Pay Per Click (PPC) tips from Christine Churchill - Optimizing Paid Search Quality Score

We met up with Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance, a Search Marketing strategy company based in Dallas, Texas, recently and asked her on some quick hit PPC tactics. In this video, Christine Churchill shares some of her formula for optimizing paid search for your business.

Complete blog post can be read here:
http://www.instantetraining.com/blog/2010/09/keyword-research-christine-churc...

Bob Tripathi: You do a lot of PPC. I saw you in the lab yesterday.
Christine Churchill: That was a fun lab.
Bob Tripathi: That was a fun lab, yes. One of the things you saw in the lab, there was this one guy who had a wrong account structure. How much of that do you encounter with your work where every day people go in and start PPC because it's spending, right? Spending shouldn't be that tough. But getting the account structure, getting the foundation... How much do you see in your daily work with clients?
Christine Churchill: Sadly, more often than you think. Part of the problem is that when people set up their own accounts, they get defaulted into things that they don't even know about. And that's kind of what happened to the guy yesterday. He got defaulted into both the search and the content network. Which should always be a basic rule in pay per click is always separate search and content or display networks. Because the people searching on those, or just the whole nature of those two worlds- they're complete worlds, a different part, and the ads are different, the landing pages need to be different, everything. They should be separated all the way out. So that's a classic error. The other thing in that particular case the individual did was they had broad keywords, no negatives at all, and they had very general broad keywords. So he was paying for money that he probably just wasted, they weren't even relevant. In this case he was a LASIK vision, and unfortunately he had "golf" as a search keyword. It might work in a different environment, but not there.
Bob Tripathi: So one suggestion is to structure your account. Keep display content and PPC separate. And the second is actually not having everything on "broad" but do a negative match.
Christine Churchill: Well do the negative, but just recently Google came out with a broad match modifier, which is a new match term. It just came out in July 2010. And what that allows a marketer to do now is while putting their keywords in, if they put a plus sign in front of the keywords... Say they want to show up for search queries of apple pie. They would put in at their keyword box "+apple + pie." And then they would show up only for instances of "apple" and "pie" in the same query. So it's a way of getting more traffic than the "exact" and "phrase match" but not go crazy with expanded broad match. It gives the advertiser a little more control.
Bob Tripathi: And I mean even Google isn't for ...a lot of times they just match it to the best match they have. I mean one of the solutions I see is you would have one keyword, but "broad," exact" and "phrase" and then have some of that control. Would you agree to that?
Christine Churchill: Yeah, I think the only change I'd make is, because I still like doing the different match types in a PPC account, but I find less uses of the regular broad match now that they have the broad match modifier. I think I'd put the broad match modifier in and still do the "phrase" and "exact" just because it gives me some more data.

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Education

Tags:

• pay per click
• google
• quality score
• keyword research
• ppc
• christine churchill
• bob tripathi
• instantetraining