Using Negative keywords are a great way to get rid of unwanted or non-targeted traffic coming to click on your PPC ads. But you always seem to attract clicks even through you have done your homework of generating a list of negative keywords for the campaign.

In Business, its always about sales and costs. If you can bring in more sales or lower the costs, then you will have a greater profit. That is the success in business, and it goes the same to Adwords as well. But how to generate targeted traffic and at the same time letting the un-targeted traffic not click on the PPC ads?

Simple formula is to write a PPC ad that only targets or filters to the type of people you are looking for, making it hard or undesirable for the unwanted traffic to click on your PPC ads. Here is how you do it:

1) Write technical terms that only your targeted group knows. Let’s take for example in “Managed Hosting Services”, the thing that consumers are looking for in manged hosting services, are the the speed, reliability, and support.  As you can see the picture below, it has the languages or words that only your target audience are looking for, the support it promises, and the address of the company. But this is not enough to filter away, when you need…

2) Numbers that only your targeted group will take interest in. Yes, this can come in price and quantity as well. Let’s say you are a manufacturer of a adaptor for laptop, you will need to target big purchase not one little purchase. On the PPC ad, you can state at least buy how many quantity, then will this transaction be able to proceed. This way you are not offending those who saw your ads, and at the same time be clear in who your type of consumers are too. This is even more important than the technical terms.

The above 2 ways can help to filter away unwanted clicks thus lowering your costs, but you are also lowering your CTR as well. With a list of negative keywords (growing daily or weekly), you are sure to filter away all the un-targeted traffic, thus lowering your cost, increase in sales and increase your CTR again.

You might ask “What happens to the quality score then if the CTR drops?” The quality score may drop a little like 2 or 3 below your average quality score or remain the same. That is why creating or finding your negative keyword is a constant process that almost cannot end. Because someone will search in a way you never think of, and of course writing a targeted PPC ad is also another great way to filter unwanted clicks.

Finding out if your competitors are using broad match keywords is quite easy. What you need to take note is the URL of your competitor’s first then key in a keyword phrase that is related to the competitor.

I have used an example of using “slim down fast diet” as a keyword phrase, note that I am using on the U.S search market. Right  is the ad which I saw and took as example: 

Then after which I take away diet from the keyword phrase, using “slim down fast” to search. I am still using U.S search engine to find out the result. And on the left is the the result I find out.

The second result can only show that www.Slim-Fast.com is using phrase match type, in order to find out if they are using board match, you will have to broaden the keyword by using one or two words as keyword, in this case I used “slim” as the keyword to finalize if www.Slim-Fast is using board match. The result shows below:

This confirms that they are using broad match as keywords. Do remember that once you used broad match, you must add in negative keywords to filter away unwanted traffic that are not targeted, which will cost you unwanted and un-targeted clicks in your PPC campaigns.

In order to maximize the PPC campaign, you must make full use of the Ads, the ad groups, and the keywords. As you can see that www.Slim-Fast.com uses the same ad, and furthermore using broad match “slim” as keyword. This is also one of the PPC mistake that most people make as well.

Do you make the same mistake before? If so, what did you do to correct the mistake? Share with us below on the comment, I will be hearing from you.

The question above is also asking you, do you trust PPC ads when you search online? Most of the time people will not trust PPC ads. Actually around 12% will trust PPC ads, whereas the 88% trusts organic search results.

Great now! How can I still use PPC to drive traffic then, when its against me, PPC user?

Remember that PPC is Pay Per Click, not Pay Per Impression. So with reasonable ad positions and great PPC ad, you can always be certain that you will still get clicks to your web page. The minimum odds are at least 100 impressions to 1 click. That means 1% CTR for your ad and keyword. This is the minimum passing point for your keyword quality score.

Back to the main topic…

Search users or any one who sees an ad online or offline will not trust ads that much compare to someone who has already used the product or services. Do you also have the same trusting issue? I can assure you are not the first or the last one. Yes people generally do not trust the ads even if they are offline.

Why do people not trust the ads in general?

1) They have not used it before. Human will not trust the services or product if they have not use it before. Its natural. That is why in your ads it must state the main benefit of the product.

2) No one they knew used it before. When someone you know used the product or services before, and recommend to you. You will have a high conversion rate, because its a word of mouth. Trust is already build with the friend, the friend will tell the truth and share experience about the product to you.

3) The ads are new and thus not a lot of testimonies. The product may be new and not a lot of people used it before, so it is best to add in testimonies, their before and after pictures. A video testimonies is even better as it involves visual and audio, where its high in conversion.

