There’s a lot going on in Google’s search results and they seem to add more every day. If we look at the above-the-fold results for a search for “fruit baskets,” we can see regular text ads, a map with local results, PLA and the first few organic spots. With the right product photos, the PLA are the most eye-catching part of the page which is a huge advantage with all the clutter.

Steps to Set Up Google Product Listing Ads

Since you already have your feed created and submitted after reading part 1 of this series, setting up your PLA ads will be a breeze.

Link Your Accounts

First, link your AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts.

Log into your Merchant Center account, then click on Settings in the left navigation and AdWords from the menu that pops up after clicking on Settings. On the AdWords page, enter your AdWords customer ID. This looks like a phone number and can be found at the top of the page when you are logged into AdWords. You can connect Merchant Center to multiple AdWords accounts if necessary.

Create a New Campaign

Next, create a new campaign within AdWords to house your PLA.

Product Listing Ads should have their own campaigns for ease of management. Your PLA campaign needs to target Google Search at a minimum and can also target Search Partners. The campaign does not need to target the display network as PLA are not show there.

When you set up the campaign, select the checkbox next to Product in the Ad Extensions section of the page. The Merchant Center account you connected to your AdWords account should appear.

Don’t worry if you forget to do this step when you set up the account. You can always come back and do it later here or through the Ad Extensions tab within the campaign.

If there are products in your feed that you do not want used in your PLA, you can filter the available products by navigating to the Ad Extensions tab. This may be useful if you have products that do not have compelling images, have low margins, or that you are contractually prevented from buying ads for. From the Ad Extensions tab, click on the product extension to edit it, then check the box next to Filter.

This will give you the option to create filters based on fields in your feed. Use these filters to include products in your campaign, not to exclude them.

Create Ad Groups

Now comes the fun part. You need to decide the best way to organize your ad groups. You may choose to do this by the product brand, type, condition or any combination thereof.

You should organize your ad groups in a way that allows you to easily view the performance data in a way that is helpful to your business. So, if you sell new and vintage handbags, you may want to create ad groups such as:

• Gucci – New
• Gucci – Vintage
• Chanel – New
• Chanel – Vintage

Organizing your ad groups like this will allow you to quickly see your conversion rate and other performance data for each brand and each type. Be creative with your ad group organization so it gives you the most value when reviewing the performance metrics. But, don’t make your ad groups so granular that the data becomes meaningless. You can use up to three product targets per ad group so use them wisely.

Once you’ve decided how to organize your ad groups, create the first ad group in your PLA campaign and name it appropriately. When asked to enter ad text, click the radio button next to Product Listing Ad.

At this point you will have the opportunity to enter a promotion which will be displayed with your PLA. You can use this section to advertise a coupon code or other special. You can enter a promotion now, later or never. Having a promotion will not affect the serving of your ads.*

Uncheck the “all products” setting that is selected in the auto targets section of the ad group set up page. Once the ad group is created, you will select the products that should be targeted in this ad group.

You do not need to enter keywords for the ad group. Google will use your product feed to match your products to (hopefully) appropriate search queries.

Enter an appropriate CPC bid for the ad group

After saving your new ad group, you will be directed to the auto targets tab, provided that you deselected the all products auto target while creating the ad group.

Click the add product target button to add the product filter(s) for this ad group. Select the field to be used to match each criteria you enter, and enter the criteria in the text box. The text you enter here must match what is in your feed exactly or your PLA won’t show. 

Repeat this process for all ad groups.

Create Ads

With PLA, you don’t need to write ad text like you do with normal AdWords advertising. Instead, Google creates ads based on the data in your feed. But, as mentioned above, you can test special promotion text.

If you don’t have any promotions you want to test, or only have one and you entered it while creating your campaigns, you don’t have anything else to do for this step. If you do want to run more than one special at a time, navigate to the ads tab to create a new promotion by selecting product listing ads from the new ad drop down.

Enter your new promotion and save the ad. Just don’t forget to update the ad when you stop running the special.

Creating multiple product listing ads is ideal for testing how different promotions affect your CTR and conversion rate since you won’t be doing traditional ad text optimization.

Launch

Okay, maybe not just yet. If you think you may need some negative keywords (you probably do), you’ll want to wait until part three of this series in which we will discuss negative keywords and feed optimization.

But, if you want to do a test run and start collecting data so you are ready to act on the optimization recommendations, make sure your budget is set to something you are comfortable with so you don’t overspend. If you aren’t ready, pause the campaign and come back for part three.

*Product listing ads do have quality scores much like regular AdWords advertising. Utilizing promotions to increase CTR may improve your PLA quality score, thereby increasing your ad position and decreasing your actual CPC.

If you sell any products through your website, even if you have good organic rankings, you need to properly set up product feeds to allow your products to appear in the shopping results (free) and in the PLA (paid) to gain as much real estate as possible on searches related to your products.

There is still a lot of opportunity with PLA, as many companies aren’t participating yet. Generally I only see large brands using PLA. This isn’t because PLA are more expensive or exclusive to these big sites (they aren’t).

I think it’s because people either haven’t taken the time to set up their feeds properly or because they are confused by the process. My goal is to persuade you to try PLA and to make the process more clear for you.

Even though I’m a PPC gal, part one of this series will just focus on setting up your product data feed to get your products listed in Google’s shopping results. Once you have that part done, setting up PLA only takes a few more steps. We’ll focus on that process in part two of the series.

Where Will My Products Be Displayed?

Google Product Search

If you click on a shopping result from a search results page or search directly from google.com/shopping, you will see results that are driven by product feeds submitted to Google by sellers. You do not have to pay to have your products shown here, but you do have to optimize your feed, get (real) positive reviews, and offer competitive pricing to rank.

These “free” shopping results are as free as the regular organic results — you have to put time and resources into properly optimizing to compete. This post will discuss how to properly set up and submit your product feed. For more information on optimization for Google Product organic ranking factors, see this post.

Google Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads (PLA) are to product search as regular AdWords ads are to organic search. PLA are also a great way to get pictures of your products on the search results page if you aren’t ranking well organically in Google Products.

If you have a unique product or something that is very eye-catching, Product Listing Ads may be much more effective than regular text ads — though I recommend running both ad types as PLA aren’t displayed for all searches. Part two of this series will focus on setting up PLA after you’ve submitted your product feed.

