I think most of us do the basics with our SEM campaigns, grouping phrases and then those phrases with related ads (such as marketing: internet marketing, web marketing, and services: SEM services, PPC Services…). However a recent exercise I went through yielded big benefits.

Now let me preface this by saying I don’t advocate the use of click through rates to determine the effectiveness of an ad. I always look for some kind of conversion metric to use. You may be thinking that you don’t have a conversion metric, but even if it’s just measuring visits to your contact page, you need something to ensure that you are doing more then just getting people to your click on your ad.

Here’s the situation, I had a large group of  related phrases with a daily cap. The high-converting, higher cost words were getting the most clicks, eating up the daily budget and making the lower converting, low cost phrases seem irrelevant. I don’t know if click fraud had a hand in this, but I suspect that the high-cost ($10/click) words are also high fraud words.

I sub-divided the campaign in to groups based on click cost. This allowed me to see the value of phrases with in the context of similarly prices phrases. What emerged were click results that had been previously obscured by the high-conversion high-cost term and a revelation that the conversion rate on some of the lower cost words was more cost-effective then the higher-cost terms. As a result of this exercise, I was able match the conversion rate of the previous campaign with a lower overall spend.