So what do they trust?

Basically speaking, they will trust the organic search result more than the PPC ads, its always this way. The main reason why the search users trust the search results is because the search engines are the ones that filter and gather the most relevant search results to the search users. The search engines are there to serve the public, and to present the most relevant results. So its why Google, Yahoo and MSN are the ones that has the most users in the world.

Solution to Building Trust For Your PPC

Besides the ones that I added above, another way is to make your ads continue to run in your Adwords campaign. Yes you hear me, continue to run. The reason why is that if someone driving home the same road after work, sees the same ad over and over and over again, do you think that when that someone need to use that product or service, the first thing they will think of is the product ad he sees everyday. It is the same for your PPC ads as well.

Ad position in PPC is very important, too high you over pay, too low few traffic coming to your website. This is where you need to find out the optimum PPC ad position for your PPC campaigns in your own niche.

Before we get started, I have a picture below showing a search results heat when someone searches online and where their eyes will land at. As you can see that it has the shape of triangle, where the top has the most heat and thus getting the most attention (traffic). Although this picture is used for SEO ranking purposes, it is works the same for PPC too, because PPC ads can be shown above the organic search result, depending on the Google and the number of PPC ads targeting the same keywords as you.

The picture above is telling you to position your ad high so you can have the most traffic, well the point of this post is to find your optimum PPC ad position for your campaign.Let us move on…

The heat is getting lesser and lesser as you scroll down, meaning lesser traffic. For the higher ranking positions, its called above the fold, the lower ranking positions is called below the fold. Above the fold is when someone searches for something online, it shows the search result, without scrolling, the search results that are shown are all above the fold. Below the fold search results are those that need to scroll down to find more.

With compelling ads, you can test the position of the ad to find out which has the best conversion result for your PPC campign. Different markets or niches have different results, you will need to test which is the optimum ad position for you. The ad position can be set by the bid price for the keyword or you set it as the preferred ad position that you want. I would recommend that you use the former, as this way you are only paying according to your position, as the bid price will usually be lower than the higher positions. Remember to use the same ad copy so that you can test your optimum ad position.

Another thing to note is that you might have a tight budget, and that the keywords that you are bidding for might be expensive, so be ready to add in more budget or you can always test on from 3rd to the last position, once you have enough budget then move on to be no 1 or 2 position. Who knows, that you might have gain great quality score because of the great CTR, and thus moving you up from no 3 to no1 or 2 position.

My recommendation is to test, test and test till you get the result. Of course testing will take time, so be ready to allocate the same amount of time to each of the ad positions to find out the best conversion result for your PPC ad position. Remember your job as an marketer is to find out the what your market wants and like, not to what you say it is.

Test this out, or if you have done so before, do share below. I like hear from you and find out your experience.

Have you ever seen a PPC ad that is so compelling or caught your attention, that you want to click and find out more? I did, and its the same for newspaper advertising, and all kinds of advertising. The words in the ad must have interest you or seducing you to want to know more.

This is the essence of PPC ads, to make people take action by clicking on the ad and move to see your landing page (where you sell them).

I will be setting up a topic on compelling ads in this blog, and at the same time to keep me updated and on the edge in my PPC ad copywriting.

Today I will be looking into “slimming work out” as the keyword to share. I am using the U.S Google search engine to find these Adwords PPC ads.

On the right you can see there are a number of ads shown. One thing that caught my attention is that all the ads did not show any word on “slimming”, except a “out” word in the first ad, which is “Find Out More”, and “work” in the last ad, which is part of the domain name.

Tell me which one actually caught your attention, even if the keywords are not shown in the ads.

Let me tell you which actually caught my attention, the forth ad with MyFoodLovers.com as the domain name. You can see why I like this ad, its because ‘I love food!’ And if I want to slim down yet do not have to lose the joy of leaving my favorite foods, I want to know how it is done. Don’t you?

So here is the secret that many of the PPC advertisers does not know, especially if they were unsuccessful in the Adwords PPC. It’s giving what the searchers want and give them even more reasons why they must click on your ad. So for me, the additional reason is to eat my favorite food while at the same time doing my slimming program.

These are called benefits with reasons. The other ads talk about the same thing on slimming, plan, loss weight etc… No difference to me, but if you add a benefit that actually is contra to the main benefit, yet not killing the main benefit. You got a winning ad!

So comment below on which ad gets your attention and why? I like to know from you. Hear from you soon.