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:

Logitech Revue is a companion box and controller that brings the experience of Google TV to your TV screen. It combines everything on the Web, cable or satellite content, apps, video calling and more that will be wildly popular between 2010 and 2030, until we reinvent interaction again.

Logitech Revue is a set-top box that’s supposed to bring the Google TV experience to your existing home entertainment center, scheduled to ship this fall.

Logitech Revue will deliver Google TV to the 60 million HDTVs already in U.S. living rooms today. Logitech Revue is a system that includes a companion box – an external device that connects to your TV through an HDMI port – and an intuitive controller that’s been designed to take full advantage of everything the Google TV platform offers. The controller is specifically designed to optimize the Google TV experience – combining a compact keyboard, remote control and touchpad.

You get seamless search and access to content anywhere on the Web, from your satellite or cable provider, even some compatible DVRs. Logitech Revue has Logitech Harmony technology built in – so you can have integration with your home-entertainment system. The companion box will have a variety of options available including video calling and a variety of controllers.

The companion box also has Logitech Harmony Link IR signal translator inside the box, which enables smartphone apps to control the companion box. The Logitech Harmony smartphone app sends signals to the internal Harmony Link which in turn communicates with your entertainment devices.

Harmony Link is a combination of hardware and software, currently built into every Harmony remote, which translates commands (such as a Volume Up button press) into infrared (IR) signals that can control many entertainment devices.

The Logitech Harmony smartphone app will be of two versions at launch: one for Android smartphones and one for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The iPhone app will run on iPad devices as well; a version of the app optimized for the larger iPad screen is planned for a later software update.

You must have the companion box from Logitech for the app to actually control your home entertainment devices.

Google TV is television the way it should be. It puts all the things you want to watch – from the hundreds of paid TV channels available today to the limitless number of Web and streaming videos – right at your fingertips. And unlike past incarnations of Web TV, Google TV combines the entire Web and all available TV content in one place, with one interface – eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between multiple screens.

Logitech will also offer a collection of additional products for Google TV, including an HDTV camera and video calling software. (source)

In an effort to offer improved access to the Internet, Google plans to create fast, cheap and ubiquitous fiber-to-the-home Internet broadband networks with one-gigabit-per-second (1Gbps) speed. The broadband connections will be as much as 100 times faster than most cable and DSL services.

Google is seeking applications from US local governments interested in participating in the project. It plans to collect responses until March 26, and will announce which communities will get the service later this year. The company said it hopes to offer the service to at least 50,000 people and as many as 500,000.

Google’s announcement is expected to spark competition and innovation in this area. Google’s primary goal is really to expand broadband and to make it faster. Faster networks enable the use of far more data-intensive applications online. Google consistently acknowledges that its core business of online search and services benefits from improved access to the Internet, whether over personal computers or mobile devices.

Google said it will sell access to customers directly “at a competitive price” and team with telecommunications companies that want to package services with its fiber network.

Verizon has already offers fiber-to-the-home Internet service to more than 3.4 million customers in 16 US states, including parts of California, although it’s slower than Google’s proposed service, with download speeds of only up to 50 Mbps.

Google China is the third international Google site that has a new homepage, radically different from the simple homepage that became a part of Google’s identity. Google China’s homepage uses animations to display icons and small descriptions for Google services like: Image Search, Google News or Dao Hang.

The other two similar homepages are for Google Korea (launched on June 12, 2007) and Google Japan (launched on March 21, 2008). Google China Blog says that the three homepages were a part of bigger project meant to improve Google’s interface and to adapt it to local cultures. For example, Chinese users found it difficult to navigate to other Google services, since they were listed on a different page, so Google decided to place the links more prominently on the homepage.

I liked the last paragraph from Google China’s blog post (or its automatic translation, to be more exact):

The change in the Asian region in the entire Home Google is a major patron saint Google Home Marissa has given us the greatest help, and this was her first “replacement” Movement biggest supporters: “You can change as much as possible “of this so let us encourage the Google home page of this classic too bold move from the surgery. Google Home is not static, but, as she insisted to the interests of users, she is also due to the change and you change.

Google already provides an alternative to the “classic” homepage: iGoogle, but the default homepage hasn’t changed too much over the years.