I was just curious about the basic rules/best practices for PPC advertising. I’ve recently started a new job and one of my tasks is to learn as much as I can as quick as I can about PPC Advertising because it’s a service offered to our clients but there’s not really any one who is proficient with it. The person they had doing it left the company.
I’ve used AdWords before to create campaigns and the thing I seemed to struggle with the most was figuring out what keywords to use. I had a decent amount of impressions, but the click through rate was very very low. Also, has anyone ever worked with lawyers before? I was told by someone that when setting up AdWords or something or them you have to be careful because of different rules and regulations they must follow when advertising. Any truth to that?
Thanks in advance for any help. I’m also Google’ing and reading a lot of articles on my own.
For us when we were running about a $2000/month budget for a customer we had the most success finding keywords that are a little more obscure yet had a higher click through rate. Almost always the high profile keywords were very difficult to profit from.
Also, where you can get in a bad position is if:
The add copy doesn’t get clicks
The content for the arrival page doesn’t get acted upon
Especially on #2 this can be something out of your control that makes you look bad, so be thoughtful of that.
There is a lot of good info on the Adwords Help site including the guidelines for landing page being advertised. In the past, you could just add hundreds or thousands of keywords and see what stuck. You can’t do that anymore because you’ll be penalized with low quality score for low clickthrough rates. I think the best method is to start out with a small targeted keyword list and build out from there slowly.
You may want to go through all of the trainings that Google offers. That’s the best way to learn Adwords best practices. There’s a ton of good third party info also which it appears you are already reading.
[FONT=verdana]Regarding your point about lawyers, you’re right about the complexity of the rules and regulations governing advertising. But, rather than hiring a lawyer (who wouldn’t be expected to know the law for every country where your ads might be seen), it’s better to carefully read Google’s own guidelines - on the assumption that they won’t display an ad which is illegal in the country in question. The guidelines are quite clear and unambiguous, and shouldn’t give you any difficulties.
One major thing I would tell you is to start off with highly targeted keywords that also utilize phrase and exact matching. Many times I’ll take over a paid search account where everything is set to broad match. Generally speaking this is a very bad thing to have in place since you could be triggering keyword phrases that have zero to do with what you’re trying to advertise.