Maintaining Your Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

April 30, 2009 · Print This Article

by Brian Basch

You’ve finally gotten your campaign off the ground. Keywords have been researched and bid on, synonyms and relevant words taken advantage of, and you’re set up for the next six months. Now, how do keep things working properly? Pay per click campaign management is an important skill that many people forget about.

While it would be nice to set up your campaign and just let it run by itself, that won’t work. You’ll have to track each of your ads and its activity to see how efficient and productive it is. There are plenty of ways to do this.

AdWords offers tools that’ll help you calculate what percentage of traffic an ad brings in. You can use tools provided by your web host to find out which ads brought in traffic that actually led to sales. Remember – no web spider ever bought a product.

So why go through this extra hassle? This is because, if your ad is not performing well, it is costing you money, and will not bring in profits. In other words you are paying for useless traffic. Even if no sales are made you will still be paying for each click.

Do not give up hope there are ways to fix ads that are not doing well. Check its position. It should appear within the first 5-10 pages of the search results. If this is alright then your next step is to check your keywords.

People’s first choice is a popular keyword. They feel they will get lots of traffic by using these types of keywords. The problem is that most of these popular keywords are not targeted to your specific market. They are the ones that searchers use initially but will not always be the ones they should be using.

That means that people using these keywords are often not sure what they’re looking for. They’ll look at a lot of sites before they buy. Good keywords are general enough to be searched for by someone who’s not sure what they’re looking for, but specific enough to reach the audience that will buy your product or service.

Consider searching for your own keywords to see what pops up. You might be surprised by the other sites that have chosen the same keywords you have. Take a look at the top competitors for a word and analyze their sites to see if they’re in line with what you want to be associated with. If you seem out of place in a set of search results, it might be time to change your strategy a little. Remember, a bad keyword is only costing you money!

Detailed monitoring will let you know which keywords are performing well and which ones are failing. You will know which ones should be replaced and the ones that should stay. With good selections of keywords you can end up with ads that are very profitable. When you monitor your pay per click campaigns you will set yourself up for success.

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