The relationship between keywords and search queries is the foundation of Google Ads paid search marketing and organic SEO campaigns.

Most keyword research articles seem to mainly focus on teaching keyword research for optimizing for organic SEO.

So this article will help brands learn how to target and manage keywords more effectively in paid search campaigns as well.

The Basics of PPC

Mastering PPC means finding high-volume keywords that have little competition. It’s easier said than done, and it’s why a lot of PPC campaigns fail miserably.

The amount you pay for a keyword will depend on 4 factors:

• Volume: The number of times that keyword is searched for every month
• Keyword Difficulty: How competitive or difficult the keyword is
• CPC: This will depend on what various companies have decided they will spend at auction for their ad to show for the keyword
• Quality score: This is based on how relevant your ad copy and landing pages are to each term the user searches for.

Define Your Keyword Strategy & Goal

Before we begin keyword research, the first step is to define our goal for our ad campaign and then the keyword strategy. To get ourselves heading in the right direction, we can ask questions like:

• Why are we creating an ad campaign?
• What product are we selling?
• Who is our audience?
• How would our audience think about this product?
• What do we want to accomplish with this campaign? What is our end goal?

PPC Keyword Research

There are several things you’ll need to consider when performing PPC keyword research on the front-end of a PPC marketing campaign:

Keyword Terms: There are several types of keyword terms that should be addressed in PPC research.

In addition to branded terms (e.g. your brand name and product names), you will need to consider non-branded terms that describe your products or services.

Long-Tail Keywords: Instead of focusing on broad keywords, a better approach is to look for long-tail keywords—key words and phrases that are more specific.

For an online shoe retailer, this might mean avoiding keywords like “shoes” and focusing on key phrases like “red shoes” or better yet, “red Nike sneakers.”

Negative Keywords: You also need to create a list of negative keywords, or keywords that you don’t want your ads to appear for.

An accurate list of keywords is important because it keeps ads relevant. Negative keywords also help your organization make the best use of PPC ad spend.

Look at Your Website Content

Some of the best keywords for your campaign can be found by looking at your website content and landing pages. Which words on your site stand out and represent our product?

Are there any possible variations or synonyms of these terms?

Example: If you are a coffee distributor, variations of “coffee” that you sell may include “dark roast,” “espresso,” “house blend” and “Sumatra.”

These terms are more specific than just “coffee” and will yield better search results.

Short conclusion

When your keyword research is complete and you have relevant keywords and negative keywords for campaigns, organize them into ad groups.

Each ad group should follow a specific theme or revolve around a certain product or service that your organization offers.

Organizing similar keywords into ad groups allows you to create effective ads and target them to the proper audience and their searches.

Conducting keyword research is important for building out effective PPC campaigns that lead to conversions and increase ROI.

Click Through Rate (CTR) is a measure of how effective your Ads and keywords are at getting users to click through. It’s calculated by dividing clicks by impressions:

CTR = CLICKS / IMPRESSIONS

A high AdWords CTR is always desirable. You should take action to improve it for all your ads and keywords and look to maintain a CTR of 1% for your Search campaigns.

When a user turns to a search engine, they have a question and are looking for an answer. They are expressing a need or want.

What makes search so great is users are telling you exactly what they are looking for! They’ve already decided they need something and are now trying to find it.

Creating a relevant paid search ad is your first step as an advertiser in fulfilling that need.

If you have a:

• High CTR, users are finding your ad to be highly relevant.
• Low CTR, users are finding your ad to be less relevant.

The ultimate goal of any PPC campaign is to get qualified users to come to your website and perform a desired action (e.g., make a purchase, fill out a lead or contact form, download a spec sheet).

How CTR Impacts Ad Rank

CTR is not just an indication of how relevant your ads are to searchers. CTR also contributes to your Ad Rank in the search engines.

Ad rank determines the position of your ad on the search results page.

What affects CTR?

Ad Position
This is perhaps the most important factor to your CTRs. If ads are in the top positions, they’ll consistently have higher CTRs than ads that rank at the bottom.

Even the most highly targeted ads that rank at the bottom will have low CTRs.

So it’s important that positions for your Ads are high and that you have a high Ad Rank if you want to achieve good CTRs.

