PPC 101 a+Complete+Guide 2020

CONTENTS 1 WHAT IS PPC & HOW PAID SEARCH
MARKETING WORKS
2 7 POWERFUL BENEFITS OF USING

PPC ADVERTISING
3 THE 8 BEST PPC AD NETWORKS
4
SEJ PARTNER CHAPTER
HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR PPC STRATEGY
PPC BIDDING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BEGINNERS

SEJ PARTNER
5 WHAT IS QUALITY SCORE & WHY IT

MATTERS
6 WHAT IS CLICK-THROUGH RATE & WHY

CTR IS IMPORTANT
SEJ PARTNER CHAPTER
CLICK FRAUD: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO
PROTECT YOUR ADVERTISING
SEJ PARTNER
7 WHAT ARE KEYWORDS & HOW THEY

WORK IN PPC
8 STRUCTURE BEST PRACTICES: HOW TO

CREATE YOUR CAMPAIGNS & AD GROUPS
9 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PPC

BUDGETS & BIDDING
10 A COMPLETE GUIDE TO PPC AD

TARGETING OPTIONS
11 10 PPC COPYWRITING BEST PRACTICES

FOR EXTRA EFFECTIVE TEXT ADS
12 EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

AD EXTENSIONS
13 A COMPLETE GUIDE TO PPC AD
FORMATS
14 A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SHOPPING

ADS
15 THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT PPC KPIS

YOU SHOULD BE TRACKING
16 25 TOP PAID MEDIA EXPERTS YOU

SHOULD FOLLOW
1
WHAT IS
PPC & HOW
PAID SEARCH
MARKETING
WORKS
AUTHOR
DAN GILBERT
What is PPC? How does it
work? And, most importantly,
how can you make it work for
you?
This chapter will introduce you to everything you need to know
about the exciting world of paid search marketing: keywords, ads,
budgets and bids, ad rank, targeting, and conversions.
Let’s kick things off with the basics.

W H AT I S P P C & H O W PA I D S E A R C H M A R K E T I N G W O R K S
WHAT IS PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that lets advertisers

place ads on an advertisement platform and pay the host of the
platform when their ad is clicked.
The goal of the ad is to lead the user who clicks to the advertiser’s
website or app, where the user can complete a valuable action
such as purchasing a product.
Search engines are popular host platforms as they allow

advertisers to display ads relevant to what users are searching for.
Advertising services like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads operate

with real-time bidding (RTB), where advertising inventory is sold in a
private automated auction using real-time data.
How Paid Search Works?

Every time there is an ad spot on a search engine results page
(SERP), an instantaneous auction takes place for the keyword.
A combination of multiple factors, including bid amount and the
quality of the ad, decide the winner who will appear in the top spot
of the SERP.
These auctions are what keeps the gears of PPC moving. They
begin when someone searches for something on a search engine.
If there are advertisers interested in showing ads related to a user’s
search query, an auction is triggered based on keywords that are
bid on by advertisers. The ads that win the auction then appear on
the search engine results page.
To get involved in these auctions, advertisers use accounts on

platforms like Google Ads to set up their ads and determine where
and when they would like those ads to appear.
Accounts are split into campaigns for ease of management and

reporting of different locations, product types, or other useful
categorization. Campaigns are further divided into ad groups that
contain keywords and relevant ads.
KEYWORDS
Keywords lie at the center of PPC, connecting advertisers to

users’ search queries.
Queries are the actual words that users type into the search
box of a search engine to find results.
Keywords, on the other hand, are what marketers use to target

these users by matching their search queries.
Keywords work as generalized abstractions of a wide range of

search queries prone to irregularities like misspellings. Depending
on the keyword match types they use, advertisers can match
search queries with more or less precision.
For example, advertisers can choose to match keywords with

search queries exactly or to allow for variations such as different
orderings of the words, different spellings, or the inclusion of other
words.
It is also possible to have negative keywords, which will prevent ads

from being triggered by search queries containing those keywords,
to avoid irrelevant traffic.
Ads
Along with keywords, advertisers need to prepare ads in their
campaigns. These are nestled together within ad groups that target
shared sets of keywords and are organized by common themes.
Ads are what the users will see if the auction is won, so they’re
essential to getting right. They typically contain headlines,
description lines, and a URL.
On a SERP, they can show up on top of the results or at the bottom

of the page. It’s good practice to test different versions of ad copy
to see what performs best.
Services like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads provide features called
ad extensions that enhance the appearance of ads.
Examples include sitelink extensions, which populate an ad with

more links to different pages on a site, and call extensions, which
add a phone number to the ad during business hours.
Ad extensions are great as they increase the visibility of ads by

making them more engaging to users while communicating more
information.
W H AT I S P P C & H O W PA I D S E A R C H M A R K E T I N G W O R K
BUDGETS & BIDS
To participate in the auction, advertisers need to decide how much

they’re willing to spend on a given keyword. This is done using
budgets at a campaign level, and bids at the ad group or keyword
level.
Budgets are set at the campaign level and can be exceeded daily,
but will not be overspent monthly.
Budgets should be set according to the overall account strategy,

but bids are a more precise way of controlling spend. All ad groups
must have bids, but keyword level bids override ad group level bids.
Many advertisers use automated bidding strategies. These allow

advertisers to set a specific goal for their campaigns and then have
the advertising platform determine the most appropriate bid for
each auction.
Bid strategies can be applied to individual campaigns or a portfolio

of multiple campaigns.
Due to the RTB system, the actual amount paid by the advertiser is
dependent on competitor activity and ad rank, not just the maximum
bid.
AD RANK
There’s more to winning the auction than having the highest bid.
Search engines look at other factors to determine which ads should
be at the top and most valuable spot on the SERP.
Search engines have their own particular ways of factoring in other

elements to determine ad rank.
Google, for example, considers:

Bid amount.
Ad relevance and quality.
The context of the search (such as the user’s device and time
of day).
Format impact (e.g., whether it includes extensions that
enhance the format of the ad).
Quality Score is a metric that determines ad relevance.
The components of Quality Score are:
Historical click-through rate (CTR).

Relevance of the keyword to the ad.
Relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query.
Landing page quality.
Ad relevance is absolutely essential; the higher Quality Score is, the

lower the CPC will be.
Search engines penalize advertisers who bid on keywords with low

Quality Scores by rarely showing their ads, even if they have high
bids.
That’s why it’s very important to have an engaging and relevant ad

copy that includes high-volume keywords.
But landing page quality shouldn’t be overlooked either; ads will

show less often when they point to sites with poor user experience.
The web page must be relevant to the user, load quickly, and
provide an overall smooth user experience.
TARGETTING
Choosing the right keywords is what allows advertisers to show ads

to relevant audiences.
But there are other targeting options available to optimize

campaigns, including:
Device targeting.
Location targeting.
Day and time targeting.
Demographic targeting.
This way, advertisers can target users on mobile in the evening, or

users under 25 and within a certain radius of a particular location, to
optimize their ads’ performance.
These are very valuable because different variations of ad copy,

for example, might perform better for one group of users than for
another.
Using remarketing tools that allow for more specific ad copy

messaging and adjusted budgets, it can also be possible to target
or exclude past visitors to a website who do follow-up searches.
Bids can be automatically adjusted for keywords based on targeting

options, giving advertisers more control over traffic and spend by
bidding when customers are more valuable to the business.
CONVERSIONS
The point of all this hard work isn’t just to get clicks.
The real end game is to obtain conversions. These are the actions
that advertisers want users to complete after clicking on their ad
and depend on the type of business being advertised.
Common examples of conversions are:

Purchasing a service.
Signing up for a newsletter.
Placing a phone call.
And more.
It’s vital to track conversions to know whether a PPC campaign is

doing well and how many conversions can be attributed to paid
search rather than other marketing channels.
Platforms like Google Ads can track conversions using a snippet of

code placed into the source code of the conversion page (which
is reached after conversion, like a thank you page) to collect
conversion data.
Conversion tracking can be tricky because conversion paths also

tend to be more complicated than a simple click on an ad and a
direct purchase.
They often include multiple searches and website visits or can lead
to an email, phone call or in-store visit. Using an analytics service
like Google Analytics can help decide how credit for conversions is
assigned to conversion paths.
2
7 POWERFUL
BENEFITS OF
USING PPC
ADVERTISING
AUTHOR
COREY MORRIS
There are many compelling
benefits of PPC advertising.
Whether you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the
value of Google Ads (or Microsoft Ads), there’s a compelling case
to be made.
For starters, PPC:
Offers quick entry.

Results are easy to measure and track.
Works well with other marketing channels.
Provides a wealth of useful data.
PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most

businesses and brands. If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing,
you’re likely losing out on valuable traffic and revenue.
Need to make a case for PPC advertising? Here are just seven
powerful benefits of using PPC.
7 POWERFUL BENEFITS OF USING PPC ADVERTISING
1. PPC CONTRIBUTES TO BUSINESS GOALS
This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising.

PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing
goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and
thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.
Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a

powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.
In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can

foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the
funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter
signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads.
PPC can support many parts of the sales

funnel and the path that your prospects
take from awareness to becoming a
customer. Regardless of the set of
identified goals, PPC campaigns can be
set up effectively.
Granular goals, targeting, and robust data

to report make it highly successful for
many and easy to know if it is working or
not.
2. PPC IS MEASURABLE & TRACKABLE
A major benefit of PPC advertising run through Google Ads is that

it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the Google Ads tool in
combination with Google Analytics.
You’ll see high-level performance details, including impressions,

clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals).
There’s no mystery to your PPC performance. Stats are readily

available and show how your campaigns are performing and what
kind of traffic and results they drive for your budget.
In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture isn’t as

clear for attribution of the budget to direct results.
When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and
track it to conversion using Google Analytics, you can see what you
spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals.
No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like that. Plus,

you can do more with call tracking and isolate your PPC efforts
more than you can in SEO, and many other marketing efforts as
calls can be a big blind spot.
3. QUICK ENTRY
Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors in jumping into

PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little
bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO
efforts, which often takes a lot of time and attention to get the
same positioning and traffic that Google Ads offers within minutes
of launch.
When compared to other channels like email and organic social,

you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who
are already aware of your brand. You aren’t limited to your existing
followers or customer lists.
PPC lets you quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and
customers.
Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform
– from the research to campaign build-out, to writing ads. You
can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your
development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking
and any desired landing pages.
4. YOU’RE IN CONTROL
While there are several nuances regarding default campaign

settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options
for reaching potential customers. This starts with the keywords or
placements you choose to target and how restrictive you want to
be.
You also have a lot of budget flexibility if you want to start small.
You can set your own ad budget and bids, and choose what you’re
willing to spend (though you have to pay at least close to a market
rate to play in most cases).
If you see positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if

you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop your ad
spend immediately. This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing
campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move

quickly when necessary or desired.
Google Ads’ auction and the algorithm involved have the final say
of where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when
compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your
landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.
The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits
and to optimize while your ads are running and try new tests every
day. There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment that you see in
other mediums, and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to
let it finish out a contracted media cycle.
Whether you have a quantity of

leads goal, a ROAS goal,
spend goal, or other
specific goals, you can
manage toward them
and track them with data
that is fresh within a day.
5. PPC WORKS WELL WITH OTHER

MARKETING CHANNELS
Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world, and
content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now.
With the investment in producing original and unique content to

support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership
positioning, Google Ads is an engine that can drive visitors to
content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content
investment.
PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and

opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience – the people
using Google to find information, services, or products.
The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from

Google Ads can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-
by-keyword basis for prioritizing SEO efforts.
On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy
can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align
with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained,
and business end goals are not siloed.
Google Ads remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors

engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads
are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on
specific rules or audiences you select.
If nothing else, remarketing can be a great place to start running

PPC campaigns as well as it is cheaper and lower in the funnel than
prospecting and brand awareness steps tied to ads.
There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an
alternative to traditional direct marketing activities. PPC can also be
directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and
conversion. If you can shift away from more expensive traditional
marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better
tracking, it can be a big win.
6. INCREDIBLE TARGETING OPTIONS
Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in Google Ads to

test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting
types that can gain brand exposure.
This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running

ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors or focusing
on specific audience demographics on the display network.
By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope
of Google Ads is leveraged and that you’re getting as many
impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in
your prospective audience.
Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see
what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is
for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different
targeting methods with each other.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available

is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your
audience as well as those that have been exposed to your brand.
You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.
7. A WEALTH OF MARKETING DATA
While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly

available in Google Ads, the value of information gained goes
beyond just PPC performance.
Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be

used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.
Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display
planner tools to find where your audience is.
You can also cross-reference where your competition is through

third-party tools like SpyFu, KeywordSpy, and iSpionage to build a
solid profile of what you’re up against and what market share you
can gain. Plus, you can still manually look at the search results and
gain insight as to what the searcher will see.
STILL NOT CONVINCED ABOUT PPC?

Run your own projection to
show the risk of Google Ads
compared to other organic
and paid traffic sources
you’re currently utilizing. For
example:
By looking at what the cost will be for media, management of the

campaign, and any content that must be created, you can put
that cost up against what you’re currently spending for similar
management and development activities in organic search, email,
social, and offline marketing channels.
Additionally, you can take some simple inputs, including your current
or projected conversion rate and project with the keyword and
display planner tools to see what traffic is out there.
From there, you can look at what the projection is if you were to
increase by certain amounts of traffic, putting the cost of that traffic
against the investment required to get it.
SUMMARY
PPC advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable channel
for tons of B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other companies seeking
quick, quality traffic and conversions.
Considering all the benefits PPC offers, there’s little risk in testing
it out to see where it can move the needle and gain a wealth of
valuable data to inform your other marketing and optimization
efforts.
3
THE 8 BEST
PPC AD
NETWORKS
AUTHOR
LISA RAEHSLER
No two ad platforms are
exactly alike.
Deciding where to invest in advertising can depend on several
factors, such as:
Platform user base.

Volume for ad serving.
Creative opportunities.
Advertiser budget.
This allows advertisers to gain massive reach to potential

customers across audiences and online behaviors.
So which PPC ad platform is right for your business?
It’s likely your business will benefit from several of the platforms
that follow.
THE 8 BEST PPC AD NETWORKS
In this chapter, you’ll learn more about the following PPC ad

networks:
Google Ads.
Microsoft Ads.
YouTube.
Facebook.
Instagram.
LinkedIn.
Twitter.
Pinterest.
GOOGLE ADS
Google Ads is the most popular ad network due to the available

reach of ads in volume of searches done in the Google search
engine and a large number of websites on the Google Display
Network (GDN).
Billions of searches per day happen through Google’s search

engine.
Google states, “Google Ads display ads appear on over two

million websites and in over 650,000 apps, so your ad can show
up wherever your audience is.” Targeting on the display network
includes remarketing, in-market audiences, similar audiences, and
more.
Both search and display campaigns allow demographic targeting

in age, gender, parental status, and household income. Adding in
demographic targeting narrows the available reach for ads, but
makes the targeting more relevant.
Placements: Google search engine results, web placements on the

GDN, shopping, mobile apps, and YouTube.
Ad Formats: Text, image, responsive, video.
Pricing: Cost-per-click (CPC) model based on the competition and

ad quality. GDN allows Cost-per-1,000 impressions (CPM).
Tip: Depending on the industry, advertisers will find higher CPCs

on Google Ads on search keywords. It is time to think creatively, try
a highly relevant display network campaign, or move to one of the
other platforms.
MICROSOFT ADS
The Microsoft Search Network sees 12.2 billion PC searches

monthly.
Microsoft Ads has tools for advertisers to import campaigns from

Google Ads, simplifying the process of getting started.
Microsoft has the advantage of exclusively serving Yahoo search

traffic, powering several digital assistant voice searches, and the
ability to target searchers with LinkedIn profile data such as
company, job function, and industry.
According to Microsoft:
“Outside of LinkedIn itself, Microsoft Advertising is the only digital
advertising platform to offer LinkedIn Profile Targeting.”
Placements: Search engines, Microsoft Audience Network, which

includes native content placements on MSN, Outlook.com, the Edge
browser, and select quality partner sites. LinkedIn.
Ad Formats: Text for search, responsive for native placements.