As I mentioned, there’s still a lot of opportunity here, even in markets where companies are using product feeds or PLA. For instance, to continue with the tea theme, while many retailers are featuring teapots, none are featuring loose leaf teas. This demonstrates a great example for Teavana.com which has ads in 1st position for both teapots and loose leaf tea searches. If they were to add PLA for their loose leaf teas, they may see a dramatic increase in CTR and (hopefully) sales.

Sounds Great. How Do I Get In?

The first step is to set up your Google Merchant Center if you don’t already have one. Google Merchant Center is simply the place where you will upload your product feeds and see data related to them. There are other features available in Merchant Center, such as e-commerce search for your site and Google Checkout, which you may choose to use after you are familiar with the service.

For now, simply sign in to your Google account (use the one you use for AdWords) from the Merchant Center page. You will be asked to fill in your account information. You don’t have to do that now, but you will want to before you upload your feeds. You will also need to verify ownership of your url by placing a snippet of code on your site before you can use Merchant Center, just like you have to do with some other Google products. Now you’re ready to create your product data feed.

What is a Data Feed & How Do I Create One?

A data feed is simply a file that contains pertinent information about your products. If you have a large number of products or if you are more technically inclined, you can use an xml file to submit your feed. If you don’t have many products or do not have the ability to create an xml file, you can create a data feed in Excel or with a Google Doc spreadsheet.

This template has the standard columns (fields) required and recommended for all data feeds. Additional fields are required if you are selling clothing/apparel or media. You can learn about the requirements for each field here.

Some fields have very specific requirements that you will want to pay close attention to. If you don’t fill out all of the fields properly, your feed may not validate. Even if your feed does validate, your products may not be shown in the Shopping results and your PLA may not display. Make sure to review all of the requirements, but pay special attention to these fields:

• id: This field must be unique for each product. Even if you submit more than one feed, you cannot use the same id for another product in another feed.
• title: This will be displayed to users, so it should be compelling and descriptive. But, it cannot include marketing copy such as “free shipping.”
• description: This field is displayed in the shopping search results, so it should be written with the buyer in mind. But, you must follow Google’s editorial guidelines closely.
• product_type: This field is used to classify and categorize your products. You will use Google’s category taxonomy to list all of the categories your product fits within.
• link: If you want to use utm parameters to track performance in Google Analytics, you will need to append the urls in this field with your desired parameters.
• image_link: This is the image that will be displayed with your listing, so you want to use clear, compelling images. Also, if you offer products in multiple colors or styles, use an image that reflects the correct product color or style for that listing to increase your click-through rate.
• expiration_date: If your products are only available for a limited time, the expiration date field can be used to automatically remove products from the search results when they are no longer available. By default, products expire after 30 days. You cannot use this field to extend that period. You will need to update your feed at least once a month to ensure consistent inclusion.

There are also some fields that are very helpful to retailers such as the sale_price and sale_price_effective_date fields. Using these two fields, you can schedule sales so your prices are automatically updated when sales begin and end.

The shipping and shipping_weight fields are only required if you do not have flat-fee shipping for all products. If you do, you can set this in your Google Merchant Center settings and do not have to include these fields. You can include this standard shipping information in your Merchant Center settings and override it with product-specific shipping information in your feed on a case-by-case basis.

The tax field is flexible and can accommodate very complex tax structures if needed. If your tax structure is simple, you can enter it in your Merchant Account settings. This field is only required in your feed if you want to override those Merchant Center settings. Make sure you include tax information in at least one of these two places. If you do not, your products will not display.

Once you have all of your product information in your spreadsheet, save it as a tab delimited .txt file. If you have multiple feeds, make sure to name the file something that will identify which feed it is.

Uploading Your Feed

Hop back over to your Merchant Center account and click on Data Feeds from the left navigation. Click the New Data Feed button. Here you are simply telling Google that you are going to submit a feed. Choose the country in which you want your products to display (you must submit a feed for each individual country because shipping and tax information will most likely be different).

Choose googlebase as the format and enter the name of your .txt file. Click on the manual upload link and upload your .txt feed file. Google will now process and test your feed. Depending on the size of your file, this can take a while. If you only have a few products, it happens very quickly.

Click back to your dashboard to check the status of your upload. Next to the file you just uploaded you will see a linked status. You can click on that link to get details about the feed validation. If you have any errors, fix them and re-upload your file. Once your feed is validated, it can take up to 24 hours for your products to start appearing in the search results.

Once they do, you’ll want to do some quality control to ensure all of your products are being included. You can see all of your products that are appearing in the search results by going to http://www.google.com/products?authorid=[your Account ID]. You can find your account ID along the top of any page within your Merchant Center account. If your products aren’t displaying, check these common reasons.

You can also click on the Products link in the left-side navigation within Merchant Center to see the status of each product. If you have more than 10,000 products, this page will display 10,000 random products. You will need to search for specific products to see their status. The list of possible statuses and their definitions can be found here.

Updating Your Feed

If your products or prices change frequently, you’ll want to upload a new feed each time there are changes. You can schedule the feed upload within the data feeds section of Merchant Center by clicking the create schedule link. In order to schedule the feed update, your feed file will need to be hosted on a url that Google can access. It can be password protected so the file is private.

If your products or prices do not change frequently, you can simply schedule the feed to update monthly so your products don’t expire after the 30-day standard expiration. Or, you can manually upload the feed once a month. If you forget to update your feed, your products will expire after 30 days and you will stop receiving traffic.

Tracking Performance

We’ll get deeper into monitoring and optimizing later in the series, but you should begin properly tracking performance now. Within Merchant Center, you can click on the Performance link in the left navigation to view impressions and clicks for each product. To get more useful information, you will want to either use utm parameters in the links in your product data feed or set up a filter in Analytics for referrals that include google.com/products.

Stay tuned for part two of this series where we will discuss the steps required to set up Product Listing Ads now that you have a working product feed.

