Over the past few weeks a number of my clients have been asking me about ways to discover what pay per click keywords their competitors are bidding on. There are sites out there which offer you the chance to do exactly that.

They say that discovering what keywords your competitors are using may be your best source of competitive advantage in online advertising, claiming advertisers with larger keyword lists win more traffic at a lower cost per visitor than their competition. While in some cases this may be true, the key to building a successful Ad words pay per click campaign goes beyond the keyword research. It is difficult to believe that this keyword data will be 100% accurate, without having access to a competitors Ad words you can only estimate which keywords and on which match types they are bidding on.

Ok, so you have your keywords. Now you need to build the pay per click campaign, within which the single most important factor to take into account is quality score. How the account is structured, the breakdown of the keywords, relevancy of ad text and quality of landing page all go towards determining your quality score. Remember, quality score is Google’s reward for relevancy, the greater the quality of your advertising the cheaper your CPC’s are going to be. It’s also important to remember that while having a good keyword list is important, every website is different and each company has different needs to the next. To me it would be of no benefit to copy a competitors keywords and do a quick job.

I suppose, as a pay per click account manager, working for a leading internet marketing agency my view is going to be a little biased. Building an Ad words campaign that is going to succeed for your company is not something to take short cuts on. The expertise behind Ad words is knowing how to market your keywords effectively and how to manipulate the data that comes back when the pay per click campaign is live. Imagine a beginner at golf, he buys all the fancy clothes to wear, top of the range clubs and balls but doesn’t have the skills or experience to back it up……….all the gear and no idea!

Click Consult are an expert Pay per Click (PPC) Management Company with over 25 years combined PPC Management experience. Contact us for more information or call 0845 205 0292

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Conversions make or break a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign and, for most advertisers, it is what PPC is all about. Although PPC can be good for brand building (i.e. with content network campaigns and banner/image ads), the ultimate aim for a company’s PPC campaign is conversions, whether that be an online sale, a submitted quotation form, a registration or a telephone enquiry. There is nothing more important than seeing the numbers you want to see in the ‘conversions’, ‘conversion rate’ and ‘cost per conversion’ columns of the campaign summary. For instance, if the profit margin for a product you sell is £20, the moment your cost per conversion creeps above the £20 mark, your PPC advertising ceases to be cost-effective.

As PPC Account Managers, we live and die by our conversion rate. But the one thing that keeps us awake at night with a cold sweat is the perpetual struggle between volume of conversions and cost per conversion. If you obey the steadfast laws of PPC, then a high number of conversions and low cost per conversion (or CPA) do not go hand-in-hand. A high volume of conversions come from capturing a great deal of traffic, all of which must be paid for by the click. It also comes from tolerating ad groups with high cost per conversion values, as they chip in with a substantial chunk of conversions when you look at the bigger picture. Pausing these ad groups may bring the CPA down, but it will also bring the number of conversions you get down.

The most obvious question, therefore, is how do you get the volumes of sales, completed forms, registrations, phone calls etc without your CPA spiralling out of control? Rest assured, there is a way and it can be done! Indeed, here at Click Consult, we do it all the time. But if you want the holy grail of PPC advertising – aka a campaign that generates a vast number of conversions without a ridiculously high CPA – then you’re going to have to give us a conversion yourself! Call 0845 205 0292 or complete our quick enquiry form on the left and ask us “How do I get a high number of conversions and a low cost per conversion?”

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