LinkedIn serves text ads, Dynamic Search Ads, and shopping
campaigns.
Pricing: CPC model based on the competition and ad quality.
Tip: While Microsoft Ads allows advertisers to import campaigns

from Google Ads, keeping an exact copy and not optimizing for
the Microsoft Ads platform can be a mistake. Be sure to adjust
bids (usually down), match types, and add any Microsoft Ads ad
extensions.
YOUTUBE
YouTube reaches over 2 billion logged-in users per month globally,

so it’s an excellent opportunity for advertisers to reach their
audience through this platform effectively.
Campaign creation and management are handled through the

Google Ads platform with more in-depth information about the
audience’s demographics and engagement through YouTube
Analytics in the YouTube account.
Placements: YouTube
Ad Formats: Skippable in-stream ads, Non-skippable in-stream ads,

Bumper ads, Video discovery ads, Masthead ads
Pricing: CPV, CPM
Tip: Advertisers can reach potential customers with the same

targeting available for the Google Display Network
FACEBOOK
As the top social network on the planet, 2.6 billion people use
Facebook every month.
User targeting can be very granular with demographics, interests,

behaviors, and more. Facebook supports retargeting through user
activity on Facebook and off Facebook actions through advertisers’
Facebook pixel data and upload of customer lists.
Placements: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience

Network.
Mobile: Facebook mobile properties and Audience Network.
Ad Formats: Video, single image, carousel, slideshow, canvas

(mobile). Audience Network on mobile supports a variety of video
and display formats such as native, interstitial, rewarded, and in-
stream video.
Pricing: Cost per desired action, based on bid, estimated action

rates, ad quality.
Tip: Best for targeting very granular audiences through detailed

demographics since the level of targeting is not easily achieved on
Google or Bing.
INSTAGRAM
Instagram has over 1 billion active users who tend to be younger

than Facebook users.
As a Facebok company, campaign creation and management are

handled through the Facebook Ads platform. While Facebook
recommends using Automatic Placements (targeting all placements
in one campaign), this can easily be set to any placement the
advertiser would like.
Placements: Instagram Feeds and Stories, can be combined with

any Facebook placements
Ad Formats: Single image, video, carousel ad, collection

Pricing: Cost per desired action, based on bid, estimated action
rates, ad quality.
Tip: Instagram audience skews younger than Facebook and has a

bit less volume.
LINKEDIN
Now owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn is a wealth of information and

audiences for advertisers to target for the professional set.
More than 500 million professionals are on LinkedIn, and they can
all be targeted by professional criteria, such as job title, seniority,
company, and many more.
Placements: LinkedIn, LinkedIn Audience Network contains ten of

thousands of mobile sites, mobile apps, and ad exchanges.
Mobile: Ads in the LinkedIn app and LinkedIn Audience Network.
Ad Formats: Text/image ad on LinkedIn, native on LinkedIn

Audience Network sites and apps.
Pricing: CPC model based on the competition and ad relevance,

CPM, Cost-per-send (CPS).
Tip: One tactic that gets results on LinkedIn is offering valuable tips,
whitepapers, or other content related to users’ industry.
TWITTER
Twitter offers several options to reach users through the platform

used by 330 million active users each month.
Unlike many other platforms, Twitter ads are entirely contained on

Twitter, with no network partners.
Promoted tweets are probably one of the most flexible ad formats

because they can include any combinations of text and other media
that comply with the overall policies.
Placements: Twitter.com and Twitter app.
Mobile: Ads in the feed of the Twitter app.

Ad Formats: Promoted tweets (text and/or images, GIFS, videos),

promoted accounts, promoted trends.
Pricing: Promoted tweets and promoted accounts is CPC,

promoted trends are handled through a Twitter sales
representative.
Tip: Advertising on Twitter should go hand-in-hand with having a

solid Twitter engagement strategy. While promoting an account can
get new followers, robust tweet content will yield the best results.
PINTEREST
Pinterest has 200 million active monthly users who are researching
trends, ideas, and products, and many of them are looking to
purchase.
The users skew the majority of women at 7%, with 40% earning
$100,000 household income.
Placements: Pinterest.com and Pinterest app.

Mobile: Ads in the feed of the Pinterest app.
Ad Formats: Promoted pins, one-tap promoted pins, promoted

video pins, cinematic pins, promoted app pins.
Pricing: CPC for promoted pins, app installs, CPM for promoted
video pins.
Tip: Search queries on Pinterest are more general than on Google,

for example. Research keywords before getting started. A robust
Pinterest presence will improve results as shares and saves on
Pinterest stick around and don’t cost the advertiser.
4
HOW TO
DEVELOP YOUR
PPC STRATEGY
AUTHOR
LISA RAEHSLER
A successful PPC campaign
begins with a strategy.
You need to know and clearly define what you want to accomplish.
What is your goal?
A PPC or paid social program can actually consist of many

different goals.
Sometimes your PPC goals will be obvious, but sometimes this will
require more consideration of all of the options available to your
organization.
H O W TO D E V E LO P YO U R P P C ST R AT E GY
The most common PPC goals include:

Brand awareness
Product and brand consideration
Leads
Sales
Repeat sales
Each of these goals aligns with the basic sales funnel: awareness,
consideration, and purchase.
As an advertiser, you should closely examine the sales funnel for

your business and customize your paid media programs accordingly.
For example, a B2B business may have a much longer sales cycle
due to researching business solutions and the internal decision-
makers’ involvement.
In contrast, a consumer e-commerce product could be an

immediate purchase or a few hours from clicking on a PPC ad.
Let’s take a look at each of these five PPC goals and tactics that will
help you accomplish each one.
BRAND AWARENESS
PPC is often used for brand awareness to introduce and raise the
visibility of a brand or product.
At this phase, we want to maximize exposure to a highly relevant

audience, with hopes clicks will lead to the consideration phase.
Using PPC display ads can be effective if the targeting is on-topic

by using keywords, topics, relevant placements, in-market lists, or a
combination of those.
These targeting tactics are the most general but will offer a wider
reach.
Social media PPC ads are a good option for branding since there
are so many targeting options based on demographics and
interests.
Similarly, search campaigns with more general keywords can be

useful for branding.
For example, if the business sells scuba equipment, potentially

bidding on “scuba gear” could increase awareness of the product
offering.
The downside of this approach is that you will often see higher
cost-per-clicks due to competition and sometimes irrelevant click-
throughs.
The best way to execute this approach is with smart keyword

match types and negative keywords.
PRODUCT & BRAND CONSIDERATION
In this phase, when users are considering and researching a

purchase, it is a great time to reintroduce the brand with more
detailed targeting and more persuasive call-to-action language in
the ad copy.
When consumers hit the considerations phase, typically, their

search queries will become more detailed and specific.
They may search for brands and product combinations to research,

compare, and read reviews such as ‘Samsung 50” TV’ or ‘LG 50” tv’.
This is a good time to use remarketing with a banner or responsive

ads to bring the consumer back to the previously viewed product.
Another excellent form of targeting is the in-market list composed

of users whose online behavior and action have indicated they are
in the market to buy.
LEADS
When your business model doesn’t support immediate or online

sales, you want to collect leads to follow up with interested
prospects and engage them in a conversation.
Calls-to-action might be:

Request a demo.
Get a consultation.
Free trial.
All of these ideas are meant to entice the user to call or fill out an
online web form to initiate conversions.
How the lead is followed-up on will vary for each business, but now
you also have information that can be used for PPC and paid social
customer match campaigns.
SALES
Consumers who are ready to purchase tend to use words in their

search queries that indicate higher intent.
This can include things like:

Model numbers.
Shipping information.
Discounts.
Coupons.
Financing.
It is good to have separate campaigns that address this phase by

highlighting offers, guarantees, warranty information, or your return
policy.
This reassures consumers that your business is the one to buy

from.
Make full use of your ad copy and ad extensions.
Also, try cart abandonment ads and remarketing ads that show the
products the user viewed.
Remember to set up the remarketing campaigns so that customers

are no longer targeted after the purchase.
To do this, set up a “purchasers” list. Exclude that list from the

campaign. You will also need it later for repeat sales.
REPEAT SALES
PPC is an excellent way to garner repeat sales if your product or

service needs replacement, maintenance, accessories, upgrades, or
other product cross-sells or up-sells.
In designing the repeat sales approach, ask a few questions:
How long does the product last or need to be replaced?

Is there a new and improved model coming out?
Does the consumer buy multiples?
Are there opportunities to cross-sell accessories or
complementary products?
What would motivate the consumer to re-purchase from you?
Brand loyalty? Fast shipping? Unique features?
Use PPC remarketing and customer match to re-engage previous

customers with messaging aimed at factors that would motivate
them to purchase from you again.
Similar to the sales phase, coupons and discounts are always good
motivators.
CONCLUSION
A solid PPC and paid social account should include numerous goals
designed to reach and lead the consumer down the sales funnel to
purchase.
It might be helpful to outline this in a chart that contains goals,

keywords themes, key messaging, and landing pages to get
organized and ensure all of the bases are covered.
After launch, review the results and determine how to optimize and
allot budgets.
Check the “Attribution” section of the paid media platform or

analytics to see campaign paths and assisted conversions to help
guide moving forward with a successful account.
PPC BIDDING
RECOMMENDATIONS
FOR BEGINNERS
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
MEREDITH STACK
DEMAND GENERATION MANAGER,
CALLRAIL
In pay-per-click (PPC)
advertising, you bid on
keywords.
In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you bid on keywords. When
people search for those keywords, your ad or listing appears high
up on the results page, based on how much you bid.
The bidding aspect is what throws off many non-marketing people,

conjuring up images of a fast-talking auctioneer at a county fair.
The process is much different than what you might expect, and
fortunately, Google makes developing a PPC bidding strategy a
cinch for beginners.
The following plan will get you started with basic bidding on
Google Ads. As you gain confidence, you’ll be able to explore more
advanced strategies – but even this novice approach can still open
new marketing channels for your small business.
P P C B I D D I N G R E C O M M E N DAT I O N S F O R B E G I N N E R S
GETTING STARTED
If you’ve never used Google Ads before, setting up an account

and getting your first campaign going is easy:
Follow Google’s instructions to sign up for Google Ads.
When you click to start a new campaign, the interface will give
you some basic options. Choose “Website Traffic,” and then
choose “Search” and continue.
The next page is the basic dashboard, and it can look
intimidating at first. Name your campaign, and then unclick the
boxes in the Networks section – these are advanced options
that beginners should avoid.
Scroll down and pick your language(s).
The next steps require a little more attention, which we’ll detail soon.
You don’t need to worry about ad groups just yet – as you become
more accustomed to PPC bidding, you can give this intermediate
feature a try.
CLUES ABOUT PPC KEYWORDS
Keywords are essential to any PPC campaign in Google Ads. You

can’t simply hope that a random search will produce your ad –
keywords stack the odds and your PPC bidding strategy in your
favor.
Yet many PPC newcomers find keyword research daunting,

seemingly requiring too much work and a cross-your-fingers
approach that hopes the keywords you dig up will be effective.
This should never be a deterrent to a paid strategy, and Google Ads

can do most – if not all – of the legwork for you with its Keyword
Planner, which is found under the tools/settings icon (the wrench).
The initial process is simple and geared toward beginners and

experts alike: Enter some industry terms and/or your small
business’s domain and let the tool return recommended keywords.
The tool also provides estimated bid values for keywords, offering a
good idea on what’s popular with search engine users and what will
cost you more to get those users’ to engage with your ads.
When choosing keywords, consider how narrow or broad you want

to be based on what your target audience is looking for.
If a keyword is too specific or you restrict your keyword bids to

“Exact Match,” it might not draw enough search traffic.
The opposite is just as tricky – for example, a plumbing business

that chooses “leak detection” for a broad match might be displayed
(and would be charged) for keywords like “roof leak detection” or
“engine leak detection” for people looking for ways to fix a leak in
their roofs or cars.
Phrase match offers a strong middle-of-the-road setting for PPC

beginners.
Pro tip: Search some of your keywords on Google to see what

results and ads show up and get a clear picture of how your ad
would fit in. Consider using long-tail keywords, or three- to four-
word phrases, to mirror how your ideal customer may be searching.
Once your ads are live, you will be able to see what phrases people
are actually using in their searches that also show your ads.
These terms are referred to as search queries and will be in their

own “search terms” report in Google Ads.
PICK A GOAL
Before beginners decide on how much they want to spend with

their PPC bidding strategy, they must decide which metric they’ll be
paying for.
The basic Google Ads menu offers bids focused by:

Clicks
Conversions
Conversion value (how much each conversion is worth)
Impression share (how many times your ads are shown versus
how many times they could appear)
As a beginner, start with clicks and focus solely on that for a while –
until you’ve moved well beyond the novice stage.
Bidding on clicks is much easier to understand because it’s such a

one-for-one transaction, and you get direct results: You spent this
much to get x number of clicks, thus informing your future bidding
strategy.
Google Ads offers more advanced options, such as maximized

clicks and target return on ad spend (ROAS) than the four we’ve
listed – trust us; they’re really advanced for the PPC neophyte.
Ignore the link to those options and stick with clicks.
Note: If you decide to set your goal for conversions, you will need to
take extra steps for more advanced conversion tracking.
SET A LOCATION
Most small businesses cover a relatively small geographic area –

any PPC bidding strategy for beginners must account for this reality.
You naturally may want to cast as wide a net as possible with your
Google Ads strategy, but you don’t want to be paying for clicks from
so far away that customers won’t travel to you or you to them.
Another consideration with setting the location for your ads is cost.
Bigger cities with more competition require higher bids than those
in rural or exurban areas.
Google Ads’ setup almost encourages you to go big, but stay local
to realize a better ROI.
As you set locations for your paid ads, think about the services you
want to offer and the keywords you’re using to sell those services.
Our plumber might not mind traveling 50 miles for a big job that
is advertised in a PPC ad, but driving that far to fix a loose toilet
handle won’t be as cost-efficient.
Break your keywords down, pick the most profitable services you
want to initially focus on, and set a search area that makes the most
sense to your business.
SET A BID
At last, you should be ready to set a bid.
Although the number you set here is important, it might be the

least consequential step of the process – everything involved with
the setup, the keywords, and the location are more critical to the
success of your PPC efforts.
According to Google Ads:

“For CPC bidding campaigns, you set a maximum cost-per-click bid
- or simply “max. CPC” - that’s the highest amount that you’re willing
to pay for a click on your ad (unless you’re setting bid adjustments, or
using Enhanced CPC).
For example, If you think it’s worth US$.25 to have someone visit
your website, you can set US$0.25 as your max. CPC. You’ll pay a
maximum of US$0.25 when a person reads your ad and clicks it, and
you pay nothing if they don’t click.
Let’s say you create a text ad and set a max. CPC bid of US$0.25. If
500 people see the ad, and 23 of them click to learn more, you pay
only for those 23 clicks. Your max. CPC bid was US$0.25, so you’ll
pay no more than 23 clicks x US$0.25, or US$5.75.”
As a beginner, you likely want to let Google Ads automate your

bidding, meaning the application will determine if bids are high
enough and set the price appropriately.
In this way, you won’t need to constantly be adjusting your bid

based on what the market or your competitors are doing, or on how
keywords are performing.
With clicks, Google Ads will automatically adjust your bidding to

optimize the number of people who visit your website and/or fill out
a form.
However, you still need to set a maximum daily amount you’re willing
to spend on the campaign. This will be dictated by your budget and
what the Keyword Planner is telling you the keywords are worth.
Follow these tips when setting this amount:
Break down your monthly PPC budget into a daily figure – so