Ad Relevance
Relevant ads attract more clicks. When users see that the ads are related to what they are looking for, they’ll click through and that will impact CTR positively.

CTR impacts ‘Expected CTR’, one of the factors to Quality Score performance.

And with combined ‘Ad Relevance’, another Quality Score factor, this can help you achieve good quality scores that are a good performance indicator for your account.

Ad Extensions 
Ad extensions give your ad more prominence in the search results. They make your ads stand out from competitors’ and encourage users to click through to your website.

Adding many targeted ad extensions for sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets etc improves ad quality. And this leads to a higher Ad Rank which results in higher click through rates.

Bids
Bids are one of two factors to Ad Rank. And your Ad Rank determines the click through rate for your ads – with higher positioned ads getting a significantly better CTR.

So, to achieve a higher position in the search results, you should bid higher to secure a higher position and also achieve a good CTR.

Search Terms
Each keyword will drive multiple searches to your ads. Some of these searches will be relevant and some won’t.

And they’ll each have their own CTRs which you can see when you check the search terms report.

Short conclusion

To restate the former, remember that high CTRs don’t necessarily mean that you’ll have high conversion rates or a high amount of conversions.

Similarly, an increase in CTRs don’t signal that things are improving for the account.

You need to ensure that the ad copy you have matches what the customer might expect to see on the landing page. If not, they’ll more than likely bounce off your page, costing you however much that click cost.

An issue that is becoming more common as PPC gets increasingly competitive is escalating costs per click (CPCs) in niches that had previously been relatively uncompetitive.

So how would you even start to reduce your CPC costs?

Simply lowering your bid probably won’t do the trick (in the beginning at least), so what strategic steps can you take to improve your competitiveness while still keeping your wallet healthy?

Max CPC vs. Actual CPC

Before we start, it’s best to make the distinction between Max CPC and Actual CPC.

Max CPC is the maximum amount of money that you’re willing to spend on a click. Actual CPC is what you end up paying.

What Causes High CPC?

There are three primary considerations:

High Competition

Google Ads runs similarly to an eBay auction. Every time someone searches, the auction takes place. Several things determine the winner, but your bid is one of the most significant factors.

Industry

In general, industries that have a higher value per conversion have higher average CPCs because advertisers are willing to pay more per click.

Quality Score

The end result is a score from 1 to 10 that directly affects what you will have to pay to reach a specific position on the page. The more relevant you are, the less Google will charge you to rank high.

Depending on your industry, products and targeted location, the difficulty level of achieving lower CPC might vary, but here are some general tips that, if applied properly, should help you:

Click through rate

One of the things that I love about pay-per-click marketing is the speed. We get to see the results of our efforts very quickly, and we can then determine which direction to take.

It’s therefore vital that you frequently create new ads to compete against your winning ads. What do I mean by that? Don’t settle for a CTR of 6% with one winning ad, try to improve it.

Lower bids

Lowering your bids is the most basic way to lower your Google Ads campaign average CPC. By lowering your bids you give Google a lower Max CPC to charge for every click your campaign receives.

In case your campaign is on an average position better than three and it is currently limited by budget, you could afford to lower your bids, as lower bids would imply a lower average CPC.

Focus on improving quality scores

Many times if you’re taking over a new campaign, re-organizing the highest volume campaigns to focus on click-through rate as well as conversion and creating more relevant groups can greatly improve your Quality Scores and lower your costs.

Long-Tail Keywords

Another solution to high CPC is to bid on keywords where your competitors aren’t. The more specific you can get with your keywords while still being relevant, the cheaper your cost per click will become because fewer people are bidding.

Short conclusion

Ultimately, even though paid search is becoming highly competitive because of the targeted nature of the channel and the great results many advertisers are seeing, you can still find ways around high CPCs to create profitable campaigns in many crowded niches.

If you manage pay-per-click search campaigns in Google Ads, you know that it can sometimes be a tough nut to crack. Especially when it comes to the mysterious quality score.

The Ads quality score is made up of a variety of layers that have a major impact on the success of your ads. But what exactly is it? How is it calculated?

What is a Google Ads Quality Score?

A google quality score is a combination of factors which describe your ads overall relevancy to the customer. Marketers with high-quality scores have better ad ranks.

