A major determinant for the prices you end up dealing with is your quality score as determined by Google. Your quality score is a reflection of how your ads perform. What percentage of people click on your ads, and what percentage of people who do click on your ads end up as bounced, or one page, visitors?

When you write ads that are more appealing to people, and you provide them with the content they are looking for once they make that click, Google recognizes you as a quality source and improves your rating, thereby decreasing costs. Ultimately Google wants to provide consumers with the best and most relevant ads – because it makes them a more trusted and reliable service. That’s why they reward high quality advertisements and campaigns.

Besides writing improved and more appealing ads, you can reduce your costs by targeting more appropriate markets. The more specific you get with your campaigns, the more relevant you can be. Therefore if you’re a mechanic in Steamboat today, instead of targeting “car repairs” you may want to target “winter car checkups Steamboat” or something along those lines, which will guarantee you can provide a match for a consumer making a search.

There are many other factors that you’ll have to consider to help lower your minimum bids as well. One of these is ad grouping, which goes hand in hand with the market selection described above. You want highly specific ad targets that include the keywords you use, and ad groups that play off relevant words and targets.

Of course, don’t forget that you can also lower your budget by changing your bidding strategy. You can target less popular keywords to reduce your costs, and you can also aim for a different spot besides the number 1 position to greatly lower your budget.

Sometimes it doesn’t make monetary sense to go for the top spot or the most popular market, particularly when you’re just getting started with your Adwords campaigns. So choose your markets and your targeted positions wisely, and you’ll actually end up driving more traffic to your landing pages for a lowered cost.

Businesses in Steamboat today are looking for as many ways as possible to reduce the costs of their marketing while improving the results that they see. Steamboat Springs marketing services should be well advised to take a new and improved approach to Google Adwords. Focus on improving the quality and relevancy of your ads, and in turn you’ll be rewarded not just with traffic that can be converted easier but also with lowered costs for your campaigns.

PPC- What Exactly Does It Include?
The concept of pay per click advertising is actually very simple to comprehend.  There are a ton of tools online that can help you with your keyword research to find what your customers are searching for.  If you’ve done your job, you’ll know exactly “where” you want your ads.  The next step is of course to design your ads.  Think of an Adwords ad as a one sentence summation of why a buyer should visit your site.  Next you’ll need to set your bids.  That’ right, gaining top search results takes spending a specific amount of money for every visitor you attract to click over to your landing page.  While your first reaction might be to say that the highest bid always wins, this isn’t the case.  As I addressed in a previous post, there are other factors (like Quality Score) that will affect what you have to spend.

In order to run a profitable PPC campaign, you’ll need to become master to skills like effectively writing ads, tailoring your ads to the right audience, choosing the most appropriate keywords to target and judging the competition.  The next step of the process is to properly track your results so you can hone in on the gold and toss the junk.  This is where many PPC marketers make their mistakes and end up pursuing more organic search engine optimization (SEO) instead.  The immediate results aren’t there like with PPC, but the risks (i.e. throwing away your money on bogus ads & targets) seem to be less.

NEW Website – PPC Is The Best Initial Strategy
Once a new site is built, the litmus test becomes how it performs.  The best way to quickly judge this is through immediate high traffic.  There’s no better way to instantly attract visitors than with PPC.  Besides, it will most likely take months of steady link building before a new website will even begin to see traffic from its SEO efforts.  Simply put, PPC may often be the lifeline your business needs to drive the steady stream of traffic you need to generate immediate revenue.

As I advocated before, the reality is that using a combination of PPC and SEO tactics should be the keystone to any web marketing strategy.  By initially pursuing a PPC campaign you give time to let the SEO endeavors take hold.  In fact, the most savvy entrepreneurs tend to continue their successful PPC campaigns well past the time they begin to see results stemming from their SEO plan.  A synergistic approach like this when approaching one’s online marketing will win the day every time!  A well-rounded use of both PPC and SEO will ultimately lead to multiple streams of revenue for years to come.

So what exactly is Quality Score?  Quality Score is the rating assigned to your pay per click ads (by Google) based on the relevance your ad and destination URL have in relation to the keyword(s) you are bidding on.  Staying true to form, Google strives to provide relevant content to all of their search results, paid or organic.  If they didn’t have some way of monitoring relevance then Adwords would simply become an auction site.  Ads would be placed solely based on the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay.  If you thought this is how pay per click advertising works you are sorely mistaken.

You see, if ads were placed solely on the willingness of an advertiser to pay the highest amount with no consideration given to it’s relevance to the search phrase, I’d go as far as to say that we’d see Viagra ads pop up in just about every search.  Google assigns Quality Score to prevent this very occurrence from happening.

Factors involved in calculating Quality Score are many.  However, the main ones you’ll want to concern yourself with seem to be:

• Relevance of your ad to the keyword phrase a user queries
• Relevance of the specific ad to the keyword within the ad campaign
• The historical click-through rate of your ad for a specific keyword phrase
• Relevance of your keyword in relation to the landing page you use as your destination URL

Now that we know a little about what Quality Score is, the next question is naturally “How do I increase my Quality Score with Google?”  Following right along with what we know affects your Quality Score, you’re best served by managing the following:

• Verify that your ads and keywords relate to one another.
  • Make sure to include the keyword in the ad itself
  • If possible (without looking forced), try to use it twice
• Group similar keywords, but ONLY similar keywords, within campaigns
  • Knowing that the same ad will appear in the results of any keywords you include in a campaign, it’s best to make sure your groups are small and targeted
  • Ideally, you would set up each keyword as its own campaign
  • Expecting one ad to cover multiple keywords with high relevance is unrealistic
• Pay close attention to keeping your keywords relevant to your customer.
  • Its great to have lots and lots of keywords, but only if each one has some tie to the customers your want to attract
  • By keeping your keywords (and ads) relevant to your customer, your click-through rate will be much higher
• Make sure to use specific (relevant) landing pages for your keywords/ads
  • Don’t automatically send everything to your Home Page
  • If your keywords relate more specifically to a drill-down page of your site, link your ad to that page
  • Don’t expect your customers to work to navigate your site… send them directly to what they are looking for

By following these general guidelines and keeping your Quality Score high, you will not only achieve higher search result placements but you’ll be rewarded with lower cost per click.  Google wants their user experience to be a good one so they will give preferred placement to ads with high Quality Score.

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