$5,000 a month would be entered as roughly $150 a day.
Set a max click cost, which will define the most you want to spend
per click and the number you are hoping for each day at full price.
For example, $25 will net you six clicks with your $150 daily budget
– assuming each will cost the full amount (you may end up with
more depending on where the actual cost per click lands).
Rely on your keyword research to set a reasonable daily max. You

may find that you aren’t budgeting enough – you won’t make any
headway if you are setting a $15 limit for keywords that cost $20
per click.
Need help setting your budget and goals? Here’s a

handy worksheet that can help you calculate your ad spend.
Returning to our plumbing business, it may be happy to pay more

per click and set a slightly higher budget to draw more clicks – and
more potential nearby customers – from a busy urban area.
Or the business might see an opportunity to advertise with a less

common keyword in a geographic area that has less competition.
Again, everything you do before defining your bid information will

factor into how much you type in for your max amounts.
As you become more comfortable with understanding PPC and

interpreting the bids, Google Ads is setting for you – as well as the
data generated from clicks and impressions – you can begin to
manually set bids.
Automated bidding provides a great way for beginners to dip their

toes in the PPC waters, but ultimately, it benefits Google in the long
term because you’ll pay more. Moving beyond the novice stage
ultimately will save you money.
INCORPORATING CALL TRACKING
Data is key to the success – or lack thereof – of any modern

marketing strategy, including PPC.
Google Ads generally delivers the metrics you seek, except for one
area: people calling your business.
Did they call after seeing your ad on Google?
Or did they simply obtain your number from another source?
Determining the efficacy of your PPC campaign is difficult if you

can’t track anything beyond clicks.
Call tracking software solves this problem by generating unique

phone numbers to be used with each PPC campaign.
That way, if a lead does call your business after clicking on one
of your ads, you’ll know precisely which ad they saw from which
campaign.
This not only nets you a potential new customer, but it also identifies
which campaigns were more effective and at what bidding price.
5
WHAT IS
QUALITY SCORE
& WHY IT
MATTERS
AUTHOR
FREDERICK VALLAEYS
Over the past few years,
automated bidding has become
more consistent at delivering
solid performance for search
advertisers.
They no longer need to pick a CPC bid for every keyword and can
instead set CPA or ROAS goals and let machine learning calculate
the correct bid to achieve the stated goal for every single search
that happens.
But in this move towards more hands-off campaign management,

it still pays to know the details of how the underlying system works.
There is money to be saved by working hand-in-hand with

automation to deliver even better results than the machine can
deliver on its own.
W H AT I S Q U A L I T Y S C O R E & W H Y I T M AT T E R S
When turning on automated bidding, an advertiser’s work is far from

done.
While there are many levers for optimizing automated campaigns

and bids, this chapter is about using Quality Score to increase an
ad’s exposure while at the same time driving down its cost.
How Quality Score (QS) works to lower costs can be a mystery to

new and old advertisers.
With thousands of advertisers vying for top rankings on the same

keywords and many of them using the same tools for automating
their bids, how does the search engine decide which ad gets the
top spot and how much every advertiser pays?
QS is a big part of the equation, and something advertisers can

influence, even when they may have stopped controlling the other
lever that factors into this: the bid.
Why does Google use QS, how do they calculate it, and how can
advertisers improve it?
I served on the QS team for AdWords while working at Google, so

let me shed some light.
WHAT IS QUALITY SCORE?
Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant a keyword has

been based on data from past ad auctions.
As soon as Google has enough data, keywords in an advertiser’s

account are assigned a QS number between 1 and 10, with 10 being
the best.
Before they have enough data, the QS will be shown as “—” in the
interface or null (0) in some reports.
This number is a representation of the aggregate relevance of the

keyword across the many auctions in which it participates.
It is meant to guide advertisers, but it is not used to rank ads.
Enable Quality Score columns to see the score next to each

keyword.
What is used to rank ads behind the scenes of every ad auction

is the auction-time QS that takes a lot of additional factors into
account.
While the 1-10 number helps advertisers gauge how good a job
they are doing at choosing the right keywords, writing good ads,
and driving users to helpful landing pages, it’s the real-time QS that
really matters.
The auction-time QS is more granular than a 1-10 number, but it is

not shared with advertisers because it fluctuates all the time.
It is also different for every single search that happens on Google

and depends on the context of those searches, like:
Where the user is located.

The time of day.
The nature of the search term and its relationship to your
keyword.
And other factors.
On a side note, there are two types of automated bidding tools from
Google.
One is called just “automated,” and the other is called “smart.”

The key difference is that smart bidding can set different bids
for every auction, thereby taking the real-time QS factor into
consideration and setting “smarter” bids that are more likely to
match the advertiser’s target.
WHY DOES GOOGLE HAVE QUALITY SCORE?
All of that sounds complicated, so why does Google have Quality

Score?
They use it to help show more relevant ads to users every time a
search happens.
Google depends on revenue from advertising, so they have a big

incentive to make sure users find the ads interesting and click on
them.
After all, remember that the Google ad auction is based on a cost

per click (CPC) model, so Google only makes money when ads are
clicked.
If they allowed low-quality ads to take up space that could be filled

with more relevant ones, they’d make less money in the short term
and risk alienating users in the long-term.
While it can sometimes be a struggle to improve QS, it is useful for

advertisers too because they like getting the type of high-quality
leads that are possible with Google Ads.
For those leads to keep coming, advertisers have to do their part

in picking relevant keywords, writing compelling ads, and directing
users to high quality, helpful landing pages.
And when they do, it can lead to big wins by reducing their CPCs.
HOW QUALITY SCORE IS CALCULATED
Google has so much data about how users interact with search
results that they can use “big data” with machine learning
techniques to come up with a measure of the expected relevance
of every ad, keyword, and landing page relative to every search that
happens.
That’s a mouthful, so it’s called QS.
Rather than asking Google employees to judge the relevance of

every keyword (which is how it used to work when Google Ads
was invented), a process that would be hugely time-consuming,
subjective, and prone to errors, they use the principle of the
“wisdom of the crowds” to assign QS.
Specifically, their algorithms monitor what users interact with on

the search results page (SERP) to make predictions about future
interactions.
At its heart, QS is really a predicted click-through rate (CTR).
In the early days of AdWords before there was QS, they used CTR
to determine if keywords were of low relevance and should be
disabled, or had to pay more to participate in the ad auction.
Over time, as machine learning techniques became better, Google

started to consider more factors when determining expected CTR,
and the term Quality Score was introduced to replace the CTR
component that had been part of the ad ranking mechanism before.
So the simplest way to think about QS is as a measure of how likely

it is that users will find your ad relevant for what they just searched
for and the chance of this resulting in a click on your ad.
WHY QUALITY SCORE MATTERS
Advertisers care a lot about their QS because it is one of the

factors used to decide:
Which ads are eligible to enter the ad auction

How the eligible ads are ranked
What actual CPC the advertiser needs to pay
Entering the Auction

Google doesn’t want to show irrelevant ads, and it’s easy to
understand why.
They charge advertisers primarily for clicks on their ads. If an

advertiser uses a very high bid to hog a high position on the page
with an irrelevant ad, it won’t get clicked on, and Google won’t make
any money.
Search advertising is primarily about getting users to take action in

response to an ad, and not merely building a brand.
For example, while a car manufacturer may think an ad for a new

pickup truck would really resonate with someone looking up the
score for the big game, that ad is unlikely to garner a click and
hence is detrimental to Google Ads.
So when Google predicts a particular keyword to be very irrelevant

and assigns it a very low QS, that ad may not even enter into the
auction for most searches.
On the flip side, having a high QS ensures an ad is eligible to

participate in more ad auctions, so it moves on to the ranking step.
Ad Ranking
Once Google has selected the keywords and ads that are likely to
be relevant for a search, those are entered into the ad auction.
This is a split-second auction where Google evaluates:
How much each one is bidding (max CPC).

How relevant they are (QS).
What other factors, like ad extensions, may give a boost to the CTR.
Each ad gets a score, and the resulting rank determines who gets
their ad shown in the top slot and who misses out on the first page
of results.
Advertisers benefit from a higher ad rank because ads in higher

positions tend to get more clicks, and that means more leads and
chances to make a sale.
But what happens when advertisers use automated bidding and

instead of having a maximum CPC, have a target CPA, target ROAS,
or another goal?
Even in those cases, the ad auction still works with a CPC bid. The
automated bidding process simply translates the advertiser’s goal
into a unique CPC bid for every auction.
CPC Discounting
Finally, the actual CPC an advertiser has to pay for a click is
calculated based on the CPC. They would need to maintain their
rank above the next ad in the auction.
This discount is the reason most advertisers have an average CPC

that is lower than their max CPC.
Advertisers benefit from a higher QS because it means they have

to pay less to maintain their position versus their next competitor.
In effect, the higher the QS, the less they have to pay for the same
click.
This applies to all advertisers, even those using automated bidding.
If an advertiser has a great real-time QS for a particular search, the

automated bidding process may determine that it can achieve the
advertiser’s goal with a lower CPC (and save money), or it may find
that keeping the bid higher might lead to more conversions.
Either way, the advertiser wins as a result of having worked to

achieve high QS, something we’ll explain how to do next.
HOW TO IMPROVE QUALITY SCORE
You can improve QS by improving the relevance of your keywords,

ads, and landing pages.
To focus your efforts, start by looking at the relative score of the

three subcomponents of QS:
Expected clickthrough rate.

Ad relevance.
Landing page experience.
By hovering over the Status field

next to a keyword, advertisers can
see if their ad may be missing out
on opportunities to show due to
low QS.
Advertisers can see details about the QS, its components, and their
historical values by adding the relevant columns to the keyword
view.
The value for each component will be Below Average, Average, or

Above Average, so this can guide you toward what to optimize.
There are also historical values that can inform advertisers if recent
changes have improved or hurt the various elements of QS.
Note that the historical field represents the value on the last day of
the selected date range.
To see daily values, advertisers can turn on daily segments.
Use time segmentation to see the historical QS values for all days of a period.
EXPECTED CLICK-THROUGH RATE
This is a measure of how likely your ad is to generate a click when

the search term is exactly the same as your keyword.
This score is normalized to remove any effect from the ad’s position
on the page, the presence of ad extensions, and other factors that
aren’t a direct measure of relevance.
If it’s low, make sure the keyword is specific and relevant to what
you’re offering.
Also, consider that it may only be relevant in a limited number of

cases.
For example, a dog walking service may sometimes be relevant for

the keyword “dog.”
However, there are many searches a user might do, including the
word dog when they’re not looking for your service, but instead
need a vet, dog food, or photos of dogs.
This will negatively impact the CTR of the keyword, and it may be
time to consider adding more relevant keywords to the account.
If your keyword is relevant, but this score is low, try writing a

stronger ad that is more compelling by highlighting its relevance
to the keyword or by including a stronger call to action or a unique
value proposition.
Avoid generic keywords that could mean many things. Instead, use specific
keywords for the things you can help users with.
Ad Relevance
This component measures how well the message in your ad
matches the keyword.
If this component is low, it may be because your ad groups cover

too broad a range of themes.
A solution may be to split the ad group into smaller, more tightly

themed ad groups.
For example, if you’re a pool contractor, keywords like “pool design,”

“in-ground pool construction,” and “pool renovation” may all be
highly relevant, but when they are all in the same ad group where
they share the same ad text, some relevance is bound to be lost.
By having too disparate a list of keywords grouped in one ad group,

you can cause the ad that is shown to be too generic or about the
wrong theme.
Don’t just rely on dynamic keyword insertion, but take the time to
properly structure your account by building separate ad groups for
each set of closely related keywords.
In the example before, each of the three pool-related keywords is a

different theme and should be placed in different ad groups.
Break out ad groups by common themes so you can write ads that more
closely match the core topic of each ad group’s keywords.
Landing Page Experience

This final QS component measures what happens after a user
clicks the ad.
When they arrive on your landing page, are they happy they came,
or did they turn right around and leave?
If this component is too low, make sure that the landing page is
closely related to what the user searched for and delivers on the
ad’s promise.
Usually, deep linking is better than taking someone to the

homepage.
Make it easy to use the landing page on both

mobile and desktop devices.
Make the page load fast

and consider using an
AMP.
Offer unique and

valuable content and
treat the user’s data with
respect.
The user already did a search to say what they were looking for. Your ads
should lead directly to related and relevant landing pages on your site.
CONCLUSION
Along with the bid, Quality Score is a major part of how Google
decides which ads to show and how to rank them.
Thus, a good QS can be just as beneficial as a high bid.
Ads with lower bids can beat those of higher-paying competitors by

having better relevance.
This makes PPC very appealing because it’s not just the advertiser
with the deepest pockets who always wins.
Monitor your QS and tackle optimizations when a low QS is holding

you back from achieving your targets.
But at the end of the day, don’t get so bogged down that you lose
track of the ultimate business goals related to revenue, profitability,
and growth.
6
WHAT IS CLICK-
THROUGH RATE
& WHY CTR IS
IMPORTANT
AUTHOR
MELISSA MACKEY
Search engines place a high
premium on a good click-through
rate (CTR).
After all, in the pay-per-click model, the more someone clicks, the
more money that search engine makes.
But CTR is important to advertisers, too.
When a user turns to a search engine, they have a question and

are looking for an answer. They are expressing a need or want.
What makes search so great is users are telling you exactly what
they are looking for! They’ve already decided they need something
and are now trying to find it.
Creating a relevant paid search ad is your first step as an

advertiser in fulfilling that need.
This chapter will explain what click-through rate is, what a good
CTR is, how it impacts your ad rank and Quality Score, and when a
low CTR is OK.
W H AT I S C L I C K-T H R O U G H R AT E & W H Y I T I S I M P O R TA N T
WHAT IS CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)?
Put simply, click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that

resulted in a click.
If your PPC ad had 1,000 impressions and one click, that’s a 0.1%
CTR.
As a metric, CTR tells you how relevant searchers are finding your
ad to be.
If you have a:
High CTR, users are finding your ad to be highly relevant.

Low CTR, users are finding your ad to be less relevant.
The ultimate goal of any PPC campaign is to get qualified users to

come to your website and perform a desired action (e.g., make a
purchase, fill out a lead or contact form, download a spec sheet).
CTR is the first step in the process to improving your ad’s relevancy
and generating those desired actions.
WHAT IS A GOOD CTR?
So what’s a good click-through rate? Clients ask me this all the time.
The answer, as with many things in PPC, is “it depends.”
CTR is relative to:

Your industry.
The set of keywords you’re bidding on.
Individual campaigns within a PPC account.
It isn’t unusual to see double-digit CTR on branded keywords when

someone is searching for your brand name or the name of your
branded or trademarked product.
It also isn’t unusual to see CTRs of less than 1% on broad, non-

branded keywords
HOW CTR IMPACTS AD RANK
CTR is not just an indication of how relevant your ads are to

searchers. CTR also contributes to your Ad Rank in the search
engines.
Ad rank determines the position of your ad on the search results

page.
That’s right – PPC isn’t a pure auction.
The top position doesn’t go to the highest bidder. It goes to the

advertiser with the highest Ad Rank. And CTR is a huge factor in the
Ad Rank formula.
But Ad Rank is even more complicated than that. Google measures

your actual CTR against an expected CTR.
So if you’ve run a lot of ads with a low CTR, Google will assume that
any new ads you add to your Google Ads account are also going to
have a low CTR, and may rank them lower on the page.
This is why it’s so important to understand the CTR on your ads and
to try to improve it as much as possible.
A poor CTR can lead to low ad positions, no matter how much you
bid.
HOW CTR IMPACTS QUALITY SCORE
Quality Score is a measure of an advertiser’s relevance as it relates

to keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the
more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores.
Quality Score is calculated by the engines’ measurements of

expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page
experience.
A good CTR will help you earn higher Quality Scores.

WHEN A LOW CTR IS OK
Since CTR is so important, should you optimize all of your ads for
CTR, and forget about other metrics, like conversion rate?
Absolutely not!
Success in PPC is not about Ad Rank and CTR.
I could write an ad that says “Free iPhones!” that would get a great
CTR. But unless giving away iPhones is the measure of business
success for me, such an ad won’t help my business become
profitable.
Always focus on business metrics first, and CTR second.

If your goal is to sell as many products as possible at the lowest

possible cost, you should optimize your PPC campaigns for cost per
sale. If your goal is to generate leads below a certain cost per lead,
then optimize for cost per lead.
Unless your business goal is to drive lots of PPC traffic, CTR should
not be your main KPI.
In fact, there are times when a low CTR is OK – and maybe even a
good thing.
One of those times is when dealing with ambiguous keywords.

Ambiguity is a necessary evil in any PPC program. People may
search for your product or service using broad keywords that mean
different things to different people.
Here’s an example: “security.”