Just like organic search traffic is ranked on a results page, paid ads are ranked as well. The outcome of your score depends on three main criteria:

• Expected Clickthrough Rate: The chance that your ad campaign will be noticed and clicked by a consumer.
• Landing Page Experience:How convenient and organized your layout and sitemap are, as well as the overall pertinence of the site to the consumer.
• Ad Relevance: The level at which your advertisement matches a user’s search query and intention.

The score is reported from 1-10 and is meant to help marketers refocus energies on increasing customer impact.

Why is quality score so important?

A higher Quality Score is important because it has enormous influence over the cost of running your ads, as well as your ad rank.

If there are two advertisers competing for clicks on the same keyword, the advertiser with the greater Quality Score will usually rank higher than the other when bids are the same.

The advertiser with the inferior Quality Score will therefore have to bid more to maintain a strong ad rank.

What influences quality score?

There is no exact formula for improving Quality Score; it is influenced by a number of account factors, including:

• Landing page relevance and quality
• Click-through-rate of your ads
• Historical account performance
• Relevance and accuracy of ad text
• Relevance of your keywords

Nobody outside of Google actually knows which of these is most important or has the most weight in the Quality Score algorithm, so the smart course of action is to optimise your account for all of them.

How to improve your quality score:

Super Small Ad Groups

Google recommends using 15 to 20 keywords per ad group. However, this does not work in most cases. In fact, ideally, you should have only one keyword per ad group.

Even if you have a large account, you should consider using this strategy for 80 percent of the keywords that you expect will get the most traffic.

And, you guessed it, you should always use this approach for keywords with the “Rarely shown due to low quality score” warning.

Optimise your landing pages

You can improve your Quality Score by ensuring your landing page is an accurate and relevant continuation of the statements or promises made in your ad, as well as the initial search query.

If a user searches for “Size 9 Batman Trainers”, they are clearly a fan of the caped crusader; more importantly, though, they are making a very specific product query.

For such a query, a higher Quality Score is likely to be given to advertisers whose ads reflect this and reference this query directly (e.g. “Batman Trainers”), and whose landing page delivers on the promise of the ad.

Decrease your landing page load times

Landing page load time has become an important consideration in calculating Quality Score. Take the time to check the load times on each of your landing pages and see what can be done to reduce them.

Some of the factors that contribute to longer load times are: meta refreshes, slow redirects, multiple redirects, interstitial pages, slow server, large page size.

Short conclusion

It’s not enough to work hard and rank high, you’ve got to maintain that score once you achieve it. Google checks back on websites regularly, but your quality score changes slowly.

This can be deceiving to companies who think they’re doing well when really things have been slowly slipping. By monitoring your keywords, scores, and Google’s algorithm changes, you have a better chance of staying on top of things.

If you do any kind of business online, whether you’re selling products or services, generating leads to push through your funnel, or even engaging an audience without pitching anything directly, I’ll bet you already know the vital importance of conversion rate optimization.

But why bother with conversion rate optimization services at all? Why not handle it all yourself? In general, there are two kinds of clients.

On the one hand, there are those that already have an active conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy but want to improve it.

Alternatively, there are people that recognize the importance of CRO but have put off launching a CRO campaign for any of a multitude of reasons – lack of time, knowledge, or even money.

If this sounds familiar and you’re having trouble figuring out the reason for your dismal online performance, then what you need is more likely some professional help in website conversion rate optimization or CRO.

How to know if you need conversion rate optimization services?

Is your conversion rate way below the industry average?

It’s difficult to know what is a good conversion rate for your site unless you have a point of comparison. If you’re not sure whether your conversion rate is good enough, it might be a good idea to check the average in your industry.

Of course, you should always take industry averages with a grain of salt. You can’t expect your relatively unknown online store to fare as well as the brand giants.

But that’s not saying that you can’t learn something from their figures, as well. For instance, you can use the average conversion rates in your industry for benchmarking your own performance.

Do people arrive and then almost immediately leave your website?

Abnormally high bounce rates on your key pages are another tell-tale sign that you might need some optimization help.

A high bounce rate occurs when your visitors land on a web page and end up doing nothing else before hitting either the back or close button on their browsers.

