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:

Now, we already know about various fax related services which can help you send / receive fax online. Starting from black fax attack, we learnt how to send free fax online and then on receiving a fax online with an incoming fax number. Online faxing services are indeed a bliss, but as a user, you need to take care of few things before using such free online faxing web services.

It becomes a foolish act to simply use the fax services available for free for whatever the purpose you find. There are few serious tips to be considered before sending your fax to anyone who requests it online.

1. There are many spammers who mail you telling that you won / business partnering / some help to invest in your country and request you to send your driving license / passport / voters id or anything through fax / email. Never respond them through free faxing or emails.

2. Some bank mail ids (including Paypal) request you to send a copy of passbook along with your internet banking account login id and password. They are again hackers who try to trick you for their phishing scams. Just ignore them, if you give your details, your account soon settles at big 0. Check out phishing attack in live.

3. Never fax anyone just for testing: Few people have a good habit of testing everything they get. But that good habit can prick you in bad times if the one who received your inappropriate fax is an influential person and reverse checks your number and details. Be more cautious the recipient is not any governmental office. Test online fax sending services only with your/any friend’s own fax machine, not a third party.

4. Never ask anyone to fax you just for testing: This is inverse of above. If someone gets your incoming fax number, he might start abusing the system and you are the one who lose your account and might get a lifetime ban from those free fax services.

5. Auto responders & announcement mails: Many use such services like vacation notificatins etc to send their updates to everyone on the address book, that ‘everyone’ may also include your faxing service and there is a chance that your account will be suspended for abusing with invalid mails. Indeed its a bad idea to setup auto responders if you have subscription to any web services / blog updates. At the end, you will be the loser.

6. Review the “Privacy Policy”: Most of the internet users are not aware about an almost compulsory page called “Privacy Policy” which discloses how your data is handled. If you find anything fishy in free faxing service, its better to avoid it. There are many other trusted ones to try. They might use statements like your faxed documents might be stored for study purposes. Do you wish your passport / GF photo be studied by those services?

7. Never fax acquaintances: Its too risky to fax from your fax number to the one whom you met in some stranger chat service especially those e-wh0res whom you met on a dating forum.

8. Avoid sending online fax at work: Most of the companies/ offices monitor users’ activities while online, its better to avoid online faxing at office.

9. Don’t save fax mail id in contacts: This can be useful if some malware hides in your system and sends automatic mails to everyone on your contact list. This is based on assumption that your faxing service also accepts mail based faxing apart from web interface fax sending.

10. Use telephones / email / traditional fax service for tooooo sensitive information. Its tough to trust anyone online if it comes to super confidential matters.