Often, we discuss ways to better qualify traffic and attract only the most qualified visitors, but some advertisers can’t find enough traffic to bring proper exposure to their sites.  Maybe these are new products that need to pull in more momentum or possibly very common items with far too much competition to be seen with a low CPC.  Whatever the case, there are ways to find traffic when it seems that none is available.
 
Start by adjusting your campaign options and budgets.  Google determines how often an ad must be shown in order to bring in enough clicks to spend the daily budget, but when there is more competition for ad space than there are searchers looking for the product, the number of impressions may be too low to bring in enough clicks.  Start by selecting the “accelerated” option in your campaign settings.  Checking this box tells Google to attempt to spend your budget as quickly as possible instead of trying to spread it out throughout the day.  If this option still does not bring enough traffic, try raising your campaign budget to a higher number.  Google will give you more impressions in order to attempt to meet your higher budget.  This is especially useful when used in combination with the content network.  Be cautious however, when utilizing this option, because even though you normally might only receive $20 worth of traffic when your budget is set to $100, there may be occasional spikes in which you could spend the whole amount.

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I am often told by clients that they search for their Google Cost Per Click ads on a regular (almost daily) basis. In fact, a client recently told me she searches multiple times a day, just to make sure she is seeing her ads! I advised that although it is very enticing, as well as reasonable to want to see where her ads are appearing, it is definitely not recommended. Here is why…

Searching for your Google ads can lead to a low click through rate (CTR). Click Through Rate is defined in Wikipedia as “a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions).” An impression is when your ad is displayed on a search results page. In laymen’s terms, if your number of impressions continues to increase, however, your clicks do not increase, your click through rate will be poor. This is exactly what occurs when you search for your ads on a regular basis. You are pretty much telling Google that your ad is not enticing enough to warrant a click, and your positions on the page will be lowered as a result. In actuality, not only does it lower your positions, it can also lead to higher click costs, because Google can actually state that a particular keyword is not performing well, forcing a higher mininum bid to even keep your ads running.

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So, you’re running Paid Placement Campaigns (PPC) in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You have set them up and you’re finally getting visitors to your site. That’s all you need to do, right? Wrong! It is absolutely imperative to ensure that your paid campaigns are running properly, and that you are using the most effective keywords and ad copy, bidding appropriately, etc. One of the biggest mistakes often made is to sit back and let the campaigns run on “auto pilot”. I can pretty much guarantee that your competition is not doing that and therefore, you should not be either.

That being said, how do you improve the effectiveness of your campaigns? Sometimes it is just a matter of tweaking your ad copy or changing your keywords. Other times, it could be revising your match type or increasing your bids. Match type refers to the way an engine matches your keywords to the actual terms people are searching for. For example: Broad Match would be the widest range possible, which means you will get coverage for any variation of your keywords. This happens to be the default setting. Exact Match, on the other hand, would require the searcher to enter your keywords exactly how you have them in your campaign. This will obviously limit your exposure significantly. It might take some testing to determine which match type is best for you based on your particular keywords.

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