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Keyword Strategy

First, you will want to determine which keywords you want to focus on for the holiday season. You can do this by looking at your analytics trends to see where you generated increased traffic and sales in previous years. Or, you can look at a tool like Google Insights to see historical trends for your keywords. For instance, if you are a cookware retailer, looking at this graph from Google Insights would tell you that there is a huge potential for traffic and sales during the holidays. Take the keywords with the most traffic potential and see how they are performing for you. Choose the keywords with the most traffic potential that also convert the best for you and focus your efforts on them. The last thing you need to do is get a lot of clicks on keywords that already aren’t good converters. During the holiday shopping season there will be a lot of “lookie loo” traffic that won’t convert so you could overspend if you don’t have a solid strategy in place. You may also want to take a look at the keywords with the most traffic potential that don’t convert well for you. If there is a chance that you will get a large number of clicks on marginally performing keywords that are profitable the rest of the year but can quickly become costly if they get more traffic, you will want to implement a strategy to protect your campaigns. This may involve either pausing those keywords temporarily or reducing your bids so you are not as competitive. You will also want to do some keyword research and see if there are any gift or holiday-specific modifiers that you could add to your keywords to maximize results. For instance, you could add “gift,” “gift set,” “Christmas sale” and “holiday sale” to your top performing keywords to try to capture some additional targeted traffic. For ease of management and ad targeting you will want to put these keywords in new ad groups. That way when the holidays are over, you can easily pause the entire ad group instead of individual keywords. Also, you will be able to more closely target your ad text to match the user’s query. It may be tempting after you do some keyword research, but don’t bid on really broad terms that don’t apply to your offerings just because there is a lot of traffic. Bidding on words like “gift ideas” or “gifts for women” would probably be a terrifically great way to lose a lot of money. An additional step that will be beneficial is to do some competitive analysis on the keywords you have chosen to focus your efforts on. See what specials your competitors are offering and see if you can match or beat them. Shoppers are always looking for a great deal — but even more so during the holidays — so it is important that your pricing is competitive (or better). If your competitors are offering free shipping, you should too since 75% of customers prefer to shop with merchants offering free shipping. Find any way you can get an edge and capitalize on it.

Bidding Strategy

Once you’ve settled on the keywords you are going to focus on, and the ones you aren’t, you will need to determine what to do with your bids. If you have a large profit margin on some of the keywords, you may want to run experiments to test bid increases to generate additional sales volume. If you do not have room in your margins to pay more than you are for clicks, you will want to keep a close eye on performance over the coming months as competition increases and your competitors bid more. You may find that some keywords that are normally profitable for you are not during this season. If you have a product that usually results in residual income from additional purchases or a subscription, it may be worthwhile to bid higher on some keywords and take a loss on individual sales during this season in exchange for the higher income throughout the next year. Ultimately your strategy is going to be very unique to your business and may include bid increases or decreases. If you aren’t comfortable making changes based on assumptions about performance during the holiday season, setting up AdWords Experiments is a great way to test bid changes without having to commit.

Landing Page Strategy

If you’ve waited until the last minute to ready your campaigns for holiday traffic, you may not have time to put up new landing pages. Also, you won’t have a lot of time to test, so throwing up unproven new landing pages may not be a great idea anyway. So, you will want to see if there are any updates that can easily be made to your existing landing pages to make sure the on-page message matches that of your ads. If you mention any specials or discounts in your ads, make sure those are reflected on the landing pages. If there are any small design changes you can make that will make users more likely to buy or buy more, now is the time. For instance, if you do offer free shipping or a percent discount for large purchases, incorporate that message into your landing page. Don’t assume that people will read it in your ad and wait until they have something in their shopping cart to see if it’s true. Customers need to see the offer in the ad and on the landing pageto increase the chances of conversion.

Ad Strategy

I don’t recommend completely abandoning your current high-performing ads in favor of all-new ads focused on holiday specials. Instead, you should approach holiday ad optimization in the same way you do all ad optimization. Keep your highest performing ad active and add 1 or 2 active variations (depending on ad group volume) with copy advertising your holiday specials. You can have additional variations paused and ready to activate as needed. Keeping a close eye on your ad performance is even more important than ever during high-volume shopping seasons. You will want to quickly replace underperforming ads with new variations so you don’t lose out on potential sales. You may want to create a custom alertto notify you as soon as an ad reaches the impression or CTR threshold you set. To do this:

1. Click on the Ads tab then on the Alerts button.
2. Choose Create a custom alert.
3. Set the parameter that you would like to track.
4. Make sure the email notification box is checked.

Now you don’t have to worry about obsessively checking your ads every day. As long as you have set up proper parameters, you can simply make adjustments when you are notified that the threshold has been reached.

What’s Next?

Remarketing, of course! This is a great time to capitalize on the additional traffic you’ll be getting by implementing remarketing campaigns. Users will be doing a lot of online shopping and will be visiting a lot of websites so they may forget about yours, even if you do have a great offer. So, tag them and remind them of your great offer so they can come back to convert. Or, offer them something even better if you can. Use our remarketing guide to walk you through the process of creating your remarketing strategy. You will want to be careful with your remarketing strategy here though as many people are buying for others so the chances that they are going to buy add-ons or additional services relating to the product they purchased is smaller. Make sure you limit the cookie duration so you don’t annoy your customers. Finally, have a process in place to change your ads and landing pages as soon as your specials are over or key dates have passed. Many people are on vacation during the last week of the month, so I frequently see companies running ads and landing pages that are outdated. For instance, if your ads or landing pages announce free shipping until December 23rd, those ads and pages need to be changed by December 24th. Or, if you have Santa on your landing page, he needs to head back to the North Pole before Christmas is over. This may seem like a simple concept but it is easy to forget. Within AdWords, you can set up rules to pause your holiday ads:

1. Click on the Ads tab, then on the Automate button and select Pause ads when.
2. Change the requirement to Ad Text and enter a phrase that is included in the ads you want paused (e.g. Free Shipping for Christmas).
3. Change the Frequency to one time and select the date and time at which the ads should be paused.

Don’t forget that the holiday shopping season doesn’t end at Christmas so you can launch ads with new offers to replace the ones you ran in December. People look for deals for weeks after the holidays are over so you should continue your push through January with appropriate ad text, landing pages and offers. Furthermore, you can gain a lot of intelligence about your advertising strategies and find new opportunities by analyzing the keywords that generated traffic during your holiday push. Don’t waste that data by neglecting to do an in-depth review of how all of your keywords and landing pages performed. You can keep the sales coming throughout the year by implementing changes based on intelligence gained from all of the holiday shoppers. Happy holiday advertising!

Setting up AdWords Remarketing

Identifying Your Audiences

Audiences are the groups of people you want to target or groups of people you want to exclude from targeting. Audiences will be unique to your business. You will need to determine which pages will be triggers to retarget users and which pages will remove that retargeting — each of these is an audience. You will include or exclude these audiences for each ad group to ensure you are targeting the right people. This is achieved with custom combinations, discussed in detail below.

