Today we will talk about a strategy that is ESSENTIAL in establishing a successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign, and it has to do with something called the “Common Keyword Technique”. Using this technique, you will be accomplishing several things:
1. You will increase your Quality Score
2. Your Cost Per Click (CPC) will decrease
3. Your ads will be given a higher priority and shown more often, due to increased relevancy
4. Your Click-Through Rate (CTR) will increase, meaning that you will increase your conversions
5. See #1.
This is a very fundamental concept in PPC marketing, and it will drastically increase your chances of actually profiting from your campaigns. So, how do you go about using this method?
Well, first you need to understand that any given campaign, regardless of which advertiser it is with, is divided into two levels. These levels are the overall campaign level, which is where you organize all of your campaign settings, and the ad group level, which is where you group all of your similar keywords together to keep them organized.
The “Common Keyword Technique” comes into play at the ad group ‘level’, and what you basically want to do is to make sure that all of your keywords in an ad group have at least two keywords in common to ensure that your ads are as relevant as possible.
For example, say you are targeting the keyword “how to build a dog house”. You could structure your campaign something like this:
Campaign Name: DogHousePlans(dot)com
Ad Group: Build A Dog House
Your keywords would look something like this:
build a dog house
[build a dog house]
“build a dog house”
build dog house plans
[build dog house plans]
“build dog house plans”
dog house build
[dog house build]
“dog house build”
how to build a dog house
[how to build a dog house]
“how to build a dog house”
how to build dog house
[how to build dog house]
“how to build dog house”
build dog house
[build dog house]
“build dog house”
(The [] parentheses indicate “exact match” for a given keyword, and the “” marks indicate “phrase match”.)
You could then prepare an ad that looks like this:
Build A Dog House
Want To Build A Dog House
By Yourself? Find Out How.
DogHousePlans(dot)com
You will notice that all of the keywords within this particular ad group have three words in common, build, dog and house. That way, when someone makes a search like “how to build a dog house”, that ad will come up and those words will be highlighted, which also increases the chances of your ad being clicked. Just like in article marketing you always target very specific keywords, with PPC advertising you want to make sure that your ad groups are tight enough to provide maximum relevancy.
The bottom line? If you can’t use all of the major keywords in your ad group within your ad title and description, your ad group is not tight enough. You will be much better off removing the ‘odd’ keywords and creating a separate ad group for them, and this will drastically improve your relevancy, Click Through Rate, and thus your Quality Score, which of course means cheaper CPC.
