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:

Wadja.com has integrated social websites YouTube and Twitter allowing users to organize, archive and discuss social content in real-time.

Wadja is a unique social and mobile networking service that uses labels to create people-to-topic connections. Wadja users create instant topic-oriented conversations using labels. Labels enable the creation of communities that come together through their common interests, hobbies and activities. Wadja’s labeling system sorts and organizes content into easily digestible information.

Users can enable or disable their YouTube or Twitter feeds and filter the incoming information. Only videos and Tweets that are directly related to the user’s label will appear under each specific label, while filters allow the user to make further refinements on the type of information s/he will receive.

Other users can search and follow interesting label topics to view and discuss content that is directly related to their interests.

You can use Wadja to label your thoughts and follow user generated “labels” that focus on specific topics, hobbies or local (real-time) happenings. Conversations can take place over the Web, Email and SMS, and the responses are shared between contacts, or privately with a friend.

Youtube just introduced a new feature that lets you upload secret, hidden, private videos as unlisted Youtube videos. Now your secret videos can be hosted on Youtube and viewed only by as many people as you want to share your hidden Youtube video.

This means we can now upload more private videos to our recently launched Youtube channel  at  youtube.com/quickonlinetips and keep them unlisted to release them when we actually want them to go live, or share videos with selected group of people.

Unlisted Youtube Videos

Unlisted  videos means that only people who know the link (which you shared with them) can view it. Unlisted videos will not appear in Youtube search results, your channels, or Browse pages.  To view an unlisted video, you don’t need a YouTube account, and unlike a private video, there is no 25 person sharing limit.

Can anyone view my unlisted video? Remember the video is unlisted, but has a publicly acccessible url for people who know the video link. So if your friend whom you trustingly shared the link, decides to post the link on their blog, anyone who can click that link can see that video. So if you want your secret video to remain hidden, ensure your contacts are trustworthy and don’t share the link further.

Private Youtube Videos

Are private videos better? If it suits you, instead of making unlisted videos, make them private videos – then only upto twenty five other users who you invite to view the video will be able to see it, and not anymore. Of course the video will not appear on your channel, in Groups, search results, playlists etc.

So basically private videos can be shared with a limited audience – if you want to share videos with all your 200 friends, then unlisted video is the better way. Moreover, once a video is shared via the private URL, it cannot be unshared, so use your 25 invites wisely. Also your contacts need a YouTube account to view private videos.

If you looking for buttons and banner images to promote your YouTube channel, just head over to this page and download the ones that will look good on your website or email newsletter.

You can link to your YouTube page in two ways:

A: Link to the main channel – The user will see all your recently uploaded videos and your favorites and he will have to click the “Subscribe” button in order to subscribe to your channel. See example:

http://www.youtube.com/user/labnol

B: Link to the subscription page – The user can directly subscribe to your YouTube channel after clicking that confirmation button though he won’t necessary see your YouTube page. See example:

http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=labnol

The graphics are available in all popular sizes so you may even use them as stickers or print one on your business card.