Christine Churchill, president, KeyRelevance spoke about managing a paid search campaign.
(Coverage of the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference continues at Murdok Videos. Keep an eye on Murdok for more notes and videos from the event this week.)
Know what you want out of a campaign before you set it up. “There’s a difference between running a campaign and running an efficient campaign.” When using keywords longer phrases often convert better. Single word terms rarely perform well. Look at popularity as traffic potential and review keyword competition. Group keywords into “buckets” of related terms and create a separate keyword list for negative keywords. Keyword matching options from Google include “broad match” which is a default option. If your ad group has the keyword “used car” it would appear when a users search query contained either term. If your keyword is in quotation marks for “used car” your ad would appear when a user searches for the phrase used car. If your keywords are in brackets [used car] your ad would appear when a user searchers for the specific phrase used car. Yahoo has standard match, which is exact match, plus singular and plural variations along with common misspellings. Advanced match is a combination of phrase and broad match. To get started figure out a budget and if you are new start small and build. “Optimizing can improve quality score and you do need to care about quality score,” Churchill said. All major search engines have tools that are adequate to build and manage successful campaigns. Third party tools are also available and many of the best tools are proprietary and are developed by private paid search firms. “PPC doesn’t require a huge budget to be successful online. Big budget does not equal success,” Churchill said.
