Forum Moderators: open
Here are a few obvious ones:
To me my most important plan of attack is to raise my SALES PER CLICK. If I can beat my competitors at this game, then I will be able to bid higher than my competitors and still make a profit. I continually watch my logs, add new products / content, tweak my website, etc. Since I started an all out campaign to increase my Sales Per Click, I have seen an increase of over 50%. It's pretty nice to get to a point where your competitors can't afford to bid as high as you.
Another obvious solution is to tweak your listings. Wording of your PPC ad can really make or break the profitability of the Ad. Also Negative Keywords in Google Adwords, etc. can accomplish the same goal of weeding out unwanted traffic.
Constantly monitor your bids so your not paying too much. Some use automatic bidding tools such as GoToast, but I suggest doing it manually, unless you don't have the time. Also, Adwords are just as important to monitor as Overture.
I change my Adwords bids sometimes 3-4 times a day.
I do think that for me the most important method above is the increasing of Sales Per Click. With the buying of AltaVista and Fast by Overture, it appears that PPC advertising will be more prominent than ever. I would love to hear your thoughts on improving PPC ranking.
1) Keyword in the title if possible - to make clear what you offer (or what you don't on ambigious words)
2) USP in the title - low prices / quality service etc
3) link into the page selling that product, not the homepage
4) research synonyms etc
5) monitor the traffic you get from normal search results - are there new keywords there?
6) are people looking for something you don't offer and coming to your site - can you offer it / resell what someone else offers? (i.e. take bad traffic and make it into a sales opportunity)
7) investigate selling abroad via other PPCs
No doubt you are doing most of these there - and there are other threads via the search option about this, too.
Good points. The researching of the Keywords is VERY important.
The biggest thing I am guilty of is sending people to my homepage instead of the individual product page. But, I am slowly getting them all changed. When I first signed up to the PPC's, I didn't have a clue.
More than anything, I would like to ask if anyone has any thoughts about the future of optimizing PPC's in the wake of Overture's recent deals?
How will this change Overture results?
How might it change what Google is doing?
