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Recently Agency51 covered how to start researching keywords for search ads to help with the initial keyword research when setting up campaigns. However, once your initial keyword research plan is in place and the ads are running, you can tweak the keywords, look at what is working and increase and decrease the bids to get them into the appropriate position on the page to get the most conversions. The campaign can then continue to be developed. There are specific ways you can improve ad rank by finding new keywords and ensuring that your ad setup is on top form.

Related Landing Pages

Making sure that your landing pages and keywords are related stops you from being penalised and given a low quality score by Google. If your keywords only vaguely match, Google will see this as contributing to a bad user experience through irrelevance. Imagine reading an ad about a pair of shoes you’ve had your eye on, but then when you click through it is a completely different pair or, even worse, a pair of trousers – not ideal! Improving the quality score helps to put your ad in a higher position without relying as much on your bid. Combined they increase your ad rank score.

As shown below, keyword bids are only part of the overall factors which lead to ad position. Advertiser 2 has a higher bid, but due to their lower quality score, their ad is shown in second position. Making changes to the quality of the ad, which includes landing page experience, can make a big difference.

Keyword Insertion in Ads

Ad relevance and click through rate (CTR) are both contributors to help quality score. Using keyword insertion in ads means that as long as the keyword picked up by the search term isn’t too long, the ad will replace the text in the given section with the keyword. Keyword insertion helps increase the click through rate as the ad text is more relevant to the search term.

Adding the keyword insertion is simple, you just surround the sentence with {KeyWord:}. In the below example, if the keyword triggered by the search term is within 30 characters, ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ within these brackets would change to the relevant keyword.

Dynamic Search Ads

Consider running a dynamic search ad – these have no keywords and are based on crawling your website to find a suitable page. As there are no constraints of keywords, this means you can use these ads as keyword gathering tools. You can then take the top converting search terms and start creating traditional search ads as you know these specific keywords are more likely to bring in conversions.

Scan Search Term Reports

Keep an eye on your search term report and look for more keywords that you can add into the keyword mix. This is a great way to bulk up your keywords, especially for the long tailed keywords. For example, if you have the keyword ‘mens waxed jacket’ as a modified broad match (so someone’s search term has to include these keywords at some point within their search) and someone searches for ‘men’s black waxed jacket’, you’ve got yourself a longer tailed keyword to add to your keywords  as you know someone who searches this next time has more intention to buy. You can then put that keyword on a higher bid than ‘mens waxed jacket’ to get it in a more prominent position in the search results.

Negative Keywords

When in the search term report, continuously look for irrelevant search terms to add as negative keywords. Doing this on a regular basis will ensure the search terms remain relevant. This in turn will improve the click through rate which helps the quality score of the campaign.

There are many ways that you can build up your ad rank through clever keyword changes. The above highlights some of the ways we do it here at Agency51. However, as with everything in the search ad world, you will find testing different approaches and seeing what works best for you is key to maintaining a healthy account.

If you found this blog useful and would like our team to have a look into your PPC strategy, please visit our PPC services page or contact us today!

 

Hannah Pittman

Hannah Pittman

Hannah has 12 years’ experience in the marketing field, ranging from online and offline marketing to PPC Specialist roles in a variety of sectors from education to global online retailers. She joined Agency51 as a Senior Client Marketing Manager with a PPC specialism.

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