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:

This guide is for bloggers who plan to move their site from wordpress.com to a personal web domain using the self-hosted version of WordPress blogging software (wordpress.org).

After the migration in complete, all your older blog links will continue to work and visitors will be redirected to the new site.

Why move to WordPress.org?

Like most other people, you started your first blog on WordPress.com because the service was free, you weren’t required to have any technical skills and there were plenty of widgets, themes and plug-ins to help you quickly customize the blog.

Then, as your blog was getting popular, you found certain limitations. For instance, you could not monetize your blog traffic because WordPress prohibits the use of Google AdSense and other forms of advertising on free sites. There are thousands of beautiful themes for WordPress out there but your choices were limited. WordPress.com doesn’t allow JavaScript so you couldn’t use advanced tracking software like Google Analytics.

Other than Google ads and themes, a big reason why you may want to move from wordpress.com to a personal web domain is branding.

Step 1: Get a domain name and rent some server space

To move your blog from WordPress.com to your own domain, you first need to have a web domain and some server space where you’ll host that blog.

Though you may buy web domains at reasonable prices from site like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, I recommend Google Apps that costs $10 per year per domain. In return, you get all the Google goodies (like Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) but the best part of the deal is that your registration details will stay private – people won’t be able to see your address or phone number from the whois record of your domain.

Web hosting services that you may want to consider for hosting your WordPress blog include Dreamhost, Rackspace, Media Temple, Blue Host and KnowHost. Digital Inspiration is  hosted on Dreamhost.com PS and am fairly satisfied.

Step 2: Transfer posts from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Now that you have the basic infrastructure in place, let’s setup a WordPress blog. All web hosting companies offer 1-click WordPress installation so this shouldn’t be a tricky thing but make sure that you install WordPress software in a sub-directory – see instructions.

Next go to your old WordPress.com admin dashboard, click Tools –> Export, and save the XML file to your local computer (fig. A). Now, in your new site’s WordPress admin panel, click Tools –> Import and then choose WordPress.  Select the file you previously downloaded.  On the next page, choose the authors, and check the box that says “Import Attachments.”

Everything from your old WordPress.com blog, including images and other attachments, will now be automatically imported into your new WordPress.org blog.

Step 3: Redirect visitors and search engines to your new blog

Your new WordPress.org blog is a copy of your old WordPress.com site but search engines and human visitors will still land on your old site as they know nothing about the new one. Therefore we need a mechanism to redirect traffic coming to the old WordPress.com addresses to your new blog.

This is not that difficult either. First, login to your domain registrar (the company with whom you registered the domain). Then change your domain’s DNS settings so that your domain points to WordPress.com servers.

Important: Make sure that you write down the existing nameserver addresses, as you will need them later on.

Once you have noted that information, change the DNS name servers to ns1.wordpress.com, ns2.wordpress.com and ns3.wordpress.com. The domain registrar, in some cases, may request you confirm the change in name-servers.

From your WordPress.com blog’s dashboard, select Upgrades -> Domains.  Enter the URL of your new domain, and click “Add Domain to blog.”  Then click “Map Domain” when asked to confirm that you wish to add this address to the blog. You cannot have www in the URLs and also don’t put the trailing slash.

Domain mapping is a premium service and will cost you $10 per year. You can pay with either PayPal or a credit card of your choice.

Once this is completed, you need to set your personal domain (abc.com) as the primary address for the WordPress.com blog. In your WordPress.com admin panel, go back to Upgrades and select Domains. Select the checkbox for the domain you just added and click Update Primary Domain.

tep 4: Reverse the DNS Nameserver changes

Change your web domain’s DNS servers back to the original nameserver settings. Save the changes, wait for a while and now both your personal web domain (abc.com) and the old WordPress blog (abc.wordpress.com) will take you to the new site.

That’s it. Incoming links, search engine traffic, RSS readers, and everything else will get redirected to your new site. You will however have to renew the domain mapping upgrade from WordPress.com every year if you wish to keep your WordPress.com address redirecting* to your new site.

[*] WordPress.com uses a 302 redirect with domain mapping which means a “temporary redirect” and therefore search engine bots will continue to index your old site in addition to the new one.

[**] If your blog is hosted on Blogger, read this tutorial to migrate from blogspot to your own down using WordPress.