Let’s say you run a company that sells physical security solutions to
businesses to protect them from break-ins. Your company wants to
bid on the term “security” to capture users who are just beginning
to think about their security needs. It sounds like a great strategy,
and it can be.
But “security” can mean a lot of different things. People might be

looking for:
credit card security
financial security
data security
home security
security guard jobs
And that’s only five examples I thought of in a few seconds. See

how disparate those are?
Let’s say you decide to bid on “business security,” since it’s more
relevant.
It’s still a broad term – and your CTR might not be great. But let’s
also say you get a lot of leads from that keyword, at a good cost.
Should you pause that term because of a low CTR?
Of course not!
Always let performance be your guide.
Low CTR is perfectly fine, as long as your keywords and ads are
performing well based on your business objectives.
CONCLUSION
CTR is an important metric for PPC managers to understand and
monitor. Optimizing for CTR, while also optimizing for business
metrics, will lead to successful PPC campaigns.
CLICK FRAUD: WHAT
YOU NEED TO KNOW
TO PROTECT YOUR
ADVERTISING
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
LUKE TAYLOR
FOUNDER & COO, TRAFFICGUARD
C L I C K F R A U D : W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N O W TO P R OT E C T
YOUR ADVERTISING
According to ad fraud
prevention specialist,
TrafficGuard (that’s us), 1 in
4 clicks on PPC advertising
are invalid.
That’s a scary number for any business advertising online, whether
your budget is in the hundreds or the millions.
However, with the right set of tools, you can protect your ad
spend from fraud and make your advertising more effective.
YOUR ADVERTISING
In this chapter, we will:

Break down the types of click fraud and invalid traffic, and how
it impacts advertising performance (hint – it isn’t just draining
your ad spend).
Explore manual and automated fraud defenses.
Discover how fraud prevention can help you increase your
advertising reach without increasing your ad spend.
YOUR ADVERTISING
WHAT IS CLICK FRAUD?
We used the term click fraud in the title of this article because it is
a widely used and accepted term, but technically speaking, the real
problem is invalid traffic – which encompasses click fraud but is
much broader.
Invalid traffic is any advertising engagement that isn’t out of genuine

interest in the advertised offering. Invalid traffic can be malicious
(that’s ad fraud), non-malicious or accidental. All invalid traffic takes
ad spend and provides zero return on investment.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Throughout this article, when we discuss fraud prevention, we use it

as a tidy way to refer to the prevention of all invalid traffic.
Sources of invalid traffic include:
Website scrapers and crawlers are deployed to gather

intelligence from advertising, search results, and websites.
Suppose you have ever used an online tool to see what
keywords your competitors are bidding on, or get competitive
pricing/position analysis. In that case, the intel provided in
these tools is typically gathered by scrapers.
Click farms where groups of people are organized to click ads.
Crowdsourcing and incentivized ads are usually publisher-

generated invalid clicks. The site’s audience is encouraged
to show their support by clicking ads or are otherwise
incentivized to click an ad with a reward. These tactics help
publishers inflate the advertising engagement of their site to
increase their own advertising revenue.
Botnets are networks of devices that are coordinated

remotely via malware to generate ad fraud. On the surface,
because each engagement originates from a distinct device,
botnet traffic looks like legitimate traffic. This traffic can be
purchased online as another way for publishers to inflate their
audiences; a way for competitors to exhaust your ad budgets;
or a variety of other sabotage tactics.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Accidental clicks induced by poor user experience or user

error are also invalid traffic. Google’s policies specifically
prohibit page layouts and styling that make it hard to
distinguish advertising from native content. Traffic that results
from these practices and others that lead to accidental clicks,
either intentionally or unintentionally by the publisher, is
considered invalid.
Click bot software/malware lives on individual devices and

generates clicks from that device unbeknownst to its user.
This extensive arsenal of invalid traffic generators is used to serve a

variety of motivations. These motivations include:
Sabotage
This is invalid advertising engagement created by someone who
wants to sabotage your advertising efforts. Saboteurs might
be unhappy customers, disgruntled employees, or even your
competitors.
With the assistance of the above sources, these saboteurs can

drain your budget and steal the top placements for coveted
keywords.
By exhausting your ad spend, they also reduce your advertising

return on investment by ensuring fewer people see your ad.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Financial
Some perpetrators stand to gain financially by sending invalid traffic
to your advertising. This could be a publisher wanting to inflate their
engagement by purchasing bot traffic to interact with advertising on
their site or by hiding ads under other clickable elements to induce
accidental clicks.
With invalid traffic interacting with ads on their sites, publishers can
easily make their audience look larger and more engaged than to
attract more advertising revenue.
Other financial motivations include various intelligence and

analytics solutions that scrape search results, advertising, and
websites to populate their data sets.
Accidental
Aside from sabotage and financial motivation, there are also invalid
engagements that occur by accident.
For example, when users, by habit, double click on adverts or

repeatedly navigate through advertising.
There are a lot of ways that fraud enters the ecosystem and lots of
motivations bringing it in.
An article released by the New York Magazine last year revealed

more than half of all internet traffic is fake. When you think about
that, it really isn’t too surprising that click fraud is as prolific as it is.
YOUR ADVERTISING
HOW IS INVALID TRAFFIC IMPACTING

YOUR PPC ADVERTISING?
Ad fraud doesn’t discriminate between small businesses and big

businesses.
A business with a $500/month budget is just as exposed as the one

with a $500k/month budget.
So, what is happening when invalid traffic is infiltrating your

advertising campaigns?
YOUR ADVERTISING
Lost Ad Spend
The first and most obvious impact of invalid traffic is lost PPC ad
spend.
TrafficGuard audits for new clients reveal anywhere between

10-30% of PPC budgets being wasted on ad fraud when fraud
prevention is not in place.
Advertising Effectiveness Is Proportionately

Limited
The highest cost of invalid traffic is the lost opportunity associated
with wasted ad spend.
Say you have $1000 ad spend a month, your CPC is $1, and
for every 20 clicks, you get a conversion, giving you a cost per
conversion of $20.
Without fraud prevention, up to 30% of your spend could be

wasted on invalid traffic. That is $300 of spend with $0 return on
investment.
With fraud prevention in place, if that $300 generates genuine

engagement instead of ad fraud, you would stand to gain 15
additional conversions ($300 divided by your cost per conversion
of $20).
YOUR ADVERTISING
With an average conversion value of $50, that could be as much as

$750 additional revenue every month.
So you can see here, the biggest cost isn’t the budget wasted on ad
fraud, but the additional 43% revenue that the wasted $300 should
have generated.
Optimization Efforts Are Hampered

Your advertising metrics are what you use to determine where best
to allocate your marketing budget and forecast results for your
marketing efforts.
If the data you use to make these decisions is skewed by the

presence of invalid traffic, then the decisions you base on this data
will also be compromised.
As TrafficGuard’s Head of Data Sciences says, “Rubbish in, rubbish

out.”
Without fraud prevention, there will always be invalid traffic in your

online advertising – it’s just about determining where it is so that
you can optimize away from it.
YOUR ADVERTISING
WHAT ARE THE SIGNS?
There are many ways that ad fraud impacts a business, for

example:
Wasting ad spend.
Restricting advertising ROI.
Wasting opportunities (if your budget is consumed by fraud
and your ad isn’t seen by a high-intent shopper later in the
day).
And the list goes on.
But… you can’t see these pains until they are alleviated.
A kid born with blurry vision thinks that’s how everyone sees until
they get their glasses.
YOUR ADVERTISING
The same can be said for digital marketers and fraud prevention.
Because invalid traffic has always comprised part of your

advertising traffic, its pain isn’t obvious.
However, once you alleviate the problem and your advertising starts
performing how it should, you wouldn’t want to go back.
While there are no real red flags for invalid traffic in PPC channels,
that doesn’t mean you can’t find out – you just need to use a tool
to give you some transparency. TrafficGuard has a free plan that
analyses up to $2,500 Google Ads traffic a month and provides
real-time traffic quality reporting.
Armed with this visibility, you can see how much spend invalid traffic
is consuming and come up with a plan to mitigate that waste.
YOUR ADVERTISING
DEALING WITH CLICK FRAUD

– MANUAL VERSUS AUTOMATED APPROACHES
So as you can see, no one is immune from invalid traffic. Fortunately,

there are some tools and methods available to you to protect your
spend and get your advertising performing the way it should be.
The key principle to PPC invalid traffic prevention is exclusion list

management. Using the Google Ads IP exclusions list, for example,
your ads will not be shown to traffic from IPs on your blacklist.
You wouldn’t want traffic from known bot IPs, for example, so by
adding these IPs to your exclusion list, you can stop your ads being
shown to them.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Manual Click Fraud Prevention

Manual fraud prevention involves updating your IP exclusion list in
your PPC platforms. The first step to this is determining which IPs
are sending invalid traffic and represent the biggest threats.
Neither Google Ads nor Google Analytics gives you the level
of detail required to determine this on your own, but there are
solutions available to help you get the granularity you need to do
this.
The easiest way is using a free tool, such as TrafficGuard’s free

PPC Protection. In the TrafficGuard portal, you will be able to see
the valid and invalid traffic sent by specific IPs, helping to inform
your manual exclusion list maintenance. More info on identifying
IPs for exclusions using TrafficGuard’s free plan here.
Armed with your list of IPs to exclude, you can then log into
Google Ads and update your exclusion list following these steps:
1. Sign in to Google Ads.
2. In the menu on the left, click Settings.
3. You will now see a list of all campaigns across your account.
Select the one you would like to exclude an IP address from.
4. Click Additional settings to see the IP address exclusions option.
5. Click to expand the IP exclusions section.
6. Enter the IP addresses that you want to exclude from your
campaign.
7. Click Save.
8. Repeat across all campaigns.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Limitations of Manual IP Blocking

Manual IP address exclusion management is a great way to get a
basic level of protection for your Google Ads budget but it does
have its limitations, including:
Timing: If you are only checking your traffic quality daily, or weekly,
new sources of invalid traffic can appear in the interim. Automated
fraud prevention addresses this by adding exclusions in real-time.
Labor intensive: The tedious nature of updating blacklists of every

individual campaign takes you away from other value-generating
tasks.
Exclusion list size: Google Ads allows you to exclude up to 500

IP addresses at a time which makes it crucial to ensure that they
represent the biggest threats at any point in time.
YOUR ADVERTISING
Automated Invalid Traffic Prevention

Real-time fraud protection takes care of all of your exclusion list
maintenance in Google Ads, including list removals, to ensure that
you are protected from the most current threats to your advertising.
Automated prevention often also manages different types of

exclusion lists and various platforms, along with IP exclusions in
Google Ads.
By preventing your campaigns from being shown to these bad

sources, invalid traffic is proactively prevented as opposed to just
reported.
YOUR ADVERTISING
USING FRAUD PREVENTION TO INCREASE

REACH WITHOUT INCREASING AD SPEND
Who wouldn’t want to get better results from the same ad spend?
As COVID-19 is sweeping the globe, the pressure on digital
marketers is growing. More businesses are relying on digital
advertising as a new channel and potentially singular source of new
business.
For many, the effectiveness of digital advertising will determine

whether they survive this crisis which means it’s more important
than ever to make every dollar count.
How does fraud prevention help you do this?

YOUR ADVERTISING
More Genuine Ad Engagement

With a set ad spend, you can reach a certain number of people and
if you don’t have fraud prevention in place, your reach is further
restricted.
By stopping invalid traffic, you can stop your ads being shown to
sources of invalid traffic so that your ads reach more real people
with the potential to become customers.
Better Advertising ROI

More genuine engagement means that dormant spend now has the
chance to deliver an actual return on investment.
Clean Data Powers Faster Optimization

Real-time fraud prevention means that invalid traffic doesn’t
infiltrate your campaign metrics, data stays clean, and you can
make faster and more effective optimization decisions.
The Takeaway
Every dollar that you don’t spend on ad fraud helps you reach more
potential customers. By stopping ad fraud, you can increase your
advertising reach to get more genuine ad engagement and better
PPC advertising performance.
7
WHAT ARE
KEYWORDS &
HOW THEY WORK
IN PPC
AUTHOR
ANDREW LOLK
Keywords are the
foundation for everything
in PPC.
Keywords are what you use to define where your ads should appear.
Without a solid understanding of what keywords are and how to use

them effectively, you’ll never be successful with PPC.
Before getting started, it’s essential to understand some of the

terminologies in this guide.
Search Term: The word or words a user types into Google when
performing a search.
Keyword: A word, or a set of words, that you add to your Google

Ads campaigns.
Keyword Match Type: A setting for your keywords that will

determine the keyword’s reach.
W H AT A R E K E Y W O R D S & H O W T H E Y W O R K I N P P C
TYPES OF KEYWORDS
When you think of keywords, it’s useful to understand what buckets

the different keywords are in and how this sets them apart.
The types of keywords include:
Branded keywords include company names (e.g., Amazon,

Target).
Generic keywords typically cover ambiguous keywords, and

can also be referred to as short-tail keywords (e.g., “running
shoes,” “plumbing,” “towing”). The gist of a generic keyword is
that we don’t understand their intent yet. There is nothing in the
search that shows us whether this person is looking to buy a
pair of shoes, or if they are just searching for different kinds of
shoes.
Transactional keywords are keywords that have both strong

and weak purchase intent. As long as there is some purchase
intent, then you can label a keyword a commercial keyword.
This is everything from “Nike running shoes” to “plumbing
services.”
Locational keywords cover everything related to a location

and are very powerful for location-based companies. Often
these are your typical home services. It can be a city name
(e.g., “towing company San Francisco”) or an actual request
to show ads that have companies “near me” (e.g., “towing
company near me”).
Long-tail keywords cover keywords that consist of more than

3-4 words (e.g., “Nike running shoes for a marathon”). They
are typically highly transactional, meaning they have higher
conversion rates than the other keyword types.
Informational keywords cover keywords where people are

simply looking for information. This can be anything from
“Sears store directions” to “how to get rid of a wart.” You
would rarely use info-keywords for Google Ads.
Quick note: The buckets above are not either-or. Just

because a keyword is “long” doesn’t mean it can’t also be a
branded or an info-keyword.
KEYWORDS ACROSS THE BUYER’S JOURNEY
The type of key term a person uses in their search often reflects
where they are in their buyer’s journey.
It’s important to note, however, that it’s impossible to know exactly

where in the buyer’s journey someone is solely based on what
keyword they use, but it can be a strong indicator.
Consider the following chart as a gliding transition rather than hard

limits:
CORE KEYWORDS VS. QUALIFIERS & MODIFIERS
When you work with keywords in PPC, it’s very helpful to know
the difference between a core keyword and a keyword qualifier/
modifier.
I should note that this is not official terminology.
Core keyword: This is like the main keyword (e.g., “plumbing”

or “running shoes”).
Keyword qualifier/modifier: Searchers will often add qualifiers
or modifiers (e.g., “cheap,” “near me,” or “marathon”).
The reason why it’s important to understand the difference between

core keywords and qualifiers/modifiers is that if you only have one
core keyword in your account you’ll end up paying a lot per click
and have a very narrow reach.
If you’re a plumbing company, and you have the following

keywords, you’re essentially just bidding for one core keyword:
Plumbing services
Plumbing contractor
Plumbing company
Nearest plumbing company
For the beginner in PPC, these all appear to be four different

keywords. However, if you look closely, then they’re all the same
keyword (plumbing).
Instead, you need to remember to continue to find new core

keywords across the entire spectrum:
Leaky pipes
Gutter repair
Broken water pipes
Water heater repair
Waste disposal installation
You should still have all of the keywords that I listed, to begin with;
it’s just important you don’t get stuck with the same keyword.
KEYWORDS AREN’T EXACT
One of the biggest “aha” moments you’ll have as a beginner in PPC

is finding out that when it comes to keywords, what you see is never
what you get.
As I’ll highlight in the match type section below, just because you
use the keyword “Nike trail running shoes,” it doesn’t mean your
ads will only appear when someone searches for “Nike trail running
shoes.”
The reason is rather ingenious and insane on Google’s behalf

because not even experts would be able to cover all searches with
keywords if every single keyword should exactly matching a search.
KEYWORD MATCH TYPES
One of the first things you need to understand about keywords is

that there are different match types.
Depending on what match type your keyword is in, it will behave

differently.
This is one of the unknown “hacks” that people who’ve worked in

PPC for any time take for granted.
There are four different match types. The difference between the
match types come down to how much you want each match type to
be expanded.
Broad Match
To add a keyword in broad match, just add it as is: running shoes
Broad match keywords are like shooting a shotgun.
You choose the overall area you want to target (the keyword),
but Google can expand your keyword, sometimes to completely
different searches than you anticipated.
As an example, the broad match keyword “protein powder” can

also show ads for searches like:
Protein supplement
Protein
Dietary supplements
Larger muscles
With broad match keywords, Google tries to show your ad when

searchers look for relevant terms.
Broad Match Pros:

You can cover a lot of misspellings and keyword variations
with a single keyword.
You’ll discover high-converting long-tail keywords that you’d
never thought of.
Broad Match keywords receive many more impressions/clicks
than any other match type.
It can be extremely effective!
Broad Match Cons:

Many searches/clicks = High costs.
High risk of losing money to irrelevant searches.
Hard to control, especially with single-worded keywords.
Broad Match Modified

To add a keyword in broad match modifier, add it with plus signs:
+running +shoes
Broad Match Modifier Pros:

Much better control of which searches you want your ads to
appear on.
Very good for finding new long-tail keywords.
Your ads will still appear, although the search phrase has an
extra word or different word order.
Catches misspellings.
Broad Match Modifier Cons:

Lower search volume than with Broad Match.
Can still be expanded to seemingly irrelevant searches.
No easy way to create keywords in Broad Match Modifier.
Phrase Match
To add a keyword in phrase match, add it with quotation marks:
“running shoes.”
Phrase Match Pros:

Greater control on what queries you’ll be shown.
Very effective for sentences.
Effective for avoiding greater expansions.
Phrase Match Cons:

Reduced search volume.
Is a lot more restrictive than Broad Match Modifier with very
few benefits.
Exact Match
To add a keyword in exact match, add it with brackets: [running
shoes]
An exact match keyword is more or less that. Only search terms

matching that almost exact keyword will trigger your ad to be
shown.
Exact match keywords are like the snipers of the keyword match
types. Precise, direct, and on point.
Exact Match Pros:

You know exactly what search is used.
Perfect for controlling high-converting keywords.
What you see is what you get.
Exact Match Cons:

Much lower search volume for your keywords.
You can’t discover new keyword variations or long-tail
keywords.
You miss “one time searches.”
After you’ve fully mastered these, you can move on to an advanced

match type that merges Phrase Match and Broad Match Modifier
into a single keyword. To learn more, view the SEJ article: The Fifth
Google Ads Match Type: Phrase Match Modifier.
Which Match Type Should You Use?

