I'm been doing SOME PPC for a while now, but never got too serious with it. I have a few questions on some things I'm unclear about. ---------------- 1. What should ad groups consist of? How similar should the keywords within an ad group be to each other? What is the optimization process for an ad group? Is it finding the best ad? (That 1st one consisted of more than one question, but I thought it would probably be best to keep them together.) 2. How do you find the best keyword/ad/lp combination? What is the process? 3. When starting out a campaign, and you're selling for instance a product that gives a payout of $35, how much should you bid to start off with on keywords? 4. In an ad group, if you add broad and/or phrase keywords, wouldn't that mess up the relevancy of your ad group? 5. I use Prosper202 for tracking, how can I analyze that data, (keywords, ads, location, device etc) and optimize the campaign? 6. When running a campaign with the goal being getting a sale of a product you're promoting, should you be paying attention to the click through rates or the conversion rates? I'm starting out with Bing ads by the way, just in case that makes any difference.
If you're really trying to take PPC seriously, then the biggest thing you can do is figure out how it fits within your overall marketing goals. In terms of specific search terms, try to make them unique enough that they offer your product/service differential over the competition. For example, if I'm the only video game shop in a particular area that offers repairs, then I obviously am going to want to be the top result for "video game repair (insert city name here)". Additionally, you should also limit the terms you include (I'd recommend three, there's some great literature on why here- http://blog.whitesharkmedia.com/5-ways-to-boost-your-dental-offices-ppc-campaign/). Think about PPC like a pipeline. The overall goal is for someone to click on this link and go to a landing page (never your homepage) and then interact with whatever call-to-action you're after. Finally, here's some other great resources from the same folks above: http://blog.whitesharkmedia.com/3-biggest-problems-biting-dentists-ppc/ http://blog.whitesharkmedia.com/dont-forget-modify-ppc-campaigns/