Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [236]
Finally, PPC can provide additional profitability by targeting words and phrases that have shown to be extremely profitable for your business. When evaluating your costs, return on investment, and profitability, you can use PPC and SEO to provide complementary coverage of high-profit keywords and keyword phrases.
Quality Score
Each search engine utilizes a methodology of judging campaign performance. This is called a quality score. Similar to the algorithm that provides relevant results in organic search results, the quality score attempts to score ads and campaigns for relevance. The quality score rewards advertisers for good performance by lowering bid rates for relevant campaigns. Prior to the quality score factor, advertisers that paid the most for clicks would get the highest visibility, regardless of relevance. The ad did not have to match the keywords that were bid on, and visitors could be taken to unwanted destinations. Someone could advertise “free iPods” for the keyword university and take visitors to a casino site. The search engines saw the potential of losing credibility and revenue, so they responded by creating the quality score.
The quality score for each search engine tends to fall into the same types of measurements: relevant ad copy, relevant landing page (to the ad), and good click-through performance. Ads that receive more click-throughs are generally considered to be more attractive to customers, so those ads are considered more relevant. A high quality score benefits an advertiser’s campaign with lower click-through costs and better positioning.
The quality score is based on how relevant the ad copy is to the campaign keywords and then on the relevance of the landing page based on the ad copy and the keywords. Another part of the equation can be the performance of the ad itself. If it gets enough click-throughs compared to the number of impressions, then it performs well. If the ad receives many impressions but very few click-throughs, then the ad is not performing well, because it is not an attractive option for searchers. Essentially, the quality score is a logical quality assurance test for the advertising network provided by the search engine.
In Google, a high quality score reduces the price you have to pay to maintain your position, be it the top spot or the second or third. Only ads with high quality scores will show above the organic rankings on the search results page, which is a good opportunity to increase visibility. High quality scores will also provide advertisers with additional ad site links, which are additional links near your ad copy that lead to additional landing pages for your campaign.
To present searchers with the most relevant, high-quality results, the search engine has to ensure that there is some type of review policy in place. The searcher is the customer in this process, and the searcher expects that the ads will be relevant and not misleading. The more relevant and attractive the ad is, the better the advertisement will perform.
Tuesday and Wednesday: Take Advantage of Keywords
The rest of this week is going to focus on the basic functions of developing a successful campaign. These foundational building blocks are also the most common mistakes advertisers make when developing a campaign. There are many ways to bust a budget when setting up a campaign, and most of the search engines do not make it easy to cover all of the necessary details for a campaign. Because of this, it is easy to start a campaign and lose a lot