When you first set up your campaign, I recommend you use Broad
Match Modifier and Exact Match.
As you can see in my review of the four-match types, each one

catches different users; so in most cases, you will use them all in an
effective Google Ads campaign.
The only but (and it’s a big but) is that you should wait with using
broad match until you really know what you’re doing.
Your Google Ads performance can easily tank when you use broad
match keywords without a specific strategy or workflow to optimize
them.
Gradually, as your campaign gathers statistics, you might find that

some of the match types for a particular keyword are not profitable,
but others aren’t.
NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
Negative keywords are used to exclude your ads from showing on

searches.
Let’s say you’re a plumbing company, then excluding searches

for “jobs” or from cities you don’t service will help increase the
performance of your Google Ads campaigns.
In the e-commerce space, let’s say you sell marathon running shoes,
but not trail running shoes, you can exclude “trail” from triggering
your ads.
This is powerful because you’re more or less paying the same for
every click the same keyword generates.
This means you can end up paying for clicks that aren’t as relevant
for your business as you might have thought.
This is one of the main reasons why beginners can’t get Google Ads
to perform.
You may think you have chosen the right keywords, written good
ads, and are sending good traffic to a website.
However, behind the keyword, you often find your ads are triggered
by search terms that aren’t as relevant as the keyword you added.
You can, and should, work with negative keywords in two

capacities:
Before launching your campaigns
After launching your campaigns
When you’re done finding keywords for your campaign, spend

at least half an hour to an hour Googling the keywords to see
what pops up. Add any irrelevant terms you can find as negative
keywords.
You can take advantage of a ton of standard negative keyword lists.

After launching your campaigns, you should consistently review
your Search Term report. This is where you can see exactly what
search terms your searches triggered your ads.
Use this information to add new negative keywords on an ongoing

basis.
8
STRUCTURE BEST
PRACTICES:
HOW TO CREATE
YOUR CAMPAIGNS
& AD GROUPS
AUTHOR
I LYA C H E R E PA K H I N
Account structure is a critical
element for ensuring paid search
success.
Adopting structure and group best practices ensures that keywords,
ad messages, and landing pages are aligned with the business’s
objectives.
An effective structure is deeply connected to your marketing strategy

and business needs.
One should also think beyond the initial setup and create a nimble
structure that will allow for efficient ongoing maintenance and scaling
campaigns with the business evolving over time.
ST R U C T U R E B E ST P R AC T I C E S : H O W TO C R E AT E YO U R
CAMPAIGNS & AD GROUPS
Getting the tactical elements right ensures having a structure that is

as functional as possible (e.g., supports the most effective reporting
and optimization).
It will also position you well to benefit from the latest paid search
innovations that increasingly rely on algorithm-based automation
and scripts.
As ad groups run in the context of their campaigns, we will first

review some campaign considerations.
Carefully considering how many campaigns are needed will ensure

that you cover all relevant keyword themes, and each topic is
housed in its own campaign.
This naturally leads to having the right number of overall ad groups

and organizing them in the most relevant way.
While some structure and ad group features vary by engine,

particularly across engines in non-English speaking markets, most
have the same common elements.
CAMPAIGN SETUP BEST PRACTICES
When deciding what and how many campaigns to have, consider

which searches will need maximum coverage.
Then, evaluate what budget management, targeting, and device

settings are needed to support business objectives.
Follow the Money

As budget lives at the campaign level, anything needing to have a
dedicated budget deserves its own campaign.
For terms you need to fund as fully and continuously as possible,

it is recommended to set up a dedicated campaign so they can be
managed more easily.
It is a best practice to fully fund your own brand terms, as they

target most qualified users who already know of your business.
Retargeting (i.e., RLSA) and campaigns that are of strategic
importance (e.g., running in key markets) are some other use cases
for needing to create priority campaigns to most closely manage
key traffic pools.
Targeting Parameters
Desired engine networks, geography, and audiences will further
impact your structure.
Ad group level bid modifiers can help avoid creating separate

campaigns for each targeting instance.
However, for reporting, budget management, and ease of long-

term keyword management, it is recommended to implement most
settings at the campaign level.
This allows reporting most

efficiency on performance
and builds out campaigns
over time, with limited steps
needed each time a new
group or new keywords
need adding.
Networks Settings
It is often assumed that ads would show up on search results (i.e.,
search network only).
However, in some cases, you may want to run on syndication sites

or even the display networks of the given engine.
Take a moment to check which network you need and select the
right setting.
Geotargeting
For geography, it is tempting to have the same footprint as your
business does with other media.
However, your search engine demand may differ from where your
offline sales occur.
Take a moment to research where search engine demand is likeliest

to come from (DMA, cities, states, regions, countries).
Then, set up a couple of individual campaigns for your top markets

with
If budget allows, create one extra “catch-all” campaign to cover

remaining traffic in the rest of the possible places where your
consumers may come from.
For example, a Boston retailer may create campaigns for the

Boston metropolitan area, neighboring counties, New England, and
the rest of the U.S.
While it is tempting to select English or all languages, do research

where the bulk of the traffic will come from and if your site fully
supports that.
If you could be targeting multiple languages, do create multiple

campaigns for each language version.
For example, in our earlier example, the Boston-based retailer

sold flags of countries around the world, its site supported three
languages, and it shipped only to the U.S. and Canada.
Its structure could look something like this.

English_Boston metropolitan area
English_neighboring counties
English_rest of New England
Spanish_New England
English_US
Spanish_US
English_Canada
French_Canada
Notice that there are no Spanish or French versions to mirror

English campaigns 1-3. That is due to search volume, not justifying
that.
Audiences
Use first-party and any third-party data that is available to guide
your structure.
Creating separate campaigns for remarketing, targeting past users

with RLSA campaigns, is one common use case.
However, consider slicing your structure further, particularly if you

sell multiple products or services.
For example, creating separate campaigns for users who have

purchased some products but not others will allow you to closely
support cross-selling business objectives with dedicated budgets,
geotargeting (if needed), ads, and reporting.
This is not possible if attempted at the ad group level.

Device Settings
Performance by device continues to vary, making it an important
optimization lever.
Before breaking out campaigns by device, consider these pros

and cons.
Engine algorithms have now evolved to account for device

signals when optimizing bids in their automated algorithms.
Splitting campaigns by device greatly reduces traffic and KPIs

available for optimization and may create campaigns that do
not have large enough volume for meaningful optimization.
If the site has responsive design and other mobile best

practices, the mobile user experience is likely quite strong, and
mobile campaigns can be held to the same goals as non-
mobile campaigns.
With this in mind, unless mobile devices represent a sizable amount

of traffic, cost, and goals, it is not recommended to break out
campaigns or groups by the device.
Instead, if you do not use automated bidding solutions, use

device bid modifiers for achieve device level efficiencies and ad
customizers to tailor ad message to users across different devices.
AD GROUP BEST PRACTICES
Start by clustering your desired keywords by themes.
These should be as narrow as reasonably possible to avoid overlap

in targeted searches.
As each group supports different ads, one way to guide ad group

structure is based on the copy you expect to run in each case.
For example, if you are a retailer selling sports shoes, within your
women’s shoe campaign, you could create an ad group for each
brand to align with each landing page you have.
However, depending on the range of products that may prove still

too general with a wide range of keywords lumped into each group.
In that case, you may want to create campaigns based on the shoe
brand, with a separate group for each shoe model.
It is common for most of the traffic to be driven by a select number

of terms.
In fact, occasionally, a small handful of keywords may command lots

of traffic and/ or share of goals.
In those cases, you may need multiple groups so that these “power
keywords” live in separate groups with other terms housed in
others.
Single keyword groups are rare but use the same premise. They
isolate a keyword into its own group for closest to
performance, copy optimization,
testing, and reporting.
With your ad group strategy in

place, before you finalize
and create the group
structure, consider
match types and how
audience needs can
impact ad text approach,
and then evaluate landing
page needs.
Match Types
For best efficiency and to simplify negative matching, it is
recommended to create duplicate groups by match type.
Known as match type mirroring, this best practice entails each

group having only terms of one match type.
Exact Match groups should perform the best and not need
negatives barring unusual circumstances.
Phrase and Broad Match groups usually perform less well and are
the focus for negative matching.
To note, to avoid group cannibalization, you will need to have your

Exact Match positive terms as negatives in Phrase and Broad
groups.
Match type group mirroring also has budgetary benefits.
At times of limited budget, it is much easier to pause less

performing match types with them isolated in different groups.
If you have a very high-volume campaign and need superior control

over costs, an alternate approach will work: mirror match types by
the campaign, so each campaign only has groups and terms of one
match type.
Audience Tailored Messaging

The need for different ads is a key reason for separate groups.
However, before jumping to creating more groups, see if the copy
customization can be solved with a feed or an ad customizer.
Elements like price, product features, or service elements can often

be fed through the business data capability.
Any time a change is needed, rather than creating new ads and
groups, business data can be updated seamlessly, trickling the
change to ad copy without triggering an ad Quality Score review.
When messaging needs to vary only

for a single audience and that will
not significantly budgeting, use ad
customizers rather than creating a
new group or campaign.
Customizer if statements allow for a

default text to show all users and an
alternate for one specified audience.
Landing Pages
Unless you are doing a lading page test to evaluate site conversion,
the best practice is to use one landing page per ad group.
If multiple landing pages are needed, it is a sign that keywords are

not grouped tightly, and multiple topic themes exist within the ad
group.
In that case, split your group so that there is a one to one

relationship between the group, landing page, and ad text approach.
It can be tempting to create a very detailed structure.
If it is starting to look complex, it probably is. Consider starting a

new account.
Not everything needs to live within one engine account, and

multiple ones are often needed for larger advertising efforts,
particularly with multiple sources of budget involved.
ENGINE PARITY
It is common for campaigns to be cloned from one engine to

another.
However, that can create an unnecessarily large number of

campaigns and groups.
As secondary engines command a much lower share of traffic,

many campaigns and groups will see limited traffic.
Rather than cloning everything for each engine, replicate only on

those campaigns and groups that will drive the most meaningful
results, justifying the optimization and reporting efforts.
NAMING CONVENTION
Any structure consideration will be incomplete without planning the

campaign and group naming convention.
The best approach is succinct, reflects all targeting aspects, setting

parameters, and uses special characters to separate elements.
This is key for not only administrative reasons like reporting and
optimization (be it with an engine or third-party tools).
A robust naming convention facilitates scaling efforts over time.

It will simplify implementing any automated solutions, expand
keywords, manage budgets, and more.
But don’t get carried away by incorporating everything imaginable

into the ad group or campaign name.
The naming convention should allow determining with a naked eye

what the campaign or ad group contains.
However, filters and labels should be leveraged alongside.

Use them to quickly report on various parts of your account or
campaign, without using an overly complex naming convention for
campaigns and groups.
CONCLUSION
As with any element of paid search strategy, the structure is not a
static element.
Do review it periodically, especially if there are website updates.

Site content and landing page changes are opportunities to evolve
your structure.
However, if you follow these best practices, future changes should

be incremental and save you from overhauls that take a toll on
performance.
9
WHAT YOU NEED
TO KNOW ABOUT
PPC BUDGETS &
BIDDING
AUTHOR
ADAM PROEHL
W H AT YO U N E E D TO K N O W A B O U T P P C B U D G E T S & B I D D I N G
A PPC budget is how much

money is committed to online
traffic acquisition efforts since
advertising charges only accrue
after a prospect clicks on your
ad.
What should the monthly amount be, and how do you get to it?
Here are some fundamentals designed to help you get there.

HOW TO DETERMINE A PPC BUDGET
1. Establish a Profitability Goal
If there is a measurable outcome for your campaign, then back

into your ideal budget by first knowing the answers to these
critical business metrics:
What is your Average Order Value (AOV)?

