Friday, February 13, 2009

PPC Management - Some New Ideas

By George Kristopher

You probably know Overture and Wordtracker as well as AdWord Accelerator which a great tool in PPC management for sorting out the real competition among keywords and bid prices and singling out the best-performing ads. But there are others that give you a different emphasis and have features of their own that make them unique and very much worth having. AdWord Analyzer is one (www.AdWordAnalyzer.com). Keywords Analyzer is another (www.KeywordsAnalyzer.com).

In your toolbox out in the garage you need a Philips and a flathead screwdriver, not just one or the other. The same is true of these major keyword tools. Each one has its use, and owning more is like having a bigger toolbox.

And there's more to learn still. The first list of keywords you come up with, even if it's a long one, will be incomplete. AltaVista once reported that 20 percent of all its searches were totally unique in the history of AltaVista. You never know what people are going to hunt for. So here are some fresh ideas for successful PPC management:

You need to use lots of synonyms and subjects that are relavant in your list of keywords so that you will be sure to reach your targeted audience.

Try bidding on brand names, though you'll have to work through the copyright issues yourself. Google has had a score of its own legal headaches as a result of allowing AdWords users to bid on trademarked names. Nevertheless, names of companies, magazines, associations, famous people, and famous places may all relate to your product. For example, for "billiards" you might bid on the name of famous pool player Jeremy Jones. For drums you might bid on "Buddy Rich."

Misspellings are a big opportunity, because so many advertisers don't bid on them, and the clickthrough rate is often higher. For a Lord of the Rings promotion, "Tolkein" (misspelled) got twice the CTR of "Tolkien" (spelled correctly).

LexFN.com is a web site that is very useful and interesting for PPC management. It's an elaborate thesaurus that uses web technology to find a scores of synonyms and related concepts. This can be a very fun site to play with! If you just bid on the obvious generic version of a keyword like WalMart and you don't bother with other variations like Wal-Mart and Wal Mart, Google's "expanded phrase matching" feature will attempt to match this for you, and usually succeed. However, those clicks will almost always cost you more money than bidding on the exact keyword. It's better to bid on the exact variations, the same way people type them in. - 16651

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