SmallBusinessNewz

Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, spoke at the "Unleashing the Potential of your Pay-Per-Click Marketing" workshop at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference last week.

She explained that while running a PPC campaign is very easy, "There's a difference between running a campaign and running an efficient campaign."

It helps to know what you want out of a campaign before you set it up.

Keyword Analysis

Regarding keyword analysis, Christine pointed out some things to keep in mind:

- Longer phrases often convert better.

- Single word terms rarely perform well

- Look at popularity as traffic potential

- Review keyword competition

- Evaluate keywords

- Group keywords into "buckets" of related terms

- Build separate keyword list for negative keywords

Regarding keyword development, she says that good things to keep in mind are comparison, adjectives (price and product), intended use, brand, and location.

When it comes to Google and Yahoo matching options you have the following:

Google:

- Broad match- the default

- Phrase match- "used car"

- Exact match [used car]

- Negative- word preceded by hyphen

Yahoo:

- Standard match- exact match plus singular and plural and misspellings

- Advanced match - default (combination of phrase and broad match)

- Excluded (negative keywords) - only 50 at account level and 50 for each adGroup

Christine says to use broad matching with care and doesn't recommend using it if you're just starting out.

When you're getting started with PPC, be sure to determine your budget and start small and build. You may want to change some of the campaign defaults.

PPC Complexity

It's getting harder to run PPC ad campaigns as Christine pointed out. Bid prices and ad position are no longer transparent.

"Optimizing can improve quality score and you do need to care about quality score," she says.

She also says to make sure you have a fast-loading landing page. I would add that this is a good idea for any page really.

Management Tools

"The number one tool has always been the brain," says Christine.

But when that's not enough, all of the major search engines have tools that are adequate to build and manage successful campaigns. Third party tools are also available.

Many of the best tools are proprietary and are developed by private paid search firms.

Tips and Challenges

Christine warns, "Don't repeatedly search your own ads." Instead, look at the preview tool.

"Don't assume a keyword is bad if it's not converting. It could be a landing page issue."

Christine also suggests that anyone running a PPC campaign keep up with blogs and forums, because there are always things changing in the industry, and when you are in the know, you are likely to have more success.

"PPC doesn't require a huge budget to be successful online. Big budget does not equal success."

I think that's going to just about do it for Small Business Marketing Unleashed articles on SmallBusinessNewz for the time being, but stay tuned because we have some videos that will be posted throughout the week, so the information will continue to flow!

Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report. Check out her video interview with Christine at WebProNews.