Advanced Pay Per Click Techniques

Advanced Pay Per Click Techniques (how to get the most out of your more popular keywords);

The search marketers who are getting the most out of their pay per click campaigns are utilizing syndication, geo-targeting, keyword match type and day parting.
Lets take the example of the keyword phrase “online dating” to show the benefits of multi-variable targeting. Say you’re running an online dating site and you want to see, how well that term performs in various cities. You can go ahead and do all the traditional testing but that’s not going to help you drill down your campaign. You need to know how well that term does in various cities because the bid rates and conversation rates may be drastically different.

Once you have the city information identified, you’ll want to segment based what search engine you’re using for that city (Google in New York, Yahoo in San Francisco, MSN in Boston), and then by what time of day offers the best conversion rate. Are lonely people searching for dates on Friday night in New York using Google or at work on Monday morning on Yahoo after a sad, lonely weekend? We don’t know but we also don’t run an online dating site.

Here is some information on the various types of targeting we can perform:

• Geo Targeting: Works using the user’s IP address. Country mapping is very accurate, while state mapping is accurate up to 50 percent of the time and city mapping is accurate approximately 30 percent of the time. Users can also do location mapping using Latitude & Longitude coordinates and a radius. There is some Geo targeting that is based on cookies.
• Syndication Targeting: You can split the traffic that comes to you from Google. For example, you can elect to have ads only show up on Google’s SERP, syndication sites (like AOL search) or on content sites.
• Day Parting: Track the results for each day. Focus on the conversion rate. You can look not only by day, but by time as well. Do customers search in the morning, afternoon or at night? Once you track the conversion rates, you can tell Google to only run your ad on certain days and/or times. You can also change the bid price up or down per day.