How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign Part 2

MoreVisibility - December 14, 2007

This is the second part of a five-part blog, that will give tips on things to look for when making tweaks and “cutting the fat” from your campaigns. Last time I spoke of keyword average position. In today’s blog I will talk about click through rate, impressions, and match types.

#2 keep your keyword Click Through Rate (CTR) high and limit keyword impressions.
After your PPC campaign has been running for about a month, your campaign will now have some good data to tackle my second recommendation. Your broad match type keywords will have many impressions, especially if your industry and keywords are highly competitive. If you have some keywords set to exact or phrase match type, then your impressions will most likely be lower for those keywords. If your click through rate, is higher than three to five percent, then this means searchers are drawn to your ads and feel the ads are relevant when they type in that search term. You want your keywords to have as high a CTR as possible. If you have keywords with a lower CTR, then there are a few things you can do before completely removing them. First, you can change the match type from “broad” to “phrase” match. This will limit your impressions and hopefully improve your CTR. I always prefer changing the match types before abandoning a keyword, because you never know if a different match type will work better. If the CTR is still low after changing the match type to “phrase”, then I would consider removing the keyword. The keyword selected may not work for your product.Tune in for my third recommendation soon. It should be posted in early January.