Gross Margin Percentage ((Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold)/
Revenue = Gross Margin)
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – if this number is unknown, at a
minimum set a goal to keeps you profitable
So, with these three metrics, let’s take the hypothetical scenario
below:
Say you get approval to run a Google Ads program as long as you
can drive sales of at least 50 units and $5k in profits per month to
justify the campaign.
You know the average order value of your product is $450 per sale,
and the gross margin is 55%.
The historical Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is estimated at $147.50.
(Author note: I could write a whole book on CPA calculations and

what should and shouldn’t go into them, but for this exercise,
let’s assume this number has been vetted and generally
accepted by management).
Given the numbers in the scenario, we get $7,375 as a budget to

start with.
Huh? How did I come up with that?
Here’s the simple formula in a budget forecast model created in an

Excel spreadsheet (will also work in a Google Sheet).
Use the simple equation to determine your ideal budget

starting point.
Is it perfect? No.
Are you likely to adjust it after you get real data? Yes (You
better if you find a reason to, or you’re not doing your job!)
Are there nuances and specific business case scenarios

that this formula doesn’t account for? Of course, but
this formula is designed as a beginning starting point.
2. Identify Keyword Themes by Intent

A paid search campaign won’t spend money if your selected
keyword themes don’t have a high enough search volume (a.k.a., the
number of people searching these phrases each month) to produce
the number of clicks on your ads to spend the budget.
Remember, paid search is great at responding to demand, but won’t

really help you generate it.
Therefore, you should conduct keyword research ahead of budget

planning to determine a realistic monthly budget.
By using a tool, such as the Google Ads Keyword Planner, you can
forecast what the monthly spend could be for your location(s) as
the tool can estimate the cost per click for your keywords and click-
through rate, dependent on volume.
For example, if you’re looking for a place to start, Keyword Planner

gives you the option to enter your website or even a page to get
some suggestions.
(Important: Use this to get ideas and inspiration, not to

automatically take every suggestion and build a campaign
around it.)
If no data is available, that’s a good indicator. There aren’t enough

people searching for your product offering to justify a paid search
campaign, so a social, display, or video campaign may be a better
option.
By relying solely on this, however, business goals may not be met

as the cost per acquisition could exceed the threshold needed to
remain profitable.
It is recommended to use this method in conjunction with the first

option outlined.
3. Audiences
“Who you’re trying to reach” when determining your budgets and
what to bid is another critical factor worth considering.
For example, you may have found your most profitable customers
are parents of grade school children.
In that case, wouldn’t spend some extra effort making sure your ads
get in front of them?
You may find it’s worth paying more to get in front of a key audience,
which will affect your budget and bidding strategy.
On the flip side, you may decide you do not want your ads to show
for another specific audience because you know your product is not
a good fit, so you don’t want to waste the budget.
I recommend at least contemplating whether or not it makes sense

to filter your campaigns (either to include or exclude) by audience.
Analyze Past Performance

If you have a paid search program running, use this option to
analyze whether your budget is high enough to fully fund every
keyword theme you are bidding on.
Look specifically at the metric “impression share lost due to budget”

under the ‘competitive’ metrics section of columns to show in
Google Ads.
This will give you insight into opportunities you’re missing in terms of
responding to market demand.
In order to add Search Impression Share Lost – budget (on the

Google Ads interface), select the three-bar “Modify Column” icon.
Then click “Competitive Metrics”:
Then click: “Search lost IS (budget)”

Once you get to the report, you’ll see your “impression share lost
due to budget.”
When this metric shows anything above 0%, your company’s ads
are not present as often as they could be because there isn’t
enough budget to meet the demand.
In Google Ads, it means people are looking for things related to the
keywords you are using to trigger an ad, but because there is no
more budget, your ad cannot show.
Do the Math
campaign (provided your success metrics are being met, of
course!).
To know exactly how much to increase it by, select a date range of

“last 7 days”, and divide the number of impressions actually served
by the Search Impressions share percentage.
1,415 impressions / 40.14% (Search Impression Share Column) =

3,525 impressions (max. number of ad impressions possible for this
campaign for the seven-day date range)
Once the maximum number of impressions is known, follow the

formula below:
3,525 impressions x 56.82% (Search lost IS [budget] column) =

2,003 missed ad impressions simply due to the budget being
exhausted
2,003 missed impressions x Click-Through Rate for campaign,

3.75% CTR 75 clicks were missed!
75 clicks x Average Cost per Click, $6.02 Avg CPC = $452 more
needed per week to fully fund this specific campaign
$452 + $318 actual weekly spend, divided by the 5 days of the

week the ads run, means the average daily budget should be $154
per day
You could use the “budget explorer” tool available within the
interface, but too often, Google’s budget recommendation far
exceeds the estimates derived by using the Impression Share
metrics and equation shown above.
Here, Google is recommending $340 /day when the formula above

determined $154/day would be sufficient.
Tip: Keep in mind that Google can overspend your daily budget on
an individual day, but over the course of a month, it won’t spend
more than your daily budget times 30.4.
That said, take the limited budget flag with a critical eye.
Look at the time of day reports to see when/if you’re running out of
budget before increasing it.
If increasing your budget is not an option, then working to improve

your keyword quality scores and refining your audience targets may
be the best options to decrease the amount you are required to pay
per click and, ultimately, the amount spent.
THE ROLE OF CAMPAIGN HIERARCHY

IN A PPC BUDGET
Once the overall monthly budget is determined, how it’s allocated

within the ad platform is typically done at the campaign level.
Campaign hierarchy is defined by performance goals from an

ROI standpoint, influenced by the ad groups housed within that
campaign as they contain your keyword themes (i.e., the intent
behind the search query).
Lower-funnel keyword themes that are likely to drive people to

complete a successful auction on your website usually get awarded
the most budget as it’s the easiest to justify.
This is why it’s important to research relevant keywords as part

of your budget projections and finalize campaign structure by
grouping tightly themed keywords into a profitable campaign
hierarchy.
Campaign hierarchy and organization will depend on your goals

and where you want to be visible in terms of branded versus high-
priority, non-brand keyword themes.
PPC BIDDING BASICS
In relation to Search Network campaigns, there are many different

bid strategies an advertiser can test.
Bidding automation is becoming more popular, but manually setting

a bid may be the best option up front if you do not have historical
data.
Manual bidding can be done at the ad group level, so all keywords

housed within share the same bid, or at the keyword, level to add
more control over spend.
Tip: When first starting out, assign bids at the ad group level to
collect data before making decisions at the keyword level.
Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner (after setting up your Google
Ads account) to determine what the estimated maximum cost per
click (aka Max CPC) is that is needed to collect your initial set of
performance data.
Once 100 clicks have been reported for a keyword, there should be
enough data available to provide insight into how to adjust the Max
CPC bid at a keyword level.
Final Price Paid Per Click

Setting a bid doesn’t mean that’s what you’re getting charged.
The actual amount you pay per click is determined by auction time
competition, Ad Rank thresholds, and your ad’s quality.
In simple terms, you only need to pay $0.01 more to beat the
advertiser with an Ad Rank below you.
Great! But what’s an “Ad Rank”?
Knowing the Optimal Bid

The position of your ad is determined by your ad rank, which is a
calculation computed by an algorithm and influenced by your bid
and relevancy.
The highest Ad Rank takes the top spot.
Advertisers with high Quality Scores will be awarded higher Ad

Rank even with a lower bid; therefore, to remain profitable, it’s
recommended you work to increase the keyword’s Quality Score
before simply increasing that keyword’s bid.
Changing the Max CPC amount depends on your goals.

You must find the ideal bid after data is accumulated in order to
determine whether the traffic acquired is completing the action on
your website that you intended them to do, and at a price that is in
line with your ideal cost per acquisition.
For example, if the keyword is reported to trigger your ad in a

position above 1.8 on average, you may want to decrease the bid to
lower spend, and ultimately, your cost per acquisition, although that
change may decrease your visibility and/or click-through rate.
This is where the skill of mastering manually bidding comes in, and
why bidding automation is becoming more popular (and in some
cases necessary).
Also, once you have campaign performance data that’s showing

clear patterns, you can use what’s called a “Bid Modifier.”
This allows you to bid up or down based on:

User device (desktop, tablet, phone)
Location
Time of day
Audience
Bidding Automation
Executed properly, automation can help free up day-to-day bid
monitoring.
Moving away from manual bidding to “bidding automation” is

becoming more of a reality now that advancements are being
realized, and more marketers have confidence in “letting go.”
Currently, these are the automated bidding strategies available

in Google Ads:
Maximize Clicks
Target Impression Share
Target CPA
Target ROAS (return on ad spend)
Maximize Conversions
Maximize Conversion Value
Once you have enough data from your manual bid strategy to
benchmark performance, testing these strategies by running a
Google Ads experiment against the manual bid strategy is a logical
next step for account optimization.
10
A COMPLETE
GUIDE TO
PPC AD
TARGETING
OPTIONS
AUTHOR
MICHELLE MORGAN
In the world of pay-per-click advertising,
there are many different targeting
options available, each designed to
create a unique way for advertisers to
reach their target audience.
Through platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and others,
we’re able to serve targeted messages to users based on:
Their search behavior.

Content they’re viewing.
Behaviors they’ve exhibited.
And more.
In this chapter, we’ll go through each of the targeting options for

Search, Display, and Remarketing campaigns and how they can be
used to engage with our potential customers.
Let’s get started with the most common targeting: Search.

A C O M P L E T E G U I D E TO P P C A D TA R G E T I N G O P T I O N S
SEARCH TARGETING
Search campaigns are a powerful strategy for marketers, allowing

you to reach users when they are actively searching for information.
By showing an ad on a search engine results page (SERP), you’re in
a position to answer the user’s query and potentially influence them
to make a purchase.
So how do you show up on these SERPs?
By bidding on keywords.
Keywords
Keywords are phrases advertisers use to tell platforms like Google
and Bing what searches we want to show up for.
When someone goes to Google and types in “red shoes”, Google

will scan your account to see if you have the keyword “red shoes” in
your account.
If you do, then you’re eligible to show up for the query. If not, then
your ad won’t show.
There are many other factors that influence whether your ads
will show for a certain query, like keyword match types, negative
keywords, and your keyword bids, but that’s a topic for another
chapter.
Dynamic Search Ads

The second type of targeting for Search is called Dynamic Search
Ads, or DSA.
DSA campaigns are relatively new to the PPC playground and are a
shift away from keyword targeting.
Instead of providing the platforms with a list of keywords, you

provide them with your website and the engines will match to user
queries that are related to your site content.
You can allow the platform to scan all pages, some pages, or
specify lists of pages it can look at, but all ad service is determined
by the content on your site.
Dynamic Search Ads are a great tool when looking to expand

the reach of your current search campaigns because they were
designed to help advertisers match to relevant queries that are not
already being bid on in the account.
Audiences
Rounding out targeting on the Search network, we have Audiences.
There are multiple types of audiences you can use in Search
from Remarketing, to In-Market, to Life Events, which we’ll cover
in subsequent sections, but these can help narrow your focus on
Search.
By adding an audience to a Search campaign, you’ll target your ads

only to users who search for keywords you’re targeting or match to
through DSA, but that also match that audience.
Using these audience layers, you can create a custom experience

for this list of users vs all other users by creating a separate
campaign, adjusting ad copy, setting new bids, and more.
DISPLAY TARGETING
Display campaigns on the Google Display Network (GDN) have

quite a few different targeting options but two main categories:
content and audience.
Contextual (content) targeting means your targeting options focus

on the content of the page or site.
When you choose contextual targeting, you’re indicating to Google

that you want to show up on sites that have relevant content to you.
When you choose audience targeting, you’re telling Google you
want to show up for people who exhibit the behaviors you’ve
identified as important, regardless of what content they’re viewing.
The following list of GDN targeting options is in order of reach from
narrowest to widest.
CONTEXTUAL TARGETING
Placement Targeting
Placement targeting is the narrowest targeting on the GDN.
With placement targeting, advertisers provide Google with a list of

specific websites they would like their ads to show up on.
For your ad to show, the website has to opt into Google’s ad

network, AdSense.
Keyword Targeting
Keywords are also a potential targeting option for the Google
Display Network, but they function differently than on Search.
For the GDN, keywords do not use match types and end up
functioning like broad match on Search.
Advertisers provide Google with a list of keywords, and Google will

then go find content that loosely matches the keywords, and then
shows ads on that content.
Topics
Topics are the third and final contextual targeting options and have
the widest reach of the contextual targets.
Topic targeting allows advertisers to choose topics from a list

Google has created that group websites and placements that fit the
theme.
Topics range in theme from gardening, to enterprise software, to

extreme sports, to medical research.
There are many high-level categories, most with multiple

subcategories to help you find exactly the type of content you want
to show up next to.
AUDIENCE TARGETING
In-Market
In-Market audiences are very similar to Topics targeting but are
predefined audiences rather than contextual targeting groups from
Google.
These audiences are groups of users Google believes are actively

researching or are “in the market” for a specific product or service.
The lists of In-Market Audiences are available for you to browse in

the same way Topics are, and many audiences have similar themes
to the list of Topics.
Until recently, In-Market audiences were exclusive to the Display

Network, but both Google and Microsoft Ads are giving advertisers
the ability to layer these lists into Search campaigns.
Adding this layer can help narrow the focus to those users who
have exhibited research behavior in addition to conducting the
search.
LIFE EVENTS
Life Events allow you to target users who are exhibiting indicators
of major life events.
These have been around for a while now, and the list is longer than
it was when this was debuted a couple of years ago.
Detailed Demographics
Similar to Life Events, Detailed Demographics allow you to target

users based on information Google presumes or infers about
them like Parental Status, Marital Status, Education Level, and
Homeownership Status.
Custom Intent Audiences

Custom Intent Audiences are one of the newest types of audiences
on the GDN.
These lists let advertisers use keywords and URLs to create an

audience based on products and services your ideal audience is
actively researching.
Although you’re adding keywords like contextual targeting, Google

Ads is using those keywords to find users who are likely to be
interested in those keywords.
Google also often provides its own list of automatically created

Custom Intent audiences, which is made by reviewing other aspects
of your account.
These are found just above the Custom Intent section in the
interface. If you’re struggling to come up with your own, test out one
of these from the list.
This targeting type is good for reaching users you can’t identify in
the In-Market lists or if you need to narrow the focus a bit more than
what In-Market audiences provide.
Affinity Audiences
Affinity audiences have the broadest reach of the Display Network
targeting. They were originally intended to mimic TV audiences.
These lists are groups of people who might have an affinity toward a
certain industry or thing such as “Beauty Mavens” or “Social Media
Enthusiasts”.
These audiences are best used when you’re trying to reach a very
large group of people for efforts like branding or high-level calls to
action.
Similar to Custom Intent Audiences, you can also create your own
Custom Affinity Lists by adding keywords and URLs to create
custom themes.
Similar Audiences
Similar audiences are the last kind of audience target and they’re a
unique option. Similar audiences are a function of your Remarketing
audiences.
Google regularly reviews the user profiles within a given

Remarketing list to look for patterns.
If a pattern is detected, Google will create a Similar Audience, or a

list of users who behave similarly to the users in your Remarketing
list.
You can then apply this list to your campaigns as you would any
other list as either the sole target or a modifier layer.
If Google cannot detect a user pattern in a Remarketing list,

because the list is either too small or too large, then a Similar
Audience will not be created.
To increase your chances of Google creating Similar Audiences

in your account, it’s important to create Remarketing lists with
meaningful segmentation to increase the chance of a meaningful
pattern being created.
REMARKETING
Remarketing is a way to engage with users you’ve come in contact

with before.
There are many ways we can put these lists together and leverage
them in our PPC accounts.
Let’s start with the most common method: Remarketing pixels.

Remarketing Pixel Audiences

A Remarketing Pixel is a small snippet of code placed on your site
that cookies users who visit your page.
This cookie allows advertisers to create lists of users to target

again in ad platforms.
Additionally, we can create criteria for these lists to only include a

certain subset of our audience.
One very common list created is a converters list, meaning anyone

who made a purchase from your e-commerce website or submitted
a lead on your lead gen site.
This list can then be used as a target audience for a campaign or

as an exclusion, meaning you don’t want these users to see your ad
even if they fit all the other targeting criteria of a campaign.
Customer Uploads
Another kind of Remarketing list is a Customer Upload, or a list of
customer emails you import into Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
The ad platforms will then match the email addresses you provided
with the users on their email provider and allow you to target them.
This list type is great when you want to retarget users in your CRM
or those who might not have been cookied with your pixel.
Google Analytics Import

In Google Ads, we can link our Google Analytics and Google
Ads accounts together and import audiences based on Google
Analytics metrics.
Google Analytics has a much more powerful set of audience

criteria, allowing us to leverage site engagement, sequencing, and
other indicators to create our lists.
Unfortunately, this type of Remarketing audience is only available

for Google Ads.
Remarketing audiences can be applied to campaigns as the sole

group of users to target or as a bid modifier layer, now called
Observation.
They can also be applied to all campaign types within a given

network, such as both Search and Dynamic Search Ads on the
Search Network.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Demographic targeting can be a great way to incrementally impact

performance or ensure you’re reaching your ideal target audience.
These targeting layers are determined through information given to

the channels when a profile is created as well as the behaviors of
the user.
Overall, these targeting options are best leveraged as incremental

layers to modify the other targeting options listed above rather than
being used alone.
Age & Gender

Demographic information is available for targeting in all campaign
types in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Both channels support bid
modifiers for user Age and Gender.
These targeting options allow you to see how your ads are
performing for a certain group of users, then adjust bid modifiers
up or down to increase or decrease your bids on those groups of
users.
Each of these targeting options lives at the ad group level and can
be adjusted in the Settings tab in Bing or the Demographics section
in Google Ads.
Household Income
Google Ads has one additional demographic lever available for
users living in the United States: Household Income.
The data for these groups is determined by the location’s average

household income, so it’s not a perfect science, but this can be a
great lever to pull if you’re trying to target users based on income.
This targeting option lives in the Demographics section of the

Google Ads interface and can be adjusted similarly to Age and
Gender segments.
Parental Status
Lastly, Google has one specific demographic target reserved for
Display campaigns: Parental Status.
Similar to the other targets, Parental Status lives at the ad group

level and allows you to adjust your bids with modifiers based on
your targeting preferences or performance.
There are many targeting options for PPC campaigns, each with
their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases.
I encourage you to seek out additional information about best

practices for each targeting option and test them out in your
account.
11
10 PPC
COPYWRITING BEST
PRACTICES FOR
EXTRA EFFECTIVE
TEXT ADS
AUTHOR
ADAM HEITZMAN
Running PPC ads can be
profitable – or it can be a waste of
time.
What makes the difference?
Much of it has to do with your ad text.
Writing great copy for PPC ads is trickier than it might seem at first.
Platforms like Google Ads give you a limited amount of space to catch
a searcher’s eye, get them interested in your offer, and entice them to
click.
Unfortunately, there’s no winning formula for writing the perfect PPC

ad (and if there were, everybody would be using it).
But there are many best practices you can follow to make your ad
copy stronger.
Here are 10 tips you can apply to the next ad you write.
10 PPC COPYWRITING BEST PRACTICES FOR EXTRA EFFECTIVE TEXT ADS
1. KNOW WHAT YOUR TARGET MARKET WANTS
Lots of businesses approach ad-writing by talking about

themselves. That’s a natural thing to do, and after all, you’re an
expert on what makes your company great.
But it’s actually the opposite of what you should be doing.