1. Audience: People who visited a key page

• If a user viewed a page with details about a specific product or service, target them with ads about that offering

Custom combination: People who added an item to a shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase

• The “added to shopping cart” audience included and the “complete purchase” audience excluded
• Entice these users back to complete the purchase with a free shipping or discount offer

2. Audience: People who signed up to receive information about future product releases

• When the product is released, target these users with ads for that product

Custom combination: People who visited part 1 in a content series but didn’t return for part 2

• The “viewed part 1 page” audience included and the “viewed part 2 page” audience excluded
• Delayed targeting (discussed below) can be used to schedule targeting at optimal intervals

3. Audience: People who submitted your contact form

• When users land on your thank you page, they become part of this audience

Custom combination: People who view your contact form but don’t submit it

• The “viewed contact form” audience included and the “viewed thank you page” audience excluded

Audience and custom combination targets are set at the ad group level. So, you do not need a campaign for each combination; you can create a retargeting campaign with ad groups for each custom combination or free-standing audience that you have identified. You do not need to put any keywords in retargeting ad groups as the ads only display based on the audiences you define.

Creating Remarketing Lists

Once you have identified your audiences/custom combinations and created the ad groups for each, you will navigate to the Audiences tab within AdWords. If this tab isn’t visible, click the arrow to the right of the tabs and check the box next to “Audiences – Display Network only.” Here you will select your retargeting campaign and the first ad group you want to set up.  Alternatively, you can click on Shared Library and Audiences from the fly out on the left side of the Campaign view within the AdWords UI. Click on the New Audience button and choose Remarketing List. Remarketing lists are how you define your audiences and generate the code that you will place on your site to cookie visitors.

Create a remarketing list for each of your previously defined audiences. You will want to enter a descriptive title for ease of management, and you may want to use the description in case there is a question about what audience you are targeting.

Membership duration is how long the cookie should stay active once the user is tagged. This will be different for every business and may be different for each target. If your product has a long buying cycle, you may want to increase the membership duration. However, you do not want to retarget people for long after their decision process is complete as you may annoy those who no longer want to see your ad.

Tags are the code snippets that you will place on your website. For this initial setup, you will choose “create new remarketing tag” each time. When we discuss delayed retargeting at the end of this post, we will use “select from existing tags.” Save the new remarketing list and proceed through your list until you have a tag for each audience. Once you’ve created the remarketing lists you will click on the list name under the “Tags/Rules” column to access the code. I recommend pasting each tag into its own notepad file and saving it as the name of the Audience. This will help you organize everything for implementation in the website.

Send the tags you saved along with detailed instructions to place the code only on the specific pages indicated for each tag to your developer. Make sure he or she knows to place it between the body tags and specify that it should not replace any other AdWords or Analytics tracking code you have on the website. These tags are used in addition to the conversion-tracking and statistics-tracking codes you may already employ.

Make sure to verify that the correct code was placed on each page. This step is vital and frequently done incorrectly, leading to poor ad targeting.

Creating Custom Combinations

Once your remarketing lists are created, return to your retargeting campaign, choose the first ad group and visit the Audiences tab again. Select “custom combinations” if it isn’t already selected. At the bottom of the white box displayed on this page there is a link that says “new custom combination.” Click this link to create your combination of audiences.  Enter the name of the custom combination and a description. In most cases you will leave “all of these audiences” selected in the first drop down.

Click on the “select audiences” drop down and change the “interest category” drop down selection to “Remarketing lists.” Now you want to add the remarketing list that initially tags the user and click the OK button. In the case of the example shown below, we are going to target all users who placed a product in the shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase. So, we want to add the remarketing list named “Used Shopping Cart.” After saving this setting, click the small blue “add another” link and change the first drop down to “none of these audiences.” Here you will add the remarketing list that removes the cookie that was placed by the tag from the previously included remarketing list. In our example below, we add the remarketing list named “Completed a purchase” because we do not want to retarget people who did convert.

Remarketing Ads

Once you’ve assigned custom combinations to each ad group, you’ll want to upload text and banner ads that match the goal of the ad group. Remember that remarketing ads are being served to people who have already seen your website. Also, you may be targeting people who took specific action on your website. Your ad creative needs to reflect this. Depending on the audience you are targeting, you may want to use ads that:

• Offer a discount or free shipping as incentive to complete an abandoned purchase
• Offer a complementary product if they’ve recently purchased from you
• Remind the user why you are better than your competition
• Show the user a photo of a product he or she viewed
• Ask a recently converted user to subscribe to your newsletter for product updates
• Try a different message than used in other ad campaigns

Testing ad creative is even more important with remarketing campaigns because you are appealing to people who didn’t perform an action you wanted them to perform. They have already seen your website and left for one reason or another. Maybe they were just interrupted and need a reminder about your business. Or, they may not have liked your prices, shopping cart or product selection. You need to carefully test your ad creative to ensure you are appealing to the users instead of leaving them with a negative view of your brand.

Remarketing Landing Pages

In some cases, you can direct users back to regular pages within your website when they click on remarketing ads. For instance, if you are retargeting people who looked at a pair of jeans but didn’t add them to their shopping carts, you could retarget them with an ad featuring the jeans and bring them to the product detail page for those jeans when they click on the ad. But if you are offering something new in the ad, such as a discount, or if your ad has drastically different messaging than is reflected on your website, you will want to develop custom landing pages for your remarketing efforts. The landing pages need to deliver what is promised in the ad, such as a code for free shipping or a list of products related to the one they recently purchased from you.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping is a setting at the campaign-level that allows you to limit the number of times your ads are displayed to each user in a 24-hour period. There is no magic number for frequency capping, although it is believed that a rate between 7 and 12 impressions per day is ideal. You will want to test how changes to frequency capping affect your campaign. I recommend starting with a larger frequency cap and reducing it after you gather initial data. Continue to gather data and make frequency changes until you find the point where your campaigns perform the best. The default setting is “no cap on impressions,” which will very quickly make your target users feel stalked, so you will want to change this setting to a lower number right away.

Remarketing Campaign Optimization

Your remarketing campaign must be optimized like all other advertising campaigns. You will want to test various ads and landing pages as well as different custom combinations. You may find that certain combinations don’t produce the results you need for your ROI goals. If you no longer want to target those audiences, you can simply pause the associated ad groups.

You may also find that some combinations perform very well but the ads are not running in high positions. In that case, you may decide to increase the bid for that ad group to see if you can generate additional sales at a profitable level.

Finally, you will want to vet the Networks tab in your remarketing campaign, just like you do for regular display network campaigns. You will most likely find that there are websites that simply do not perform and should be excluded. Alternatively you may find sites that result in a large number of conversions, in which case you would add them as managed placements so you can test bid changes on an individual level.

