I attended an Advanced AdWords seminar last week and am revisiting the topic of Building National Ads for Local Needs .

This seminar was sponsored by Google and lead by Brad Geddes of BG theory . While most of the Advanced Class was more a refresher than anything new, it has prompted me to make a change in my national campaign strategy for local business. In addition to the negative terms I use (listed in the original article), I now also use exclude cities, regions and metro areas in the campaigns Location settings. If your business is in Madison Alabama area, I would create local and national campaigns. In the national campaigns, I would exclude the areas covered in the local campaign and then add exclusions for all cities named Madison in the country (Google lists 24 all together).

Google recently announced changes to its approach to Quality Score. Quality Score is the bane of my existence. It turns previous ‘best practices’ into bad practices and dooms the long-tail to obscurity.

Sure it makes sense to have the keywords relevant to the ad and the landing page relevant (duh!), but in practice Google weighs click thru rates (CTR) in the overall campaign to judge what you should be paying and if your CTR drops too low for the ad group, you’ll receive a Quality score minimum bid “penalty” of $5 or $10.  This means you need maintain only small campaigns grouped with only top performing keywords.

Unfortunately when you launch a new campaign you don’t know what your top performing phrases are going to be. Many times it the second tier phrases that provide the most cost-effective conversion for your clients and finding those takes time. The problem is during the time when you are trying to build effective campaigns you are getting soaked by Quality Score penalties.

I can only hope the upcoming changes to Quality Score will imrpove the current strangle hold.

Here are three articles on Quality Score you may find helpful:

• Ah-Oh…PPC Feeling A Lot Like SEO
• How to Raise Your Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score 

When optimizing your site for traffic, you will need some means to see where you are, track your progress (or your lack there of), and help identify mistakes.

Here are the core elements I recommend:

1. Sign-up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, it’s free and it some if the best information you can get about visitor activity and how they got to your pages. If you do PPC marketing on AdWords and don’t have Google Analytics installed you can add it under the Analytics tab in AdWords. If you already have Google Analytics and your GA and AdWords accounts aren’t linked, be sure to select “link to existing” in your AdWords account so your Google CPC traffic will be properly tracked. If you made a mistake here and wound up with two GA accounts you can get Google to unwind the mistake, but it can take several carefully worded emails to get it fixed. (more…)

I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here