Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

PPC search advertising is not difficult, in fact it is one of the few marketing tools that’s designed deliberately to be simple and beginner friendly. However a ‘chasm of mediocrity’ stands between beginners, Intermediates and the Pro’s. PPC search advertising should be used as a strategic vehicle focused on delivering targeted messages, not blanket marketing. It is a disaggregated advertising tool, delivering the right ad, to the right consumer, at the right time. To ensure that this is the case, you should analyze your campaign structure using the 10% rule.

To understand the value of good account structure, we must first understand quality score. This is a measure of how relevant your offering is to the consumers search query. Google’s core competency is delivering the best search results, so naturally they want to present the most relevant ads first and they try to reward well structured campaigns with these premier ranking positions. This levels the playing ground and allows smaller companies with highly targeted campaigns to compete with larger companies with huge marketing budgets (traditional blanket marketers).
When reviewing your PPC campaign statistics, it is important to review the ‘fit’ of your broad and phrase matched keywords, to ensure they are advertising at the correct time. For example you may have “Melbourne Hotels” as a broad keyword, and in this instance your ad is likely to display when people are actually searching for “hotel receptionist jobs” or “jobs in hotels”. It is highly unlikely that these people are going to convert into sales and more importantly, your creative text does not match up well with the search query itself. It is likely that you will only be receiving 7/10 for this keyword.

To apply the 10% rule, analyse all your phrase and broad match keywords within each adgroup. If there are any individual words responsible for more than 10% of the total clicks, then you should look to break it up into a series of smaller keywords. To do this, run a search query report (in the reporting tab) and analyse exactly what phrases users have typed to trigger your ads. Ad negative keywords as a start (to filter hugely inappropriate searches) and then divide your ad group into smaller more targeted groups of 5 – 20 keywords. Ideally, the creative for each of these will be highly relevant to the actual search term. Try to use exact match for the high volume searches, as this will give you much greater control over which consumers are exposed to specific marketing messages.

Ideally, the final result will be a much more highly targeted PPC campaign with a higher click through rate (CTR), better positioning, lower cost per click (CPC) and most importantly, a higher ROI. Remember to continue analyzing this and applying it to your campaign.

For a step by step guide, read www.alanmitchell.com.au