Advanced Tagging

Once you are comfortable with setting up remarketing lists you may want to try more advanced targeting techniques. The possibilities are virtually limitless if you have a large website. Additionally, you can manipulate the duration settings of tags to create more advanced scenarios, such as delayed targeting.

Delayed targeting is useful for many businesses. Some examples are businesses that:

• Sell products that expire or need to be replaced at various intervals
  • Target users every 3 months to schedule an oil change at your car dealership
• Offer complementary products that users may buy after using the first product they purchase
  • Target users with baby clothes ads a month after purchase of baby bottles
• Sell products that are only purchased during specific times of the year
  • Target users one year after they purchased travel to a vacation destination
• Have a series of educational blog posts scheduled every two weeks
  • Every two weeks, target users who saw the previous week’s post

To set up delayed targeting, you will create two remarketing lists with the same tag. For this example, we are going to target people for 30 days, 15 days after they read a blog post.  To accomplish this, we create a regular remarketing tag to cookie the people who view the blog post page. The duration for this tag will be 45 days (30 days plus 15). Then we create a second remarketing tag but select the “Select from existing tags” option and select the tag created in the previous step. Set the duration for this tag to 15 days. You will place this tag on the blog post page and create an ad group for this targeting. Within the ad group you will create a custom combination and include the 45-day duration tag and exclude the 15-day duration tag. This will prevent your ads from displaying to users for 15 days after they are cookied but will allow the ads to display for them on the 16th through 45th days.

Conclusion

Whether you’re doing simple retargeting to increase conversions or advanced retargeting to maximize all possible opportunities, AdWords remarketing is an easy-to-use interface. The most difficult part of the process is identifying your audiences and custom combinations. Once that is complete, optimization is only slightly more involved than a normal display campaign. Adding retargeting to your advertising program can accomplish any number of goals if implemented correctly.

Have you tried retargeting? If not, do you plan to soon?

We’re starting off with our very own Pamela Lund, who just said her first challenge — not tripping on the stage — is officially over. She is rocking those awesome black heels.

She’ll be discussing remarketing, which targets people who have already visited your site. Users can be segmented for advanced targeting, and it’s audience-based.

Using it, you can do the following:

• reinforce your brand
• get additional conversions
• adjust your messaging
• offer complimentary products and services
• increase ROI of other marketing efforts
• increase social engagement

How are users targeted in Google? You set up audiences and figure out the pages you want to cookie users. Say you wanted to target someone who put something into their shopping cart but didn’t convert. You can focus on them and adjust your advertising.

You can also do this for people who viewed a key page or a specific product. There are many different sample audiences.

You can decide how much users are targeted using member duration, which is unique for each audience. You focus the duration of advertising based on their buying cycles. You can also take advantage of delayed and customized targeting.

Ads must be different than regular campaigns. You can be less formal and more creative with your campaigns. These people are already interested in your brand, so be more fun with it.

Make sure you’re testing a variety of designs and text. You need to find out what works, so don’t be afraid to try different things.

She said that unique landing pages might be necessary. If you have a product or service add-on, you need a landing page for it. The landing page must match the mood of the ads or users will feel like they were directed to the wrong page due to lack of cohesiveness.

Even if you’re not ready, start tagging people, because as soon as you launch your creative campaigns, you won’t want to wait

On Oct. 7, she’s going to put up a step-by-step guide for setting up an AdWords remarketing campaign on the BlueGlass blog, so check it out!

“Don’t be a creep,” Annie Cushing adds about remarketing. Love it.

Next up is Tim Mayer!

He’ll be discussing why you should use PPC in combination with SEO.

Search marketing is the umbrella term of SEO and PPC, which tells him that we should be looking at them in unison.

Some people start lower down on the page and miss PPC, which is why there’s a discrepancy between click-through rates for SEO and PPC.

So how do you test whether you should use PPC? You have to see if you should target brand or non-brand KW. You should alternative buying and not buying the ads so you can get a lot of different data points. It’s easy to figure out how many clicks you got, but the impression counts are very off, especially if you’re doing local searches.

Now a few PPC best practices tips. Consistency is very important. Ensuring that your ad groups are tight is a lot of work — it’s difficult to get what’s typed into the search bar show up in the results in bold on the left side of the site titles.

Once you figure out what works in PPC, you can use this for your SEO campaign.

You should have consistent messaging on your landing page. Contrary to that, adding diversity can really work, as well. Ad diversity takes a different route and can show a high click-through rate.

A lot of people look at what they can control in AdWords or AdCenter, and one of the biggest jumps you can get is just landing page creation and testing. There’s been a huge leap in technology in things that can help small businesses. Some tools include Unbounce, which does A/B testing, and Crazy Egg, which uses heat maps and eye tracking.

Some A/B testing tips include making sure you don’t use A/B testing to replace product sense and testing your competitors’ user interface changes.

For much higher lead volume and higher conversions, segment your traffic. Try different landing pages for different types of traffic (direct traffic, SEO, PPC, etc.).

You really need to ensure you use robots.txt correctly. Once you get into segmenting, you can get into a lot of trouble with search engines for having a lot of pages that basically say the same thing.

Now it’s time for Kunal Das.

He’ll be discussing AdCenter Tips for Bing and Yahoo! He’s going to highlight valuable traffic out there that’s not on AdWords.

Tip #1: Be in the race! Bing powers 30% of the marketing share. Bing serves ads much more conservatively and has really high traffic. Here are some tips about getting more volume.

You have to drive differently. So you have a car that’s going to get you from point A to point B. But you also have a motorcycle that’s also going to get you from point A to point B, and you know it drives very differently. The same can be said for AdCenter and AdWords.

Tip #2: Bid explicitly by match type. When you bid on broad, do not leave the phrase on exact blank. It’ll inherit whatever the broad bid is. You want to bid more for exact. Bid explicitly for each match type in the system.

If you’re using certain third party tools to track performance by match type, force the match type with explicit $0.05 bids. This forces the keyword to serve on broad.

Tip #3: Be aggressive and bid boost. A best practice is to start off strong instead of moderately. You want your keywords to have the best fighting chance possible to get good ranking and establish good position, and you do this by coming in with higher bids than you normally would.

Also, bid boost your target audience. Exact match converts best, and on AdCenter, broad match converts second-best. Use its unique incremental bidding feature to boost your bid for a specific age and gender.

