One of the activities that I enjoy doing the most is rock climbing. When I tell people that I like to rock climb there are usually 2 responses I get.  The first one is “Isn’t that dangerous?” and the other is “you must be pretty strong huh?”.  There may be a little bit of truth to those statements, but that’s not the whole story.

Yes, climbing can be dangerous, but only if you don’t know what you’re doing and are careless.  Running a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign is similar in that there is the potential danger of wasting money due to the same reasons.  If you just throw a bunch of keywords into a campaign, add some money and wait to see what happens…you may get lucky…but it’s much more likely that you’re going to waste a lot of money.

The other statement “you must be pretty strong huh?”…well that can definitely help, but there are much more important factors that go into climbing like technique, proper equipment, balance and good communication your belayer. Many people who are not as familiar with PPC advertising think that running a PPC campaign all comes down to the money. In other words, the highest bid for a keyword wins. This could not be further from the truth.

Here are Some Major PPC Factors You Need to Consider:

Negative Keywords:

Negative keywords are things that you don’t want to show up for. For example, if you are a lawyer but you don’t do any free work you would add free, pro bono, complimentary, etc. Having a comprehensive list of negative keywords will help to bring more qualified traffic to your site and reduce waste.

CTR (Click-Through-Rate):

every time one of your PPC ads appear on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) it is called an impression. every time someone clicks on your ad it is a click-through. The ratio of impressions to click-throughs is called your Click-Through-Rate. For example, if your ad showed up 100 times and 6 people clicked on it, you would have a 6% CTR. 

Everyone knows that clicking on their ads cost them money, but they may not know that checking to see if their ad is coming up is causing impressions and lowering their CTR. So why is your CTR important? See the next factor…

TIP:

If still feel that you need to look at your ads all the time, use the Google Ad Preview tool. The APT enables you to view your ads as they would appear on a regular Google search results page, without accruing extra impressions for your ad.

Adwords Quality Score:

Each keyword that you bid on in Adwords is graded and given a Quality Score number between 1 & 10 (10 being the best). This quality score number is determined by several factors including your click-through-rate, ad relevance, landing page relevance & load time. Having a higher Quality score will gain you greater ad position and lower costs per click.

Adwords Ad Rank:

The position of your PPC ads are based on its Ad Rank, which is a combination of how much you bid on a keyword multiplied by your Quality Score.

Example:

• advertiser A bids $2.00 and has a Quality Score of 4 ($2.00 X QS 4= an ad rank of 8)
• advertiser B bids $1.00 and has a Quality Score of 10 ($1.00 X QS 10= an ad rank of 10)
• advertiser C bids $3.00 and has a Quality Score of 3 ($3.00 X QS 3= an ad rank of 9)

In this example advertiser B would have the highest ad position even though they have the lowest bid amount!

As you can see, when it comes to PPC, money is not everything. Similarly, when it comes to climbing, the biggest & strongest guys are not always the best climbers. Just look at one of the greatest climbers in the world, Chris Sharma…

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