Online visitors come to your site with their own set of needs and expectations. When your site attracts a disproportionate amount of unqualified traffic, you can expect that these visitors will immediately leave when they see that your site is totally unrelated to their search.

Is your content, site structure, and user experience outdated?

Often, all it takes to know if your website has become dated is by comparing it with other sites in your industry.

Unless you’re trying to pull off a retro look, there really is no excuse for making your online visitors feel like they’ve time-warped to the early 2000s (or even 2010s) when they land on your site.

If this sounds like your website, then you know it should have been updated eons ago. It’s also a sign that you need to seek the help of a conversion rate optimization professional if you want to redesign your website not just for aesthetic purposes but for improved conversions.

Two questions before you get started with choosing CRO services

Before you start to put together your CRO plan, you need to answer these two questions:

• Should I hire a company offering conversion rate optimization (CRO) services or build an in-house team?
• What are my CRO goals?

Short conclusion

Knowing when to seek professional help for your conversion rate optimization needs is the first step to solving conversion-related problems in your online touchpoints.

By learning the reason for your website and online business’ lackluster performance, you can decide on the best course of action that fits your needs and budget.

Search marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach a target demographic. As such, lowering your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) has never been more relevant than it is today.

CPA refers to the amount of advertising or marketing money you spend to acquire leads who respond to a call to action (CTA) or click on your site.

In other words, it refers to the amount of money you’re going to spend to get a paying customer.

How to lower your CPA?

Work on your bids

Applying good AdWords bidding strategies is an essential part of maximising the performance of an account and achieving key business goals.

There are two types of bidding strategies and both can be used together or alone depending on what you want to achieve.

• Automatic bidding: with an automatic bidding strategy, AdWords will automatically adjust your bids to achieve the objective of your campaigns as it sees fit i.e. when it is expected to perform best.
• Manual bidding: differing from automatic bidding where you allow AdWords to do the work for you, a manual bidding strategy gives you complete control over the maximum CPC which can be adjusted according to historic data and general account performance.

Separate by platform

Rarely (if ever) should you target desktop, mobile and tablet all at once. User experiences and behaviors vary across platforms, and people on a particular device may be more inclined to engage with your content.

For example, a desktop user that enjoys fashion content at home may prefer other types of content while on-the-go and using a smartphone.

Experimenting with platform-specific promotions can help you learn where your audience is most engaged, enabling you to better focus your campaigns.

Platforms have different levels of competition for clicks (e.g. cost-per-click, or CPC), so targeting the right audience, on the right platform, at the most cost-effective CPCs will ultimately lower your CPA.

Qualify your ad text

One of the best ways to reduce your CPA is to analyze your existing ad text and modify or get rid of ads that are attracting too much of the wrong traffic.

Look for ads that have a high CPA and consider whether or not they appeal to your customers. For instance, consider whether a more specific ad that includes more details and syncs better with your landing page can reduce the number of stray clicks and improve conversion rates.

Match your keywords

Good click through rates (CTR) on your ads are great but not so great if your visitors don’t convert. However, a great way to lower CPA is to analyse your existing ad copy by looking at which ads are driving traffic of no value to your site.

When a user searches on Google, let’s say for instance “digital transformation services glasgow” and these keywords are included in both the ad copy and on the landing page, AdWords will display the ad with the keywords emboldened.

With the keywords standing out and indicating relevance, this increases the chances of the user visiting your site and making a conversion.

Learn, revise, re-test

There is no magic formula to increase your conversion rate or get more users to engage, but there are best practices that can guide you in the right direction.

If your CTR is low, check out our infographic on optimizing thumbnails and headlines for maximum engagement. If CTRs are strong, but your conversion rate is low, our infographic on creating content pages that convertcan help optimize your landing page to encourage intended actions.

Never underestimate the value of learning through a rigorous trial-and-error process. And when the numbers finally do hit home, be sure to analyze what is working so you can replicate it on subsequent campaigns.

Short conclusion

As with most things, every situation is unique. Some strategies may work for you while others may not. Regardless of the strategies you choose, be sure to regularly monitor and evaluate so you can continue to improve on performance.

Ad Groups are an essential component of pay-per-click marketing. Creating effective Ad Groups can help you to drive more traffic and leads at lower costs, while increasing the number of conversions on your site.