Tip #4: Utilize Parameters in ads. Across AdCenter, people tend to copy and paste their Google campaigns. KW does not work on AdCenter, so make sure you’re using tactics that work for AdCenter.

Tip #5: Expand exact keywords. This is integral to maintaining and improving your campaign’s performance in AdCenter. The best practice is to build out your key word set and build out as many exact-match keywords as you can. Do this by utilizing the adCenter search query report and augment it with other search engines.

Tip #6: Get smart with Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, which is a keyword research and optimization tool. You can find the Excel plug-in at Bing.com, which he guarantees will be the first result. I see what he did there.

Tip #7: Get to know their Desktop Tool. Upgrade to 7.9, which addressed some usability issues. How do you use this with Macs? You can partition your hard-drive to run both Mac and Windows on the same machine, or you can install Parallels 7, which allows users to run both Mac and Windows.

Tip #8: Balance your budget. “I feel like I should be telling our government the same thing.” You can use the budget module, budget pause notifications and the new daily budget.

Tip #9: Negative keywords on AdWords works much differently than negative keywords on AdCenter. Confirm there are no negative conflicts in accounts. Manage mobile devices and content separately from desktop paid search. And finally, ensure that landing pages include your keywords in visible HTML text. A lot of times, because AdCenter is so stringent, make sure your keywords are highly relevant.

Now it’s time to charge my laptop and grab some lunch. See you for session 3!

Bigger (Bidding) Isn’t Always Better

Frequently I see very high bids set where they don’t make sense; generally people tell me they set them that high “to get the most clicks.” The rationale is that if you bid higher your ad will be placed higher and you’ll get more clicks. This may be the case for some but it’s rarely the best idea. If you have a limited budget and you bid higher, you may get fewer clicks because you will exhaust your budget faster, like happened with this campaign mid-July. (Note: I didn’t do this )

Testing bid changes can result in huge savings if done properly. In most cases you have a specific budget to spend and need to get a certain level of return on ad spend. Whether your desired result is traffic or conversions, you want to get the most for the lowest cost possible. If you have a bid set high enough to allow your ad to display in the first few positions for relevant keywords, undoubtedly you will get some clicks. But, at a lower bid you may be able to get more clicks if your budget is limited. Or, with a lower bid you may be able to reduce your cost per acquisition (CPA) without dramatically decreasing your conversion volume. The principle is simple but the execution isn’t.

The Sweet Spot

The “sweet spot” is the ad position where you get the most value. If you are optimizing based on conversions, this will be the position where you get an acceptable level of conversions for the lowest CPA. If you bid higher, you may get more conversions at an acceptable CPA but the CPA may be high enough that those additional conversions aren’t worthwhile.

For instance, let’s say you sell a product that costs $200 and you have a 2% conversion rate*. You may increase your bid and get additional clicks and that are still profitable for you. The increased revenue may be tempting:

However, those extra 5 conversions actually come at a very high price:

If you knew you could get a high volume of conversions at a $75 CPA you may decrease your bid. You would optimize your campaign to maximize the number of clicks you get at that lower CPC to increase the conversion volume. But, if you don’t know that you can get a large percentage of your conversions for a much lower cost, you may leave your bid at the higher level. This is why testing is so important.

To find the “sweet spot” where your cost per click is low but you are still generating an acceptable level of clicks you need to test many bid levels to find where you get your desired actual CPC and conversion rate. The best way to do this is using AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) so you only impact a percentage of your impressions with the bid changes and so you can easily undo the changes if need be.  Once you’ve created your experiment you need to determine how much you are going to reduce the bids. There are two possible strategies:

1. Start with small bid decreases to minimize the chance of a major shift in traffic. This tactic will require longer to test as you’ll need to run a test on the small bid change, report on the results then run another test with the bid decreased slightly more and report on those results and continue repeating the test until you find the bid at which you are generating the most clicks for the lowest CPC. This is the best strategy if you can’t risk a major decrease in click volume.
2. Start with a large bid decrease to see an immediate impact, then if click volume decreases dramatically begin testing progressively higher bids until you find the sweet spot. This is the best strategy if you have a higher tolerance for changes in click volume and want to see faster results.

Things to Consider

• CTR. One concern I hear regularly when I recommend decreased bids is that the CTR will go down resulting in a decrease in Quality Score. AdWords normalizes CTR by ad position, recognizing that CTR will be lower in lower ad positions, therefore you are not penalized as long as your CTR is in line with what others are getting in that position.
• Impression Share. If you decrease your bids too low you may end up not getting any clicks because you aren’t bid high enough to participate in the auction. Keep a close eye on your impression share to make sure you aren’t losing too much with your decreased bids.
• Ad Copy. Different ad copy works better in different ad positions. You will want to test different ad variations in different positions to see what works best in your market.
• High Ad Postions Don’t Equal More Conversions. I have experienced ads in the top 1 or 2 positions having lower conversion rates, albeit higher traffic overall, than ads in lower positions. This may be due a host of reasons including people just clicking the first result without really looking at what the ad is for. As you test ad position you need to keep a close eye on conversion rate and bounce rate to see which position is optimal for your site.

If you’ve been following my posts on PPC you’ve no doubt noticed a trend which is testing, testing, testing. You should always be testing something in your ad campaigns and you should test every facet of your campaign to make consistent improvements in performance. Never be satisfied with “good enough” just because you are meeting your goals. When you meet your goals, create new more difficult goals and optimize until you reach them.

*For the sake of keeping the math simple we will assume a constant conversion rate although it does fluctuate and should be tracked along with CPC and position changes.

If you’ve ever looked at a new client’s account only to find that they have added every keyword in every match type and every possible word order plus they are running 10 ad variations at once and have their campaigns day parted to the point that you need a decoder ring to figure out when the ads actually run you know what I’m talking about. Your campaigns may not be in that bad of shape but since summer is here I think it’s time to ask if your campaigns need to go on a diet to reduce bloating and make them more manageable. If they do, here are 7 places to cut the fat and make your campaigns more lean.

1. Find keywords that have never had any clicks or that have so few impressions they aren’t worth the space they’re taking up. Often if you are short on time to optimize your campaigns you’ll only look at the keywords that are costing a lot so these will go unnoticed. These keywords will have low quality scores because of the low impression level or low CTR. They aren’t providing any value to you anyway so delete them.

2. Find keywords with extremely low quality scores that have not resulted in conversions. If you have already moved them to more granular ad groups and tried optimization to improve them and they are still very low, delete them. If they aren’t resulting in conversions and you have put in a considerable amount of work to improve them, they are most likely costing more time than they are worth.

