PPC Search Engine Marketing: Tools & Best Practices for PPC Results

PPC search engine marketing can be a very cost-efficient and effective way to market your business. But it’s important to follow a few pay-per-click marketing best practices to ensure that you’re not wasting your advertising budget on costly, irrelevant keywords. Best practices for PPC search engine marketing include:

• Practice ongoing keyword aggregation and expansion
• Group and organize keywords strategically
• Discover and eliminate negative keywords

Following these best practices will greatly improve your pay-per-click results and the ROI of your PPC marketing campaigns.

It sounds simple enough, right? But the truth is, the PPC tools most search marketers depend on for keyword research, keyword grouping and negative keyword discovery are riddled with shortcomings that make adhering to PPC search engine best practices difficult and time-consuming. As a search marketer, you have probably used:

• Free, third-party keyword tools for keyword suggestion. These tools provide limited numbers of keywords based on popularity, not relevance to your business. They’re built for one-time use and won’t help you aggregate public and private data for an expansive keyword database.
• Microsoft Excel for keyword organization. Spreadsheets were created for accountants, not search marketers. Keyword grouping has to be done manually in Excel, making for a long and annoying process.
• Google’s search query report to find negative keyword candidates. This is an inefficient means of discovering the irrelevant PPC keywords that drag down your click-through rate and waste PPC advertising dollars.

You may not realize you have better options as a PPC search engine marketer. In fact, there’s one product that makes all these processes faster and easier, with better results: WordStream’s PPC search engine software solution.

Aggregate & Expand Keywords for PPC Search Engine Marketing 

Keyword research for PPC advertising can’t be performed on a one-time basis if you expect to succeed on a long-term basis. To see growth and improvement in your PPC search engine advertising results, you need to grow and improve your keyword list.

Unlike most pay-per-click keyword tools, which encourage a “set it and forget it” mindset, WordStream enables:

• Aggregation of keywords from multiple sources, including third-party data and your private Web server and analytic data, for a much more complete, comprehensive keyword database.
• Continuous keyword research with the help of a JavaScript tracker that derives new keywords from visitors arriving at your site through search. 

With WordStream, your keyword list literally grows while you sleep. Every day, you’ll find new, highly relevant keywords—since they come from the actual keywords people have used to find your website, you know they’re relevant to your business.

Another benefit of the WordStream solution is that your keyword database is 100% private and personalized. No one else will have access to your keyword data, a significant competitive advantage for your PPC search campaigns.

Keyword Grouping for More Strategic PPC Search Engine Promotion 

The most important, and yet most overlooked, step in the PPC search marketing process is keyword grouping. Grouping keywords into small, tightly related segments improves your PPC search engine marketing placement by helping you write more targeted, relevant pay-per-click ads. 

For example, it’s much easier to direct a specific, compelling message to people searching for “premium dog food” than people searching for dog-related products in general. Targeting the narrower group means you can achieve higher search engine rankings in Google’s sponsored ads at a lower cost, since broader, more general keywords like “dog” are more competitive and demand higher bids.

In addition, because the longer keyword shows more purchasing intent, the searchers are more qualified, leading to higher CTR and Quality Score, which saves you even more money over time. These searchers are also more likely to convert—the reason you’re engaging in PPC in the first place.

Keyword grouping can be an arduous task, and we want to lighten your workload. Check out this guide to keyword grouping to learn everything you need to know!

The Importance of Negative Keywords for PPC Search 

For PPC search engine campaign optimization, it’s important to discover and designate negative keywords. These are the keywords that may trigger your PPC text ad, but are actually irrelevant to your offering. For example, you wouldn’t want your kitty litter ad to display for a broad match search on “hello kitty products.” That’s a useless impression and can drag down your click-through rate and drive up your overall PPC search costs. The way to get around this is to designate “hello” as a negative keyword in your “kitty” group.

To learn everything you need to know to get started with negative keywords, check out this handy guide!

Learn more about WordStream & PPC Search Engine Marketing 

Learn more about how our PPC software can help you implement SEM best practices.