What is an ad group?

Basically an Ad Group is the container for your keywords in your search marketing campaigns. PPC advertising is structured such that you first create an account, then create an ad campaign, which is home to Ad Groups.

The Importance of Ad Groups

OK, so we now know that Ad Groups are basically a structural component within your PPC account. So why should you bother with them? What makes them important?

Ad Groups contain a lot of important stuff!

Most search engines look to your Ad Group organization to determine:

• Which keywords your ads will show in response to.
• What your ad will say when it runs.
• Where the visitor will be taken when they click on your ad.

You’re deciding:

• Who to advertise to.
• What to say to get their attention.
• And how you’ll make your final pitch when you set up an Ad Group.

How to create ad groups that really work

“Really work” here means Ad Groups that cost less and convert more. Basically, in creating an Ad Group, you want to ensure that you’re offering integration and consistency:

• Integration – Create a system where you’re consistently creating keyword groups, ad text, and landing pages that are tightly integrated with one another.
• Consistency – This integration should lead to messaging consistency. Your ad text and landing pages should speak directly to the searches users are typing in to reach your site.

Ad group best practices

Start by clustering your desired keywords by themes. These should be as narrow as reasonably possible to avoid overlap in targeted searches.

Before transforming your keyword clusters into ad groups, consider Match types, audience targeting and messaging.

Match Types

For best efficiency and to simplify negative matching, it is recommended to create duplicate groups by match type. Known as match type mirroring, this best practice entails each group having only terms of one match type.

Audience Targeting

If you want to target different user groups based on their behavior, you will need to further clone your groups based on audience targeting.

As audience targeting can be also set at campaign level, this is recommended more for higher level campaigns.

Google’s responsive search ads received a makeover that could revolutionize the platform’s A/B testing and dramatically reduce advertisers’ workload.

At a glance, the new ad type will allow advertisers to create search ads with more text and automatically test different variations so that Google searchers see the best performing ad combination.

What are responsive search ads?

The responsive search ad is Google’s latest text ad type. One of the unique features is its use of machine learning to determine your most effective ad combinations.

Google does this by automatically testing different variations of your ad using the group of headlines and descriptions that you set.

It is worth mentioning that Google won’t always show all three headlines at once because it depends on the device the searcher is using.

A smaller screen size (like a mobile device) may only see two headlines. However, your responsive ads will always show at least two headlines and one description.

To sum up, the key takeaways:

• You can write up to 15 headlines and 4 unique descriptions
• The descriptions and headlines can lead to 43,680 versions of the same ad
• Automatic testing of different ad variations is done for free via Google’s machine learning
• Automatic selection of the ad is tailored to the user’s browsing history, device, and other behaviors

Benefits for advertisers

• The driving force behind these changes, Google says, is improved performance in advertising campaigns.

• This is achieved through the machine learning that Google performs on the multiple options that advertisers have submitted.

• As a result, Google’s learning can establish the best possible combination for the customers advertisers are trying to reach with their campaigns.

• Responsive search ads are also able to display more relevant text to customers; we will discuss more on how this is possible below.

• The complete removal of the necessity of manual A/B testing, helping to simplify the overall process of creating responsive search ads campaigns that will drive conversions.

• Adverts will also appear in more searches than is currently deliverable by standards Adwords campaigns.

Short conclusion

While Google updating their products and services always causes mild concern amongst those who rely on the company for their marketing efforts, it’s fair to say that the introduction of responsive search ads is undoubtedly a positive one.

So if you have the option to begin experimenting with Google’s responsive search ads, it’s definitely worth a try.

With the rise of business technology, traditional marketers now have many options to support their marketing campaigns.

Various digital advertising tools now offer highly targeted and massive reach capabilities. For example, Google’s Display Network can reach over 2 million websites to display your business’ advertisement.

Display advertising (including clickable ads that appear in website margins) has many advantages that can improve your business’ online presence by:

• Effective targeting
• Flexible costs
• Measurable results

All you need to do is carry over your knowledge of your audience so you can determine where to reach them online.

Few words from Google:

Our job at Google is to make sure that marketers and agencies are armed with the best tools to help you plan, create, buy and target, and measure and optimize your campaigns.

