Ongoing Management for Your Search Engine Marketing Campaign – Part One

After building and implementing your search engine marketing campaign, there are quite a few additional considerations to think about to continuously improve its performance. As a PPC management company, in this series we introduce a variety of ways to improve, monitor, and manage your search engine marketing campaigns to make the most of them.

Let’s take a look at what these additional considerations are, and then look at them one at a time. Here are some of the actions included in ongoing campaign management:

• Add ad extensions
• Check quality score
• Adjust bid types
• Check click-through rates
• Review segment links click-through rate
• Review split tests
• Check landing page conversion rates
• Check leads
• Check sales
• Add negative keywords
• Review search impression share

As you can see, there are quite a few things to do that can help you improve your campaigns. Now we’ll take a look at each of these actions and how to use them to your advantage.

Ad Extensions

Once you have a collection of ads, there are several extensions you can add onto them, including:

• App extensions
• Call extensions
• Consumer ratings and review extensions
• Location extensions
• Sitelink extensions
• Callout extensions

As you can see in this example, the extension is in the red box:

The key is to choose extensions that drive the right action. For example, if you were trying to drive lead volume, it wouldn’t make sense to add a physical address. It would make more sense to add a phone number and callout extension to drive people to a landing page to opt in for an offer. With the options available, you should be able to tailor your ads to the action that you want.

Quality Score

The next thing to do is to check your quality score. Quality score is very important, and is based on the match between your keyword, ad, and landing page. The score is out of 10 and the higher the score, the better. The higher your quality score, the less you pay to rank well versus your competitors, so you can see how important relevance between the three components (keyword, ad, and landing page) really is.

You want to aim to achieve a quality score for your keywords of at least 4 out of 10. If it is less than 4, it shows that there is a problem with the tightness of your campaign.

To achieve the best possible quality score, ensure that you:

• Minimize the number of keywords in each ad group
• Ensure that the keywords are very closely related
  • For example: Salesforce consultant and Salesforce Consulting
• Ensure that the ad has the same text
• Ensure that the landing page is about the same subject
• Make the call to action on the landing page consistent with the call to action in the ad

Creating consistency and relevance throughout your campaign will help you achieve a higher quality score and rank better in search engines.

In Part Two of this series we’ll continue by looking at adjusting bid types. See you at Part Two!

Please share any thoughts or questions with us by leaving a comment below.