PPC Campaign and Tweaking Keywords?

[JWales]

Hey Guys

I have just been reading a post here at 5 star about bringing traffic onto your website and i read someone say run a ppc campaign and track keywords then tweak to get the best results.


now i didnt understand much of this and thought that i would ask a few questions:


So:


1. what is a ppc campaign?


2. how do i track keywords/ what is meant by tracking keywords?


3. how do you tweak keywords.


4. can you have multiple keywords for one site?


Thanks

John

 

[djbaxter]

1. A PPC campaign refers to running ads on other sites through an advertising program (e.g., AdWords, Microsoft Ad Network, etc.).

2. If you start a campaign at AdWords, I believe you track the performance of specific ads and keywords through the AdWords account interface.

3. "tweaking keywords" just means that you adjust the keywords you're using to improve their perfromance... e.g., if you are running ads with the keywords "red trucks" and you find that's not getting a lot of clicks, you'd try other terms like "trucks in London" or "best truck prices" to see if you can improve click through rates (CTR)

4. you certainly can have more than one keyword or search term per site, even per page, although in most cases you can't really do a very good job of optimizing for more than 2 or 3 keywords/phrases per page.

 

[mlevenhagen]

2. If you start a campaign at AdWords, I believe you track the performance of specific ads and keywords through the AdWords account interface.

That is correct.. you can place your tracking URLs in the ad which will track the entire ad group (all keywords will have the same tracking code). Or you can assign each keyword a unique tracking code in that ad group.

The affiliate links have tracking code appended to them that will allow you to determine exactly where the conversion or action originated.

Each affiliate program or network has different parameters you use in your URL to track. So as an example, at the end of a clickbank link you'd add:

?tid=yourtrackingcode

commission junctions would be:

?sid=yourtrackingcode

shareasale you'd use:

?afftrack=yourtrackingcode

Then when you run your affiliate programs reports that will show up next to the conversion. You then just go into your PPC campaign and see exactly what keyword (or ad) it corresponds to.

Very helpful to know what exactly is converting so you can cut losers and nurture (manage) the converting keywords.

 

[JWales]

Thank you Minstrel and Mlevenhagen for all of that information, i never knew that you could have multiple keywords for a single site

 

[yanamk]

Every main page of your site should be keyword targeted. As for ppc campaigns - I think landing pages do better conversions. It is all about testing and analyzing the results. Sometimes a tiny change in the title can turn your site into a goldmine.