Improving your keywords’ quality scores in any Google AdWords campaign is always a must.  Your ad groups must be tightly themed and your text ads must contain the targeted keywords.  Furthermore, your landing pages should include these same keywords.  By taking these steps you should see your click-thru-rates (CTRs) increase and thus, your quality scores improve.

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The idea for this post comes from Shaun of VirtuoSEO, www.virtuoseo.co.uk.  Follow Shaun on Twitter @VirtuoSEO.

Click fraud is the practice of clicking a pay-per-click (PPC) ad solely to waste an advertiser’s budget. As the name implies, it is both wrong and unethical.  Google has responded to click fraud by instituting advanced monitoring techniques.  For the most part, Google does a good job of detecting invalid clicks and saving advertisers’ budget, but there’s a new category of malicious activity that must be addressed: impression fraud.

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Because up to 11 pay-per-click (PPC) text ads might show on any given search query, it is imperative that you do whatever you can to make your ad stand out.  Yes, you want to make sure the users’ search terms actually appear in the ad and that you have a strong call to action, but every PPC campaign manager thinks this way.  You need to dig deeper in your messaging in order to turn the impression into a click.  The three themes outlined below are ways to make your ads stand out in order to increase your overall click-thru-rate (CTR).

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Recently there has been talk of a new metric within the PPC industry: conversions per impression. I first read about this metric from Chris Crompton of Search Engine Land.

In my view, this metric represents the overall effectiveness of your PPC campaign. The click-through rate (CTR) measures how relevant your ads are to user search queries. The conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors who complete your predefined goals once the ads are clicked. These are important metrics, but it may be time to consider conversions per impression (CPI) as well. Let’s take this example:

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Google AdWords has recently added three new features to the paid platform. Two of the features are still in beta and only available to select advertisers, but all three help to bring better targeted ads to users. John A. Lee of The Clix Marketing PPC Blog does a good job of explaining these new features.

The new feature I am going to discuss is Ad Sitelinks.  Similar to the sitelinks you see in an organic listing, the paid Sitelinks allow four additional links to show within your ad.  Take the example below:

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I am going back to the basics with this entry and discussing how to write text ads that will garner clicks. Too often I see ineffective ad copy that leads to low click-thru-rates (CTRs). I will share why it is necessary to include your targeted keywords in your ad copy and techniques to make your ads stand out.

First and foremost, when you write ads “one size fits all” does not apply. Why not? Let’s take a look at this example. When I search for “Panasonic televisions” I see these ads.

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