New Year’s Health Tips for Paid Search

Click, sit, sip and groan; the sounds of being back at work. 

After a couple of weeks binging and gorging on all things festive, you pop your work suit back on and it suddenly looks more like a number from Mr. Motivators spandex collection. Now’s the time to say hello to the dreaded holiday season bulge and decide to drop the excess.

So what has this got to do with your online marketing?

Well, in a word: everything.

In this new year of resolutions and calorie burning, you may want to have a look at what weight and baggage you can shed from your online marketing strategy too, and in particular your PPC output.

According to the boffins at e-consultancy.com, 34p in every pound spent on PPC is wasted on irrelevant keyphrases That’s just over a third of your total PPC spend wasted as a result of bad practice; a staggering amount given the current post-recession climate where preventing wasted spend is an indefinite crowd pleaser.

So to avoid spoiling you budget with wasted spend, here are a few health tips for keeping your paid search account in tiptop health:

Avoid general keyphrases and focus on specifics:

Analytics packages like Google Analytics are free to use and there really is no reason why your spend shouldn’t be informed by solid metrics and industry trends. Looking at seasonal fluctuations in particular, allow you to incorporate reactive or proactive strategies into your PPC spend well in advance; companies whose products or services spike in Christmas being a good example of this. Being as granular as possible with analytics data might be time consuming but pays in the long run.

It’s positive to be negative:

Build in negative keyphrase lists from the offset. A big proportion of that wasted 34p PPC spend comes from ads appearing for search queries you shouldn’t or would rather not appear for, subsquently attracting irrelevant clicks and inflating your cpc through the Quality Score ranking method. For example, credit card companies adding the term ‘scam’ to negative keyphrase lists is good for brand protection. Another example would be an engineering recruitment agency competing for ‘job vacancies’ across all sectors; adding in terms like ‘media job vacancies’ prevents wasted spend across industries that aren’t applicable to your product.

Ad it up:

With belts being tightened all round, expectations are that consumers will be a lot more savvy when it comes to getting a good deal in ‘11. Remember, information is key when it comes to online purchasing and your PPC ad copy is no exception. Staying true to your word is immensely important if you’re going to get return on the PPC spend you put in and this means honouring your ad copy 100% of the time with any deal or offer visible and accessible on your website. Failing to do so results in high bounce rates, poor conversion, ill feeling towards your brand and ultimately wasted spend.

Just like a fresh faced gym goer has to embrace a new workout regime, for maximum ROI the best route is to commit and immerse yourself in PPC activity from the offset.

Streamline your key phrases, your copy, your spend and the result? Balance sheets that look lean in all the right places for 2011.