Customers seek you out because they need something, not
because they’re curious about your business.
The best way to get the attention of your target audience is to show
them that you understand – and can fix – their problems.
Before you start writing, do this exercise: put yourself in your ideal
customer’s shoes.
Think about what kind of problem

they’re experiencing, and imagine
how they’d search for a solution.
Then, write your ad copy as

a response to that imaginary
customer’s needs and search habits.
2. ADDRESS YOUR AUDIENCE
Use the words “you” and “your” in your ads.
Speaking to your audience makes them feel important.
It creates the sense that your business is personable – you want to

create a friendly and helpful relationship with customers right off the
bat.
3. USE EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS TO YOUR

ADVANTAGE
What’s the worst thing an ad can be?
If you said boring, you’re right.
A bad PPC ad is completely unmemorable.
It might be inoffensive and even well-put-together, but if no one

ever feels intrigued or moved enough to click on it, why even bother
publishing it?
You can avoid the fate of boring ads by choosing your words and
making your audience feel something.
If you know what your target market wants, this shouldn’t be too
difficult.
Zero in on the core problem or desire that brings customers to you,

and brainstorm some ways to play up the emotion contained in it.
Negative feelings can actually be better stimuli than positive ones

since people are motivated to avoid pain, so don’t be afraid to
leverage your audience’s anxiety, anger, or FOMO (fear of missing
out).
Some more positive emotions you can use to drive results include
hopefulness, relief, and the feeling of being liked or admired by
others.
4. USE NUMBERS, TRADEMARKS AND REGISTER

MARKS (™, ®)
If you want to draw more eyes to your ads, try adding a number or
two.
Figures and statistics have a way of getting people’s attention and

have proven to increase CTR.
One way to use numbers is to name your product’s price or

advertise a sale.
You can also try featuring a numerical statistic about your business,
such as the number of customers you’ve helped.
Use exact numbers instead of round numbers, since people tend to

trust exact numbers more.
Along with numbers, utilizing the TM and Registration Marks

especially in your brand campaigns let the user that you are the
official source for information.
This will help you get a leg up on the competitor’s ad.

5. REMOVE OBJECTIONS
Most people need a little convincing before they click on an ad or

make a purchase.
Come up with a few common objections to your service or selling

points, and address those preemptively in your ad copy.
If you remove your audience’s excuses for not clicking before they
even think of them, they’ll immediately feel more at ease with your
business – and more likely to take you up on your offer.
6. USE ALL YOUR SPACE
Google Ads gives you three 30-character headlines plus two

90-character descriptions.
Maximize your ad’s power by packing all the information you can
into this space.
If you’re short a few characters, see if you can come up with an

extra detail or two to include.
Don’t forget about your display URL and ad extensions, either.

Your display URL doesn’t have to match the actual URL that your
visitors will land on – its purpose is to show people what kind of
page they’ll be taken to, so creating a custom URL that includes
your keywords is a smart move.
Ad extensions can be another valuable way to get more real estate

in search results.
Don’t rely on them to carry your message, though, since Google

can’t guarantee that your extensions will show up every time your
ad is run.
7. EMPHASIZE WHAT MAKES YOU STAND OUT
Make your ad more intriguing by setting yourself apart from your

competitors.
You don’t have much space to pitch your unique selling proposition
to your audience, so try to distill it down into a powerful kernel that
will make readers want to know more.
Some helpful questions to ask yourself include:

What does your business do better than or different from
anyone else in the industry?
Have you won any awards?
Are you running any sales or making any special offers?
What’s unique about your brand’s image?
8. GO LOCAL
People like and trust local businesses over big, faceless national
corporations.
Emphasize your location in your ads to give people an approachable

first impression of your business.
You don’t actually have to operate in one location to play up a local-

business image, either.
If you have multiple locations, create separate PPC campaigns to

run in different geographical areas, and use specific location-based
terms for each campaign.
Also, use local phone numbers instead of an 800 number in your

ads.
9. USE STRONG, CREATIVE CALLS TO ACTION
Does the phrase “Call now” actually make you feel any sense of
urgency?
Probably not.
Instead of resorting to worn-out clichés for your calls to action,

come up with something that hits home a little bit more for your
audience.
You already know what they want, so highlight that in your call to
action.
Kick off your call to action with a strong verb, too – something like
“Get,” “Save,” “Build,” “Download,” or “Join.”
10. SPLIT TEST YOUR PPC ADS FREQUENTLY
Regular testing is one of the surest ways you can make real
improvements in your ads.
The more data you collect, the more patterns you’ll start to spot,
and the better you’ll be able to adjust your ad strategy.
Intuition can be far off the mark when it comes to what will work in
advertising, so it’s incredibly important to base your decisions on
data rather than guesswork.
Some ideas for split tests you can try include:

Placing your call to action in different locations.
Comparing different calls to action.
Experimenting with different numbers and statistics in your
ads.
Trying different display URLs.
Highlighting different benefits of your product or service.
THE TAKEAWAY
Writing effective PPC ads is more of an art than a science.
Even marketers with a talent for wordsmithing sometimes run into

writer’s block when trying to come up with the perfect ad text.
The good news?
With patience, practice, and testing, you’ll start to write PPC ads
more quickly and easily – and you’ll get real results from them.
12
EVERYTHING YOU
NEED TO KNOW
ABOUT
AD EXTENSIONS
AUTHOR
PAULINE JAKOBER
Ad extensions are an important
part of optimizing your paid
search ads.
They can help you gain a competitive edge, improve performance, and
increase CTR.
They also factor into ad rank.
Some of these extensions are manual, meaning you have to set them
up yourself.
Others are automatic, meaning they’re automatically applied when

certain conditions are met.
And some extensions can be both!

EVERY THING YOU KNOW AB OUT AD EXTENSIONS
MANUAL EXTENSIONS
As you’ll see, you have many manual extensions available to you. But
this doesn’t mean you have to use them all!
Instead, take a step back and develop a comprehensive messaging

strategy for ads and extensions.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks take people to specific pages on your site.
Sitelinks show in a variety of ways depending on device, ad position,

and other factors. You can add sitelinks at the account, campaign,
or ad group level.
You can specify the link text (the text that displays in the ad) and
URLs (the pages they click to).
Sitelinks can either be manual or automatic.
When to Use
Sitelinks are relevant to most accounts.
Pro Tips:
You can include sitelinks to your business’s LinkedIn,
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube Channel.
Each sitelink within a campaign or ad group must land on a
unique URL.
Relevancy and good quality scores help sitelinks impression
more often.
You can make sitelinks specific to mobile by ticking off the
device preference box when building the sitelink.
Video Ad Sitelinks
Video ad sitelinks appear below ads that play before, during, or
after another video on YouTube. These sitelinks only appear below
ads on mobile devices.
Video ad sitelinks are basically the equivalent of Search sitelinks but

for YouTube.
When to Use
Video ad sitelinks are a good fit for most accounts. They’re a great
way to deliver useful information, such as your store location and
additional calls-to-action.
Pro Tips:
You need at least two sitelink extensions for the sitelinks to
appear.
Your ad can show up to four sitelinks.
Sitelinks don’t appear in campaigns running on Google video
partners.
Here’s an example of how video ads sitelinks look when they

impression:
Lead Form Extensions

Lead form extensions are exactly what they sound like. They’re a
form that impressions as an add-on to your ads.
When to Use
Lead forms are a great way to generate leads for sales,
conversions, or remarketing.
Lead forms come in two flavors: lead forms for Search campaigns
and lead forms for TrueView for action video campaigns.
Lead forms for Search campaigns are currently in beta.
Pro Tips:
Video campaigns with a lead form will only serve if the person
receiving the ad is signed into their Google Account.
Lead forms for Search campaigns will serve on mobile and
tablet devices running Android or iOS.
Lead forms for video campaigns will only serve on mobile and
tablet devices running Android.
Callouts
Callout ad extensions let you include additional text to highlight
specific information about your business’s products and services.
Callouts will show in a variety of ways depending on device and

other factors. You can add callouts at the account, campaign, or ad
group level.
You choose where to add them, create the callout text, and
schedule when you’d like them to appear.
When to Use
Callouts should be used to highlight differentiators. They’re often
used to promote special offers, such as free shipping.
Think of them as benefits (vs. features) in your advertising.
Pro Tips:
You must create a minimum of two callouts for them to
impression. Google recommends creating the maximum
number, which is four.
Structured Snippets
Structured snippet ad extensions allow you to highlight certain
aspects of what you’re advertising. If you’re advertising a hotel, for
example, you might feature some of the hotel’s amenities, such as
free Wi-Fi, a business center, and a fitness club.
If you don’t include structured snippets within your campaigns,

Google may automatically include dynamic structured snippets.
When to Use
Use structured snippets to focus on tangibles. Think of these as
features (as opposed to benefits).
Pro Tips:
You need a minimum of three snippets for this extension to
impression with your ad.
Snippets must be closely related to your header. Otherwise,
they may not impression.
Call Extensions
Call extensions allow you to add phone numbers to your ads. When
call extensions show, people can click to call your business directly,
without having to key in your phone number.
When to Use
Use call extensions if you have a team that can handle phone calls.
These extensions work well for potential customers who know

exactly what they want and don’t want to spend time clicking
through to your website and locating your phone number.
Location Extensions
Location extensions help people find your business. These
extensions show your business address, phone number, and a map
marker with your ad text.
On mobile, they include a link with directions to your business.
When to Use
Use location extensions when you have a physical premise you
want users to find, such as a retail location. These extensions can
help drive foot traffic to your store.
Pro Tips:
You can add multiple addresses by linking your account to
Google My Business and targeting your ads around your
business addresses.
For location extensions to show, you must link your Google My
Business account to your Google Ads account.
Affiliate Location Extensions

Affiliate location extensions help people locate nearby retail stores
that carry your products.
These extensions are not available in all countries.
When to Use
Location extensions are particularly suited to retail chains and auto
dealers or any other type of business where affiliates carry your
products.
Price Extensions
Price extensions display specific products and pricing underneath
your ad. They can display in a couple of different ways, as shown
below (circled in red).
Example 1
Example 2
Each price extension has its own link. When people click, they go
straight to the product on your website.
When to Use
Use these extensions when you want to highlight a particular
product or service. They can help you move inventory faster.
Pro Tips:
Some advertisers are reluctant to use price extensions
because their products aren’t the cheapest on the market.
However, price extensions can serve as a useful lead qualifier.
Some case studies suggest that ads with price extensions
have higher click-through-rates than those that don’t.
Promotion Extensions
Promotion extensions allow you to highlight sales and promotions
in your ads, as below (circled in red):
You get to choose the label (in bold). Here we’ve used “Deal,” but
you can also use labels such as “Back-to-school” or “Mother’s Day.”
When to Use
Use these extensions any time you have a special sale or deal you
want to promote.
App Extensions
App extensions allow you to include a link to your mobile or tablet
app in your ad.
When to Use
Use this extension If you have a mobile app that’s live in Google Play
or the Apple App Store.
AUTOMATED EXTENSIONS
Automated extensions automatically pull data from various sources,

such as landing pages and other ads, to create extensions for your
ad.
To view metrics for automated extensions, go to the Ad Extensions

tab in Google Ads. Go to the “View:” drop-down, and choose
“Automated extensions report.”
Seller Ratings
Seller rating extensions are used to highlight businesses with high
customer ratings. Seller ratings show a combination of information
and reviews.
You are not charged for clicks on seller rating extensions.
Pro Tips:
In most cases, seller ratings only show when a business has
150 unique reviews and a composite rating of 3.5 stars or
higher.
OTHER AUTOMATED EXTENSIONS
Other automated extensions in Google Ads include:

Dynamic callouts
Dynamic structured snippets
Dynamic sitelink extensions
Automated call extensions
Automated location and affiliate extensions
All of these automated extensions operate similarly as their manual

equivalents.
You can opt-out these automated extensions. From the Ad

Extensions view, go to advanced options and look for: Turn off
specific automated extensions.
MICROSOFT ADVERTISING EXTENSIONS

(FORMERLY BING ADS)
Microsoft Ads extensions include:

Sitelink extensions
Enhanced sitelinks
Location extensions
Call extensions
Callout extensions
Review extensions
Structured snippet extensions
App extensions
Image extensions
Action extensions
Price extensions
As you can see, these ad extensions are similar (for the most part)
as those offered by Google Ads.
However, there are a few differences – some of which are noted

below.
Location Extensions
Location extensions in Microsoft Advertising give iPhone users an
easy way to call for a ride to your business.
The Get a Ride feature for location extensions allows users to click
the ride icon, which launches the Uber app. If users are logged in to
their Uber account, the destination will be pre-populated with their
address.
When to Use
Use location extensions if your business wants to encourage local
traffic, such as a storefront or restaurant.
Image Extensions
Image extensions allow advertisers to add images to their ads to
grab attention and increase brand recognition.
When to Use
Use these extensions any time you want your ad to stand out
visually.
Pro Tips:
You can associate up to six images with each campaign or ad
group.
You can point to a unique URL with each image.
Review Extensions
Review extensions are a great way to highlight customer reviews at
the ad level in Microsoft Advertising.
Clicks on review extensions are free of charge and direct people to

third-party reviews.
Google recently sunsetted this product, but Microsoft Advertising

still has it.
Action Extensions
Action extensions allow you to add a call-to-action button to your
text ads.
When to Use
These are a good way to get potential customers to take the next
step in their buying journey.
Pro Tips:
You have over 50 preset action types to choose from (e.g.,
download, apply now, reserve, subscribe), so you’d be hard-
pressed not to find one you can use.
13
A COMPLETE
GUIDE TO PPC AD
FORMATS
AUTHOR
AARON LEVY
A C O M P L E T E G U I D E TO P P C A D F O R M AT S
PPC ads come in many

shapes and sizes.
They also change frequently, which means it’s nearly impossible to
provide a truly comprehensive guide for every ad format available.
This guide is up to date as of August 2020, but is likely to evolve over

time.
What follows is an overview of the major PPC ad formats that are

available across Google Ads.
Most of the basic text and shopping formats are also available across
Microsoft Ads.
ON THE SERP
Text Ads
Ah, the bread and butter of PPC! Our dear text ads – with two
or three 30-character headlines and one or two 90-character
description lines.
Google and Bing both did away with the old version of standard
text ads recently, and now we’re seeing larger text ads with a more
varied alignment of extensions than we’d seen in years past.
Ads usually fire with the two headlines side by side, with a
description line and ad extensions below. But, the ads have grown
over the years, and occasionally show all three headlines and
descriptions at once.
Sometimes ads will serve with a third “headline,” comprised of the

URL itself. The URL in the headline can read a bit weird, so you have
the option to disable if you wish.
The different headlines and descriptions are usually separated by a

| symbol.
However, we know how Google loves to experiment: we’re starting

to see ads smoosh together with ads to form one mega-ad.
Sometimes the combinations are coherent, sometimes not, but it’s
the new normal and something advertisers will have to get used to!
Responsive Search Ads

These aren’t so much a variation on text ads, but more an
automated method of powering them.
Aesthetically, they share the same appearance as “normal” text ads

– they usually show two headlines and one description.
However, much like text ads, occasionally you’ll see three headlines
and two descriptions at the same time.
Advertisers upload a variety of headlines and description lines, and

Google will shuffle them based on the best-expected performance.
It’s recommended to include at least three headline variations and

two description variations (the same as regular text ads), but you’re
able to include up to 15 headlines and four descriptions.
Make sure the variables you use will make sense no matter the
order they serve in.
App Download Ads