• Massive Scale: With significant global coverage your message will reach more of your target audience, in more places, more often.
• Measurable Performance and Maximized Results: The Display Network delivers measurable performance for both branding and direct display clients; maximizing their results.
• Contextual Engine: A key driver of the success is Google’s ability to harness the power of the best contextual engine on the planet to place ads against the most relevant content.
• Custom Networks through Effective Targeting: Keyword contextual targeting, along with other targeting technologies available on the Google Display Network such as placement targeting and audience targeting, allows you to build and target to your own custom networks and to find and connect with the right customers more effectively and more often.
• Transparency, Actionable Insights and Value through Auction: In terms of campaign management, tools such as the Placement Performance Report, Conversion Optimizer, and Conversion Tracking provide complete transparency into what’s working, and what isn’t. This gives you the actionable insights you need to help you effectively optimize your campaigns.

Why should you use the Display network?

Branding: this is by far – to my opinion, the top benefit of Display advertising. Just by being present and visible on the web can create trust and knowledge of your brand.

Put your brand out there, make your ads scream: “Look at me, my products are great!”, and half of the work is done!

Create demand: by being visible on the GDN, you can create the need or demand for your product. It is not a surprise that today, people are so influenced by what they see (on TV, in the street, social media etc…), we want what we see.

Specific targeting: as said above, the multiple targeting options offered by the GDN is a big bonus! Needless to say you can also combine and mix those options to be as targeted as possible.

Why does that matter? By using several targeting options, you certainly decreased the audience of your ads BUT the audience is so targeted, that the users are the ones who are the most interested in what you have to sell.

Traffic on the website: it is so easy to click on an ad just as when we click the ‘Like’ button on Facebook.

Because the number of impressions of your ads increases a LOT when you do Display, the CTR goes down. But not to worry, the GDN can generate a lot of clicks!

Flexible Cost

There are two payment plans available to advertisers who use display ads. The plans don’t have a contract, unlike traditional print advertising.

With all the ads, you set the price you want to pay when your ad is displayed and it then goes to auction. Your ad price is compared to other advertisers’ set price, and the winner gets the ad spot.

Cost per click bidding (CPC), the most widely used, means you’ll be charged for each click on your ads.

Cost per thousand impressions bidding (CPM) means you will be charged based on the number of impressions your ads receive.

Short conclusion

You have the ability to receive daily or weekly updates and track the number of times your ads are clicked. The tracking tools help you assess whether your ad campaign is performing or if you need to tweak your efforts. Display ads gather a lot of data that provides you with reports on traffic to your website, brand awareness, and sales and conversions.

Google has launched a new ad format on image search named shoppable ads. It is a test right now where Google will highlight multiple products available for sale within your sponsored ad among Google Images results.

The format features multiple headlines followed by a large carousel of images and a description below. Users can swipe through the set of images in the ad.

Clicking on any of the images brings up a Google-hosted page of all the images and their captions. A card with a link to the advertiser’s site is at the bottom of that page. Just like any other text ad, clicking on the headline takes you to the advertiser’s site.

Why this can be good for advertisers

Google has tried images in search ads in several variations — visual sitelinks being the latest. This bigger, splashier format is high impact and demands little effort from advertisers, particularly in verticals likely to already have a diverse selection of high-quality product imagery.

Whether this is rolled out will depend on performance, of course. Bigger ads (RSAs anyone?) typically lead to higher engagement rates. And Google knows from Shopping ads that images can drive high engagement.

Info from Google:

Connecting you to visual shoppers with new ad formats on Google Images

We’ve seen that 50 percent of online shoppers said images of the product inspired them to purchase, and increasingly, they’re turning to Google Images.

That’s why we’re investing in shopping solutions across more of our properties, like Google Images. When we launched Shopping ads on Google Images, we wanted to provide advertisers with a new way to reach shoppers where they’re looking for more visual inspiration.

Now, we’re introducing shoppable ads on Google Images as another way we’re helping you connect with consumers. This new format enables you to highlight multiple products available for sale within your sponsored ad among Google Images results.

We’re currently testing this on a small percentage of traffic with select retailers, surfacing on broad queries like “home office ideas”, “shower tile designs”, and “abstract art”.