Creating Quality PPC Landing PagesYou can have an SEM account with hundreds of thousands of keywords that each have fantastic click-through rates (CTR) but without quality landing pages, you will never fully optimize your CPA and never reach your true money-making potential.Landing Page Layout via UnbounceI have put together some guidelines to help you create the best PPC landing pages for your AdWords account.

1. Establish your goals.The first step in creating quality landing pages is to establish your marketing goals to decide what you are trying to accomplish. Do you want sales, form fills, mailing list registrations, sign ups, etc.?Once you have established what you are trying to accomplish with your campaigns and ad-groups, do some competitive research. Check out your competitors’ la... > Read more

“Awesome! I have 300,000 impressions …. why is my CTR so low?”OK, the title of this post is a little harsh, but the importance of click-through rates to CPC campaigns has been well documented. So take a second and look at your account. Do you see that you have thousands of impressions and a few clicks with great conversion rates? I can assure you that you are not alone.

There are a few things you can do that can help you turn that frown upside down. :DSeparate Search vs. DisplayThe first thing I always look for when diagnosing why a campaign has a low CTR is network targeting. It is always a best practice to separate your campaigns by network. That means having one campaign set to search (and search partners) while having another set to target only display. I won’t go into detail o... > Read more

Everyone wants to know the "magic formula" to set up and manage your AdWords account. To put it simply, you're out of luck. There really is no "right way," but there certainly are ways that are "more right" than others.Figuring out how to spend the limited time you have in AdWords can be a daunting task.

Since no two accounts are the same, it is equally difficult to put together a workflow that will encompass every account. Keeping that in mind, below is my guide to optimizing and then maintaining your AdWords account in minimal time.Ensure Your Ad Groups Are GranularGoogle recommends keeping Ad Groups between 20-30 keywords. I find this misleading. The single most important thing I stress to my clients is to keep your ad groups small and defined. That means keeping every keyword in an Ad ... > Read more