Anyone who dabbles in PPC Marketing or considers themselves an expert Paid Search Marketer asks themselves many questions about their keywords, ad relevancy, and site quality. We test, test, and test some more on a variety of subjects. The goal of all PPC marketers is to achieve the lowest CPC, attain the highest CTR possible and ultimately make money. If Merchants offered an average of 50% commission, affiliates wouldn’t have to worry about being so precise. The reality is, PPC marketing has become more and more competitive due to raising CPC’s and higher merchant sensitivity to commission levels- making optimization a key factor in remaining profitable.

Experienced PPC Marketers have read countless publications regarding targeted keywords and ad relevancy. We certainly understand our ads must be extremely well targeted in relation to our keywords in order to attain a high CTR and level of quality. We split up our keywords in many different ad groups making each ad and keyword more relevant to one another. So, my question is, by following these guidelines how significant is the impact? How much does this really help in lowering our costs? How meticulous are you in following this practice yourself?

Following the guidelines mentioned above means that you will potentially have hundreds of ad groups for each campaign. There is a tremendous amount of time and effort involved in creating this many ad groups. In addition, you will also need to write hundreds of targeted ads for all these ad groups.

What determines your keyword/ad relevancy? You should have your keyword or keyword string appear at least twice in your ads. Your keyword should appear in your ad title and at least once in the ad body. This makes your keyword extremely relevant to your ad and will give you the best chance of being rewarded with the lowest CPC possible. The challenge is it’s very difficult to have a large number of keywords in each ad group. So as I mentioned, to be effective in this practice, requires a tremendous amount of ad groups for each individual campaign. I encourage you to give this a shot if you haven’t already and measure the impact it has on your CPC. I wish you luck and I will leave you with an example:

If my keyword is “Purchase BitDefender”, my ad would look like this…

Purchase BitDefender 2008
Industry leading Internet Security
Purchase BitDefender Now!
www.BitDefender-Online.com

Kevin Aubert
Manager, Affiliate Development
oneNetworkDirect