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.

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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 Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the Internet domain assignment, has finally decided to create .xxx top level domain and allow websites with sexually explicit content to start using the suffix on a voluntary basis. This was decided in the ICANN meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

It is estimated to have more than 370 million pornographic websites on the Internet. If all of them start using the .xxx top level domain names, it could become one of the largest domain name repositories! Figures collated by Internet Pornography Statistics suggest more than $3,000 is spent on Internet pornography every second, with “sex” the number one search term in the world, accounting for 25 percent of all Internet searches.

But many porn websites may restrain from using this domain, as it will be eazy to censor such sites with the domain name.

ICANN, formed in 1998, is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

Sometime back, I had updated you about Name.com for its unbelievable cheap .com/.net domain offers and cheap .im domain name offer. Though they don’t exist anymore, you now have another very good chance to grab without even requiring a credit card. All you need is a domain registered with Name.com.

Domain whois privacy used to be a free package (at Name.com) with domain name until few months in past. Recently when I registered a new domain, I observed that it is no more free and we need to pay $1.99 for privacy. Also the domain name prices have gone bit higher compared to what they used to be.

What is Whois Privacy?

Domain Privacy / Whois Privacy is the service offered by different domain registrars to protect personal information of the domain owner like address, phone number, email address etc. If you do not enable privacy, your details can be easily viewed on any whois lookup service.

How to save dollars and get FREE WHOIS privacy for any domain on your Name.com profile?

Login to your Name.com account and navigate to Account section where you can find the details about your existing products.

Check all the domain whois privacy checkboxesand click on “renew checked products”. If you cannot find such whois privacy details, click on the domain name to go to domain info page and enable whois privacy details.

You will now be taken to shopping cart where have to enter the Promo code as: FREEWHOIS. If you are not redirected, click on Your Cart in the top right corner.

Now, you can notice that all your shopping cart amount get converted to discount and you need not have to pay anything. As the shopping cart account gets reduced to $0, you can proceed without a credit card. Click on Account Credit radio button for your payment option.

Accept the terms and checkout.

How $100?

Here comes the secret which I called as bug. You can repeat the above process any number of time to get all your domains’ whois privacy extended to 1 more year every time you checkout. If you have numerous domains and you renew privacy of each to say 5-10 years, you have saved even more than $100. Note that if they are not fixing this issue, you can extend your whois privacy for an unlimited period of time.

Here is the proof that I have renewed WHOIS privacy of my domains for a long time.

* 4mdesigner.com Coupons *

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Price Rs: 499 – Rs 399 (expires 14/05/10 11:59pm)

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Price Rs: 499 - Rs 399 (expires 14/05/10 11:59pm)

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Just a quick note about a great domain sale going on at GoDaddy. Use the coupon code love99 to get your .com, .org, .net domains for as less as 99 cents.

This applies for only one domain per account for the period of one year. Not sure about they are limiting transactions on credit cards.