3. Look for empty ad groups. This can happen after deleting keywords like you did in step one and two. If the ad group is empty, delete it. You’ll still have access to the data but it won’t clutter your UI or give you those lovely errors in AdWords Editor.

4. Review your negative keyword lists. See if you have phrase or exact match negatives that are overlapping. Choose the one that makes the most sense for the campaign and get rid of the other. For instance, if you sell water bottles you wouldn’t want traffic from baby bottle traffic. So, if you have ‘baby’ as a broad match negative and ‘baby bottles’ as a phrase match, delete the baby bottles phrase match and just keep the baby broad negative. Vetting your negative keyword lists like this from time to time will ensure that you are blocking the keywords you want to be in the way you want and will make the lists more manageable.

5. Review the geographic data in the dimensions tab. If there is a geographic area that is far from meeting your performance goals, remove it from your targeting. If the area generates a lot of traffic that just isn’t converting you may want to launch a campaign specifically targeted to that area that you can optimize more specifically to the geo target. But, if you remove that geo from the targeting of your current campaign you can quickly have impact on your bottom line.

6. Review your day parting settings. See if they still make sense with the daily and hourly data provided on the dimensions tab. You may see more times of day that are not profitable that you want to exclude. Or, you may want to test adding some times back into your ad schedule if you’ve optimized your campaigns well and think you can get better results from times that you previously didn’t.

7. Review the ads you are running in each ad group. If you have too many ads running in a campaign, they won’t get statistical relevance quickly enough to properly optimize. Pause all but one or two ads, depending on how much traffic the ad group gets. And start scheduling ad optimization now that you’ll be getting enough traffic on the ads to make good decisions about their performance.

Even if you are properly and regularly optimizing your campaigns it’s good to do quarterly reviews of settings and keywords that you don’t put regular thought into. Performance metrics change, locations start performing differently, user behavior changes. Getting out of your regular optimization rut and doing some broader changes will help keep your campaigns manageable and can help you find places to improve your bottom line.

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People frequently ask what is one thing they can do to make a big impact on their AdWords performance and I always say negative keywords. Reducing unwanted impressions will increase your click through rate, in turn increasing your quality scores and decreasing your cost per click. But having one wrong negative keyword can severely hurt your performance. So you need to carefully manage your negative keywords which can be daunting when you have hundreds or even thousands.

In January Google introduced negative keyword lists to help PPC managers better organize their negative keywords. However, gauging by the limited amount of discussion about them, it seems that people aren’t adopting the use of negative keyword lists very readily. The last few times I’ve mentioned them to other PPCers I got the same response: “What lists? I just use Excel.” Everyone who manages PPC campaigns has excel spreadsheets full of negative keywords ranging from the general ones they like to use for all campaigns to industry specific keywords to client specific keywords. It takes a lot of work to develop good negative keyword lists and keeping those lists handy is very valuable. But, keeping all of this information separate from the client account leaves plenty of room for errors and missing information. Negative keyword lists allow you to keep all of your negative keywords organized directly within the account.

What Are Negative Keyword Lists?

AdWords negative keyword lists are just groups of keywords that you organize together. Those lists can then be applied to campaigns with one action instead of having to copy and paste all of the keywords to each campaign, all while making sure you didn’t copy over any that you don’t really want with each campaign.

Notice I said that you can apply the negative keyword lists to campaigns. More on that later but just remember for now that you can only apply negative keyword lists to campaigns. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the lists feature to save groups of negatives for use at the ad group level, you just can’t apply them to ad groups with one click.

How To Use Negative Keyword Lists

Each client has different needs when it comes to organization of negative keywords. For every client, I create a general negative keyword list that includes all keywords that specific client would never want their ad matched with, no matter what. In most cases this involves a lot of *ahem* adult keywords, celebrity names and employment related keywords, among others. I then begin gathering and organizing negative keywords just like I did regular keywords during that part of the account set up. Generally this means organizing the negatives by theme, product or service. For instance, if your client is an auto sales and repair businesses you wouldn’t want your auto sales ads being shown for parts and repair related searches. Despite your best efforts to organize your keywords properly, this can still happen. So, you could develop a list of negatives that include things like parts, replacement, repair, service, etc. That negative keyword list would then only be applied to the auto sales campaigns. Then you would create a list of keywords such as sales, sale, retail, MSRP, dealer, etc. That list would only be applied to the auto repair campaigns.

You may also create themed negative keyword lists such as those relating to cost. If you have a client that offers two levels of service – one that is a low-cost introductory service and one that is a high-end full scale service you may want to create a negative keyword list for keywords like free, cheap, inexpensive, low cost, etc. That list would only be applied to the high-end service campaigns to filter those searches to the lower cost offering. In the future if you find a new cost related word that you want set as a negative for the high-end campaigns, you would only need to add it to the cost themed negative keyword list and it would be added to all of the campaigns you applied that list to. Inversely, if you need to remove a negative from the campaigns, you only need to remove it from the one list rather than all campaigns.

Basically you can use negative keyword lists in any number of ways to organize negative keywords into useful chunks that you can easily apply to campaigns allowing you to quickly add and remove negatives across multiple campaigns with one change.

How to Add Negative Keyword Lists

Once you have your negative keywords organized, you can quickly add them to AdWords through the UI. AdWords Editor doesn’t support negative keyword lists yet.*

When you are in your AdWords account on the campaigns tab, in the flyout on the left, click on ‘control panel and library’ then ‘campaign negative keywords’. Click on the new negative keywords button, name your list, paste the appropriate keywords into the text box and hit save. Repeat this for all of the lists you organized in the previous step.

Now you are ready to assign each list to the appropriate campaigns. Click the ‘all online campaigns’ on the left side flyout to return to your campaign view. Open the first campaign you want to work on and click into the keywords tab, scroll to the bottom and click on ‘negative keywords’ just like you would if you were adding negative keywords right to the campaign. In the campaign level section, click on the add button and choose ‘add keyword lists’. You will see a list of all of the negative keyword lists you created previously. Click ‘add’ next to each one you want applied to that campaign and hit save. Now, any changes you make to the negatives in those keyword lists will be made to the campaigns you applied the list to so you only have to make the change in one place.

