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:

Most of the people who use Internet services agree – when there is a new technology out there it should be implemented on websites – and this is why you should use RSS feeds for your site.

Why You Should Use RSS Feeds for Your Site

The most important reason to use RSS feeds is to keep visitors to your site abreast of any changes that may have taken place on your page. If you have the type of site that will be changing frequently, such as a news site or blog (or any sort of personal diary type site), an RSS feed can help keep people in the loop about what is going on with your page. RSS, really simple syndication, is the perfect way to get new information out to your website’s visitors while allowing them the most convenient way possible to read your content.

When a site implements RSS, it is said to be “syndicated”, and that is a good thing. Visitors to your site will know right away that with the click of a button, they can subscribe to the content on your site and view it at their leisure in any one of several RSS readers. Viewers can, and will, still come back to your site to check on its updates and graphics, but for text and news, RSS can get the information out quickly to everyone interested in your site.

If you are afraid that RSS feeds will lessen traffic to your site, don’t be – increasing site traffic is one of the reasons why you should use RSS feeds for your site. A feed does not have to include all of the information or news you’ve posted on your page – it can be a partial feed. This allows subscribers to read a summary, or perhaps just the first paragraph, of your stories or posts as a teaser. If the RSS subscriber is interested enough in what you have written, they can then visit your site – drawing in additional views that might not have occurred otherwise.

Another reason RSS is so important is that some people may not visit a site that doesn’t feature this option. If a visitor can get the same information (or similar content) from a site that has RSS and allows them to read their feeds through a reader, they may opt for the other site out of convenience. In order to obtain the biggest readership and get your message across to the most people, RSS feeds can increase your web popularity quickly and easily.

RSS feeds are easy to set up and use, and with most web composing and blogging programs including an RSS option, there are many reasons why you should use RSS feeds for your site. Convenience and technology combined make for additional viewers and better visibility on the World Wide Web.

RSS feeds are powerful method for syndicating your content on other sites and generating free traffic. To use these feeds, you need to understand the nuts and bolts of the process.

The Nuts and Bolts of RSS Feeds

Using RSS feeds is an obvious step for any site that can support them. Simply put, the potential of getting your content and message out to readers by getting it published on other sites is something you can’t afford to let pass. The profit potential is simply too large.

To take advantage of real simple syndication, you need to take a couple of steps. The nuts and bolts of RSS feeds actually vary. You can go out and buy sophisticated programs to create, maintain and tweak your feeds. In truth, you really don’t need to do this since the downside is you have to spend time keeping everything running.

The simplest approach is to use free sites to create content and then turn it into a feed. Perhaps the easiest method is to use blogger.com. This site is owned by Google and is a free service that lets you blog. You just open an account, select a format and off you go. Blogger is created in such a way that your domain for the blog will read yourdomainname.blogspot.com, so you can tie it into your site without much confusion on the part of readers.

Once you have the blog up and running, you can flip it into an RSS feed by using another free service like feedburner. Feedburner takes your blog address and converts it into an RSS feed. It then gives you a domain name that triggers the feed. You can then incorporate the feed into your site and also give it to others.

With RSS feeds, we find it is best to use the rule of KISS. KISS stands for keep it simple, stupid! Following the above approach does the job with a minimum of fuss. In fact, you should take a close look at the blog on this site. This is exactly how we did it.

The world wide web is one of the fastest evolving mediums ever seen in business. With this guide to RSS feeds, we cover the latest evolution.

Guide to RSS Feeds

The internet is loved by small businesses because it levels the playing field in the business arena. While big businesses may have lots of money to spend on marketing and advertisements, spending it is no guarantee of success on the web. If you doubt this, you need only consider the dot com bust of the late twentieth century. Instead, success is derived mostly from being smart, working hard and taking advantage of new technologies such as RSS feeds.

With this guide to RSS feeds, we are just going to cover the basics. RSS, for instance, stands for “real simple syndication.”  As simple as this sounds, what does it mean? To understand the power of RSS feeds, we need to turn back to traditional media. How ironic!

Doonesbury is a very popular cartoon. You can flip open your newspaper every day and read the latest exploits of Zonker and the other characters. The cartoon has also made its creator, Garry Trudeau, a wealthy man. Why? The answer has to do with syndication. Every day, Trudeau sends out a new cartoon and newspapers republish it and pay him for the right to do so. This process is known as syndication. Syndication is simply a way to get your content out to multiple publications, which expands your readership.

RSS feeds serve the same purpose on the internet. You can create content and have it automatically sent out to other sites that want it. You don’t get paid for it, but it is a great way to expand the reach of your site. For instance, assume you have a travel site and are doing frequent updates regarding the best travel deals each week. You can create an RSS feed containing this content. Other travel sites can then incorporate your feed into their site. Can you see how this helps you? The other sites are putting you in front of their readers and getting your name spread far and wide on the net. As you gain popularity, more and more people will start clicking links in your content and coming to your site. Ah, free traffic!

With the new technology available in the worlds of electronic communication and the Internet, it can be hard to keep up with all of the terms and meanings – for instance, what is an RSS feed?

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS is an acronym, and it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is one of several ways that web authors and publishers can use to make sure that their updated information gets to their readers in a quick and efficient way. Most often, RSS feeds are used to update readers of blogs or news sites on new information that has been posted, or in the case of podcasts, new audio that has been uploaded.

Now that we have been able to answer the question, what is an RSS feed, let’s take a look at how it works. RSS is maintained by using a code known as XML, which stands for extensible markup language. This generic data format is a good way to be able to send out your RSS feed without having to use a lot of graphics or other large file formats. A reader program, downloaded by the reader or subscriber to your blog or other website, is able to take the XML information and put it into a usable context so it can be read and enjoyed.

There are a few types of RSS feeds out there, most commonly RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. While most people who use RSS today are updated to RSS 2.0 (the most user friendly and advanced version of the Really Simple Syndication feed), there are still a few older sites that use the 1.0 technology. Most of the RSS feed readers available today are able to read either format, but it is important to check before downloading or using a reader.

RSS feeds are easily used by the programmer, because many of the most popular website hosting and building sites allow quick implementation of this code. Other sites, such as Blogger (the most popular free blogging site and network) as well as the major blogging software companies, allow RSS feeds to be built from within their programs without needing the use of coding or other technical know-how. This means that all bloggers can use this technology to their advantage without having to learn a whole new set of codes.

What is an RSS feed? It’s a great way to make sure your followers, readers or devotees can keep up to date with your web site and the information contained on it. It is also easy to use on both the publisher and consumer ends, making it a perfect solution for information dissemination.