For some marketers, especially B2B companies, the holidays may be a time of year when things slow down, which can be the perfect opportunity to thoroughly cleanse your PPC account and get it to deliver more bang for your buck. On the heels of my blog post on landing page optimization, here are 10 ways to make your PPC campaign more profitable.

Give feedback either by commenting or by replying to my Twitter status.

1. Make changes that matter.


Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.

Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:

2. Create better targeted ad groups.


Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.

Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.

3. Curate your negative keyword lists.


Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.

4. Use broad match modifiers.

If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.

Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.

5. Test your ads.


Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.

Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?

6. Filter out unwanted clicks.


Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.

7. Use match types to control bids.

Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.

8. Show ads at the right time.


After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.

I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.

9. Improve device targeting.

Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.

10. Conduct landing page optimization.

Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.

Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI:

The Internet is a unique beast when it comes to payment transactions. You need to accept credit cards on the Internet, but there is a problem.

Accept Credit Cards – Internet

The number one method of payment in transactions on the net is credit card payment. You must accept credit cards on the Internet or you will get nowhere with your site. While this sounds like an obvious statement, accepting credit cards raises a host of issues.

The first issue to consider with credit cards is security. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know identity theft is a major problem. Your potential clients or customers know this as well, which means you have a problem. You must convince them that they are not risking anything by paying you with a credit card. To do this, you must use secure transaction systems or a well known online payment source that has credibility. You should also offer alternative payment methods such as mail in orders and placement of orders over the phone.

An even bigger problem is the protection given by credit card companies to consumers. You have probably seen the television commercials wherein credit card companies promise zero risk transactions. This process allows consumers to dispute a charge from your site. To win the dispute, they barely have to do anything. The burden is on you to show that they received what they ordered in a timely manner. If you can’t show it, the charges will be canceled, known as a “chargeback.” You will learn to hate this term because not only do you lose the sale, but you also often have to pay a fine! This is simply the cost of doing business if you accept credit cards on the Internet.

A really nasty situation sometimes arises with less than honest credit card users. They may dispute the charges from your site for no good reason. You may have sent them the product on time and they may love it. Nonetheless, they will simply go ahead and dispute the charge because they know they can. Again, this is the cost of doing business if you accept credit cards on the Internet.

So, should you not accept credit cards on the Internet? You have to. Consumers expect to be able to pay with plastic and you will suffer massive losses of sales if you do not offer this payment method. Put another way, you just have to suck it up.