That Seems Like a Lot of Work

It can be a lot of work to organize negatives correctly from the beginning and you may be used to just making bulk edits to negative keywords in AdWords Editor. But, properly using negative keyword lists will save you time in the long run and reduce the chance of making a costly mistake. How many times have you reviewed negative keyword lists that had hundreds of keywords in them just to see if there was a certain type of keyword, such as cost related, that may interfere with a new campaign if you just copy them all over from another campaign? If you had your negatives organized by theme, product or desired result you would know where each type of keyword is and could easily include or exclude it from the negatives of a new campaign.

The Future of Negative Keyword Lists

There’s a decent amount of value in the negative keyword list function as it is now. But, I see it becoming much more valuable in the future. First and foremost, we need the ability to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups, not just campaigns. As it stands, even if you create highly organized negative keyword lists, you will most likely still have more ad group level negatives which will live outside of your lists. Without the ability to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups, the usefulness of the lists is dramatically diminished. I still use the negative keyword list functionality to store ad group level keyword groups to keep everything in one place within the account rather than in spreadsheets on my desktop. I don’t apply those lists to any campaigns, I just keep the negatives saved there for reference. At some point in the future I believe Google will allow us to apply negative keyword lists to ad groups so my accounts will be ready when this functionality is available.

A simple yet valuable feature that AdWords needs to add is the ability to click on a negative keyword list to see each campaign that list is applied to before making any changes. Telling us how many keywords are in a list and how many campaigns each list is applied to is marginally valuable. Not having this functionality reinforces my belief that the people who develop features in AdWords don’t ever actually *work in AdWords*. But, I have faith that they will improve the interface in the not-to-distant future and allow full management of negative keyword lists within one tab.

Additionally, it would be ideal for Google to allow negative keyword lists at the MCC level, not just the account level. If you have negative lists that you regularly use on all accounts, having a central place where that list is stored within your MCC which you could apply to any account would save a considerable amount of time for people who manage a large number of accounts.

*Integration with AdWords Editor is a must-have if they want full adoption of this feature but I have a feeling it will be a while before we see that.

Are you using negative keyword lists? If not, why? If you are, do you have any feature requests we can push for?

If you’ve taken the time to properly set up your campaigns, you should have your budgets properly allocated, robust negative keyword lists and targeted ad text for tightly themed ad groups. If you haven’t properly set up your campaigns, researched negative keywords and written good ad text, you need to start there before you focus on ongoing optimization. Once you have your solid foundation in place, follow these steps to efficiently optimize your campaigns by focusing on what can make the most difference with the smallest time commitment

Step 1:Review the search query report

Time: 5-10 minutes
Frequency: Once per week

Review the search query report to find keywords and negative keywords to add. This report can also give you ideas for phrases to use in your ad text.

Sort this report by impressions (highest to lowest) and review. Then resort by cost (highest to lowest) and review. Add any keywords or negatives that you’ve found.

If you have a lot of impressions and a very low CTR on specific keywords, make sure to spend extra time reviewing just the queries generated by those keywords to find negatives and improve the CTR for these high volume keywords. Chances are they are very broad terms that need a lot of negatives to reach the correct audience.

Step 2: Review keyword level profitability

Time: 10 minutes
Frequency: Once or twice per week

Click on the keywords tab and sort by cost (highest to lowest). Review your most expensive keywords to ensure they are profitable. If your landing page and ad text convert well overall and you just have a few keywords that aren’t profitable, you will probably want to reduce the bids on these keywords. If none of your keywords are profitable you will need to spend more time determining why. Are you bidding too high? Is your landing page not converting? Is your offer competitive?

If you have a lower traffic campaign, you may only need to do this step once per week. But, you don’t want to do it so infrequently that a keyword can “go rogue” and cost you a lot of money with resulting in any conversions. Also, keep in mind that with low traffic campaigns it can take a long time to get a conversion. You can’t expect conversions after the first few clicks. So, you will need to be patient.

Step 3: Test ad variations

Time: 10 minutes
Frequency: Every other week

Since we are talking about small business campaigns that presumably don’t convert enough or get enough clicks to give your ad data statistical relevance each week, this step can be done every other week. You still may not get enough data to make a decision after two weeks but you want to at least check in on your ads at regular intervals to make sure there’s nothing that needs immediate attention.

Review the ads in each of your ad groups. If there is enough data to pick a winner, either for CTR or conversion rate, pause the losing ad* and write a new variation to test against the winning ad. This can be as simple as copying the winning ad and changing it slightly. Or, you could create an entirely new ad to try. You most likely already have plenty of ideas for ad text from other marketing efforts or just from talking to customers about your products.

*If you delete the losing ad, you won’t be able to download it to AdWords Editor. I prefer to do my ad optimization in AdWords Editor so I like to keep all ads so I can easily refer back to them and see what I’ve already used, what has worked and what hasn’t.

Step 1: Review placements

Time: 10 minutes
Frequency: Once per week

This step is like the keyword profitability step for search campaigns. Click on the Networks tab and review the automatic placements. Sort by cost (high to low) and see if there are any that were costly but didn’t convert. You may want to exclude these placements. If there are some that converted but not at your goal CPL, you can add them as managed placements and reduce the bids to a level that is more likely to make them profitable. Additionally, if there are placements that are converting very well and exceeding your CPL goals, you may want to add them as managed placements and increase the bids to see if you can get additional volume.

Take a quick peak at your managed placements as well and make sure they are meeting your goals. If they aren’t, adjust the bids accordingly.

Step 2: Test ad variations

Time: 10 minutes
Frequency: Every other week

Ad testing for display campaigns is basically the same as for search campaigns except that the click through rates will be much lower. When you write ad text for these campaigns, keep in mind that people aren’t searching for your product or service when they see the ad. They are being “interrupted” as they view a webpage about a (hopefully) related topic. So, you will need to make your value proposition much more apparent and try to capture the attention of someone who may not be in a buying mindset.

Really? That’s it?

Small business pay-per-click campaigns don’t need as much in-depth management as large e-commerce companies need but that doesn’t mean you can set them up and forget about them. These basic steps that can be done in less than 30 minutes per week will get your campaigns on the road to performing well. Once you see the results that you can get from your campaigns and are more willing to dedicate time to optimizing them, you can learn about and start incorporating more advanced tactics to increase quality score, decrease CPC and improve overall performance.

The most important thing is to make sure you actually do these steps and do them on a regular schedule. Schedule time to optimize your PPC campaigns in your calendar just like you would any other deadline. If you don’t it will be easy to push it off to the next week (and the next and the next), resulting in wasted money and potential damage to your quality scores, costing you more time in the long run.

What tips do you have for optimizing PPC campaigns with a small time commitment?