!
Relevant Ads:
Again, ideally each keyword has 2 ads (the control, and the test ad). The headline of the ad should always contain the exact keyword phrase. This ensures that the headline will be bolded within the search results (if you notice in any Google search results, Google highlights the term that was searched on in bold).
If you do this, you will experience higher CTR in almost all cases, but again, you want to continually run A/B split tests on your ads to keep finding higher and higher CTR ads.
Relevant Landing Page:
In a quest for ever increasing relevancy, Google examines each ad/landing page combination to determine relevancy for the pair. The 3 possible scores are Great, OK, and Poor. Higher scores are rewarded with higher placement within the ads list, which directly translates into lower CPC (meaning, you can bid less for that keyword, and still rank highly within the ads list).
Google wants to make sure that your landing page is optimized for the specific keyword that you’ve bid on, so if you humor them with an optimized landing page, you will be rewarded with lower CPC.
CTR and Bidding Strategy:
Google takes feedback from search engine users to determine if a particular ad is relevant for the search term. This is measured largely by the CTR. So, if your CTR is extremely high, Google will show your ad near the top of the ad list.
If you drop your bid price, and the ad still does better than most of the competing ads (again, as measured by CTR), then Google will start moving it back up again. Lather, rinse and repeat until you find a point where you can’t create a better performing ad and your CTR (and position) starts to drop when you lower your bid price.
Include the Adwords Cheat Sheet in the Google Adwords - PPC tab of your binder. (huh?)
**Please excuse my self-grading. I hope you think as highly of my cheat sheet as I do 
