Pay per click optimization is something that every single PPC marketer needs to do. It doesn’t matter whether you’re brand-new to this form of advertising or if you have been doing it for quite a while. Optimizing your campaign is going to mean the difference between making a little bit of money and making a LOT of money!
Of course, you probably know the more general advice of highly targeting your keywords, ads, and landing pages. Optimization goes beyond that and into the realm of expanding winning ads and getting rid of those that are “losers.”
Part of this is tracking your ads to see what is converting. There are a few different ways to do this — some more technical than others. There are certain software or script programs that will work with your advertising program to tell you exactly which keywords are converting and leading to sales. You can also do this on a less technical level by adding tracking IDs to the end of your URLs.
You will need to check your conversion to decide when to cut your losses at prearranged time — probably every day. A good rule of thumb is to drop a keyword if it has not converted after 200-300 clicks. That way you are no longer losing money with the slow converting keyword. If the keyword has converted, but not well, you might decide to expand on it and see how it does then. You might find that with some tweaks you can bring it into a higher level of profitability.
Finally, there are likely to be those ads that are simply much better for performers than most of the others. The old 80/20 rule definitely holds true when you’re talking about pay per click optimization! When you have these super winners, you will definitely want to expand upon them. Create other ads on other pay per click engines to grab that traffic as well. You can also start to focus on ranking for those great terms through natural search engine optimization.
The more you cash in on these highly profitable terms, the better. It’s all about expanding on the winners and getting rid of those money drainers. Even if those low performing keywords only take a dollar here and a dollar there, it all adds up. Focusing on your campaigns this way will do great things for your wallet.