This week I took a break from driving while talking marketing - please forgive! Anyway the topic is understanding how you can have an impact in each of the three components of PPC advertising: Impressions, Clicks and Conversions. The "Gift" strategy is outlined in the video. There are lots of variables, but I try to break it down to the really big, simple things. Remember, we're building toward more complex strategies. This is another foundational episode. To understand the variables at play, I've provided definitions for Google's Quality Score and Yahoo's Quality Index:

Quality Score is a Google measure of historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and matched Ad, account history (CTR of all Ads and Keywords in your account), historical CTR of the display URLs in the Ad Group, Quality of Destination Page, relevance of keywords to Ads within Ad Group, relevance of keyword and matched Ad to search query, and account performance in geographical region. Quality Index is a Yahoo! measure of Bid or Click Price, Historical click-through data, Conversion data, Organic Rankings of Advertiser URL, keyword appears in Title, keyword in URL, Keywords on Destination Page, Other keywords at the Campaign level and a comparison between other sites competing on the same keywords.

You may have to go full screen to read the diagram.

This episode discusses picking the right keywords and organizing them into Ad Groups. This is really the first step in creating effective Pay Per Click campaigns. There is also some discussion on selecting keywords for search engine optimization.

If you do nothing else to improve your PPC Management (meaning increase conversions at a lower cost per conversion), you must always run two Ads per Ad Group. This gives you the ability to compare and replace the poor performing Ad, leading you down a path toward conversion-optimized advertising. That's what I talk about in this episode (under 3 minutes).

Have a wonderful holiday season!

This is the introductory video for a new series on Pay Per Click Advertising. I discuss the cardinal rule of online advertising success and provide five (5) techniques for creating Ad variations. Keep in mind, this is just one of several methods to increase Web traffic.