App Download Ads (and app engagement ads alike) allow you to
showcase your app to the relevant tablet or mobile users.
The ads will auto-detect the operating system to showcase either

the App Store or Google Play where applicable.
The app must be live in either market to be eligible.
App download ads can appear in a number of places including on

the SERP, in the Play Store, or on the mobile web. All app download
and app engagement ads are included in Universal App Campaigns
(UACs).
Like responsive ads, UACs include a variety of elements that

are shuffled based on what Google expects will yield the best
performance.
At the minimum, ads will include up to four independent lines of text

that are up to 25 characters. Advertisers can also include things like
video snippets, images, or HTML5 assets to produce more options.
To advertise on the App Store, you’ll need to use Apple Search Ads.
Local Service Ads

Local Service Ads are the new kids on the block, and only open
to select verticals and markets, though they’re moving closer to
nationwide in the U.S.A.
The list is ever-expanding, and now covers most basic services you
could possibly imagine
However, it’s expected many more household services will be rolled

out over the next year.
The ads are largely automated, and (at this time) operate out of a
separate UI from traditional Google ads.
The ads primarily fire for

localized queries, including
something like a city name, a
ZIP code, or a neighborhood.
The ads are pay-per-lead

(rather than pay-per-click), and
there’s a flat rate depending on
the industry. That’s right – no
bidding!
Aside from basic business

information, there isn’t much
you can change. You are
eligible to show a Google
Guarantee after going through
a screening process, which
can improve conversion rate.
It’s expected these will roll out

in bulk in the near future, but
for now, they’re focused on
smaller local businesses.
The ads appear below
sponsored text ads, but above
maps and organic results.
Google Maps Ads

Ads on Google Maps are primarily powered by location extensions
and are treated as a search partner in reporting.
Sponsored locations will appear at the top of map search results on

desktop or mobile, and are charged on a pay-per-click basis.
The key difference is “clicks” in this case are essentially a click on

the location (or directions or a phone number) rather than traffic
direct to site.
Call-Only Ads
Call-Only Ads are a mobile-
only variation of text ads where
(shocker), the only option is to
complete a phone call from the
ad.
A “click” on the ad doesn’t

necessarily indicate a call
was completed, but rather it
indicates the phone number
was entered into the dialer.
Call-Only ads are eligible for

Google’s call tracking tool as
long as you use a forwarding
number. The frequency of
call-only ads is diminishing,
as Local Services Ads are
beginning to take priority.
Hotel Ads
Hotel Ads are designed to advertise… well, hotels!
The ad units are feed-based; advertisers will work with an

integration partner to provide key booking attributes to Google.
Features such as room availability, price, star ratings and booking
policies are all passed along directly to Google.
In a sense, Google is operating as a metasearch engine – it displays

all available inventory for all hotel providers that send inventory their
way.
The ads won’t appear directly on the SERP, but rather within the
Google hotel search UI. Say you wanted to head to Bar Harbor for a
COVID-friendly road trip.
You would enter the dates you’re looking for and see a list of all
hotels available with Hotel Ads right at the top.
Shopping
Google and Bing Shopping Ads (the artist formerly known as
PLAs) are the preeminent way to get visibility for commerce-driven
searches.
The ads take a number of formats on the SERP, from a straight bar
of three to five products above the SERPs to a “six pack” or “nine
pack” on the formerly empty right rail.
Ads will often populate knowledge panels, as seen below. In some

cases, you can even find single ad units if there aren’t enough
players in the auction.
Shopping Ads are based on a feed that you send to google,

containing prices, images, product information + titles among other
things. You’re also able to add a few COVID-specific attributes that
can indicate touch-free pickup for local ads (shown below).
Shopping Ads are a must-do for any ecommerce retailer.

Showcase Ads
Showcase Ads are a subset
of shopping campaigns, aimed
towards more top of funnel
queries – if a user searches for
a general query like “mirrors”
or “backpacks,” Google will
roll up relevant products into a
Showcase Ad to drive interest.
These ads are automated.

Google will “pick” product
selections as they see fit.
Like most things in Google, you

can customize your chosen
images by uploading a custom
header image, and manage which
products show in the ad itself by
subdividing products in the feed.
Volume for Showcase Ads is low,

but steadily increasing. While
showcase ads are technically
eligible to show on Desktops,
they’re primarily seen on phones.
Local Inventory Ads

Local Inventory Ads are a
variation on shopping ads that
mix with an inventory feed from
stores.
When searchers are looking

for a product available locally,
Local Inventory Ads will provide
a link for users to click and see
a Google-hosted “landing page”
called a local storefront, where
they can gather more information
about the product and store
itself.
Again, the volume is low here and

the ads require a clear feedback
loop with local stores, which is
easier said than done for most.
ON THE WEB
Responsive Ads
Responsive Ads are the Google Display Network’s newest (and now
only) form of text ads on the web.
You don’t have an option to only run text ads. Rather, ads will be a
mix of text and display in different formats.
Much like Responsive Search Ads, advertisers will upload a variety

of messages, logos, and images as ad components.
Google will display the ad it thinks is best for a given ad unit and
optimize accordingly.
The ads can render a little weird, as seen below:
So if brand messaging is important to you, make sure you view the

ads in a number of different formats to align with how you hope the
ads will look.
Static Image Ads

Static Image Ads, while dated, are still common on the Google
Display Network.
It’s best to upload as many sizes as your team has time to make
(pending bandwidth and costs), though it’s important to know
Google will occasionally squish or stretch ads to fit “close” ad sizes
(called Seam Carving), which can distort ads or cut off the edges.
Contact your rep to opt out.
Should you have limited resources, Google keeps a list of the

most common ad sizes, which is ever-changing as new and better
devices are developed.
Lightbox Ads
This is a richer ad unit designed for engagement and branding.
Lightbox ads take a number of different formats and are Google’s

format of a low cost “rich media” ad.
The ads are interactive – you can do things like flip through a
product catalog, create an interactive video based on a YouTube
video, and much more.
The ads begin as standard banner sizes, but hovering over by the
user for a short period of time (around 3 seconds) causes the ad to
power up.
The ads are charged on either a CPM or CPE (cost-per-

engagement).
Gmail Sponsored Promotions

Gmail Sponsored Promotions appear in the Promotions tab of Gmail
both on desktop and the mobile app.
The ads are powered entirely by audience and interest targeting,

including:
Affinity audiences.
In-market.
Demographic.
Customer match.
The ads are charged on a pay-per-open, meaning an “engagement”

doesn’t necessarily equate to a site visit.
Dynamic Remarketing Ads

looking at that just won’t stop following you around.
The images are powered by the same feed as Google Shopping,

and allow advertisers to show site visitors images, prices, and other
pertinent information from the feed.
Google offers a few simple ad templates in their Ad Builder, so

matching branding isn’t always perfect, but they’re a great place to
start.
The ads are responsive, so they’ll mold themselves to fit into a wide
variety of ad units.
In addition to showing around the web, dynamic remarketing ads are

also eligible to show on Gmail and in some discovery ad units.
YouTube
There’s a huge variety of options available for video targeting on
YouTube.
To keep it simple, ads fall into two formats:

Video (e.g., running a commercial).
Display (either promoting a video, promoting a site or
accompanying your video ad).
Search ads were quietly retired in mid-2017.

In-Stream
In-Stream is a catch-all name for the various video ad formats.
Formats range from unskippable pre-roll videos to unlimited length

ads embedded within longer-form videos.
In-stream ads can be accompanied by optional companion banners

overlaid on the top right or lower part of the video, custom call to
action cards on top of the video or simply running as they are.
The possibilities are endless, but the key to remember with In-
Stream ads is creative. There’s no sense in spending a ton of money
to promote a bad video.
Bumper Ads
Bumper Ads are a relatively new format – they’re unskippable
formats of in-stream video ads and aim to get a short, punchy
message across.
These ads are only six seconds long, and appear identical to other
in-stream video ad formats. Engagement and view rates are high
while the cost is nice and low.
Bumper ads are an efficient way to get your message across

without having to invest a ton of money in a long-form commercial.
TrueView for Shopping

TrueView for Shopping, or shoppable videos, is a hybrid of Google
Shopping ads and In-Stream ads.
If an advertiser is looking to get more direct conversion actions from

their videos, these are a natural fit.
The ads are powered by your shopping feeds; like most feed-based
products the ads can be responsive/automated, remarketing-based,
or customized to feature a product that’s directly in the video.
TrueView Discovery Ads

TrueView Discovery Ads are a video-driven version of responsive
display ads.
Advertisers will create a 25 character headline, two 35 character

description lines, and choose from one of four auto-generated
thumbnails (which can be customized).
The ads can appear on the right side as part of “recommended”

videos, as part of YouTube search results or as an overlay on similar
videos.
TrueView Discovery Ads are a powerful tool to gain exposure for

videos to boost views.
YouTube Masthead Ads

The YouTube Masthead is a premium placement, taking over the
homepage of YouTube and core portion of the app.
Historically, you’d need to take over the homepage for an entire day
for an exorbitant sum of money (in the area of $250k for a day).
Approximately a year ago, Google opened YouTube Masthead ads

to all with more robust targeting capabilities and a smaller price tag.
The ads are still premium-priced, bought on a reserve CPM basis

(meaning you must commit to a set number of impressions that
Google will fill). The ad format may not be for everybody, but if you
are looking for huge reach in a prominent placement, YouTube
Masthead ads may fit the bill!
14
A BEGINNER’S
GUIDE TO
SHOPPING ADS
AUTHOR
KIRK WILLIAMS
If you work in e-commerce paid
search, then having a working
knowledge of Shopping Ads is
essential for keeping up with the
competition.
What’s more, the significant changes in 2019 and 2020 within the
Shopping Ads sphere, have made it essential for even the savviest
PPCer to brush up on their PLA (Google used to call Shopping Ads
Product Listing Ads) knowledge.
THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SHOPPING ADS
This chapter is to give you working knowledge. We’re going to do

that by focusing on three components to Shopping Ads, and then
spending time looking specifically at a newer campaign type:
Google Smart Shopping Campaigns (SSC):

Feed Setup & Management.
Campaign Setup.
Ongoing Optimizations.
Smart Shopping Campaigns.
FEED SETUP & MANAGEMENT
Because Shopping Ads are automated based on data sent to the

engines, shopping feeds are crucial to success in Shopping Ads.
For feeds to work as needed, you need to send the feed with a feed
provider (or do it yourself) to Google/Microsoft (formerly known as
Bing) Merchant Center, after which you need to link those to the
engines so you can advertise them.
So, Product Data > Feed > Merchant Center > Ads Platform > User >
Purchase, hooray!
What Is Merchant Center for?

In Merchant Center, you submit your product data to make a feed
according to specifications (make sure you get required fields
completed and add as many recommended fields as possible).
Please note, Google Merchant Center is a unique entity in which you

will need to create a (free) account to manage and send your feeds
to Google Ads.
However, Microsoft Merchant Center is currently within the

Microsoft Ads UI under the “Tools” tab.
Tip: When you first push up a feed, it can take between 24 and 72
hours in both Google and Microsoft for the feed to be approved,
so be patient. Don’t wait until Thanksgiving Day to upload your
products, hoping for a big Black Friday!
Data Feeds
What’s with the product data feeds, and how do you create them?
Spreadsheet Option
If you have only a handful of SKUs, you can actually just use Google
Sheets to integrate directly with Google Merchant Center.
DIY XML
If you are a company with developers to spare and they have
nothing to do but sit around and wait for your feed updates, then
you may want to consider creating and sending your own XML file
directly to Google Merchant Center.
In that case, send them over the policy docs and let them get rolling
on creating an XML or txt feed. Make sure it stays updated!
Direct API Integration

For many commerce platforms, such as Shopify or Bigcommerce,
there are native apps within their system that allow you to send
feeds directly from your store.
The one caution I will note here is that you want to ensure that
you select an app that allows you as much editing capabilities as
possible over the feed. Most of those popular apps are extremely
limited in their capabilities.
For Shopify, our favorite Shopping Ads app is the Simprosys App,
as it is affordable and entirely editable.
Third-Party Feed Provider

If you just want someone else to do the work, you can contract with
a third-party feed provider to assist you in sending the feed.
If you select this option, make sure you realize that with most
providers, you will still need to work with the feed provider to get
your data to them in some format.
It’s worth calling out here that some like Feedonomics have the
option to integrate dynamically through API in platforms like Shopify,
or even to scrape your site for product information!
You’ll tend to pay more for the providers that do more work, so plan
accordingly.
Once you have selected your primary means of sending your data
feed, you’ll want to take care of any product disapprovals that
appear and set up any settings and business admin aspects within
the Merchant Center to make sure your store is good to go.
Get your tax data, shipping data, and anything else on that upper
nav toolbar of things finished so once your feed is processed you
are ready to advertise your products.
CAMPAIGN SETUP
Once your feed is sent to Google Merchant Center and processed,

you can then begin building campaigns in Google Ads.
You will need to first link your Google Ads account in the Google
Merchant Center settings, which is found in the tools and Linked
Accounts section of the Google Ads UI.
Building campaigns in Google Ads or Microsoft for Shopping is a

detailed and long discussion beyond the scope of this chapter.
So here are a few things to consider as you build Shopping

campaigns.
First, don’t just stick with a single campaign in your account, trusting
the search engines to match everything up perfectly.
This limits you in many ways, but primarily in bidding and sculpting
the right search terms to the right products.
You set bids based upon product groups. However, you have
segmented those product groups out. In essence, you are setting
one bid for scores of queries (and products) of varying levels of
intent.
Initially, I would recommend segmenting out your catalog based

upon natural categories based on how your customers search, or
on other factors such as product cost or success. This may be at
the campaign, or ad group level.
I like to get the main, big picture way you will choose to segment
figured out and then add those into campaigns. Then add further
segmented product categories or brands into those campaigns as
Ad Groups.
For instance (and in an overly simplified example), you may want to

segment out by your “Top 25 Sold Products” and then “Everything
Else” in separate campaigns, with your Everything Else campaigns
segmented into ad groups by product brand.
You may even want to go a step further and segment the Everything
Else into Categories and then Brands. For example:
Campaign: Shopping - Soccer Cleats - US

Ad Group: Nike
Ad Group: Adidas
Ad Group: Puma
Campaign: Shopping - Athletic Socks - US

Ad Group: Under Armor
Ad Group: Nike
Ad Group: Adidas
The thing to remember about segmenting categories or brands

by Campaign or Ad Group is that you can better control negative
keywords and thus push queries in between campaigns or ad
groups.
Of course, be cautious not to over-exclude with Shopping Ads

negative keywords since you can have multiple ads on each Search
Results page.
Another way to consider organizing your campaigns is to set your

account up to allow you to bid separately on query buying intent,
using the Priority settings structure.
When you do so, according to this article on query sculpting in

Google Shopping, you can pull unique query groupings into unique
campaigns so you can then better control budgets and CPCs based
on query intent.
For instance, you may want to initially limit the amount of budget
you give to the upper funnel, real generic terms like “shoes.” Still,
you may want to bid more aggressively on “bontrager cycling
shoes” since there is higher purchase intent there, and the above
strategy will allow you to get into more complex arrangements like
this.
Whatever you do, figure out what works best for your account and
get building out beyond one campaign and one ad group.
Use a great campaign set up to allow you to better match the right
queries with the right products and bid correctly for them.
ONGOING OPTIMIZATIONS
When it comes to Shopping Ads, setting them up isn’t the final act
of work done on the account.
While there is a level of automation to them, there are also things

you should regularly do to keep your Shopping campaigns humming
and profitable.
One of those things is to monitor and take action on your search

query report in Shopping campaigns.
I recommend getting into the account regularly (at least weekly

or monthly, depending on your account size) to mine through your
search terms as there will be times Google or Microsoft gets out of

control in what they allow to match to your products. You will want
to add those as exclusions.
On the positive side, you can also find opportunities here to

add new keywords into your Search campaigns if Shopping
demonstrates positive results for some queries you’re not currently
targeting with text ads.
Another aspect of Shopping Ads you can optimize on an ongoing

basis is the product feed.
There are many fields in the Feed, so I think it’s easiest to start
with these:
Titles and Descriptions
Prices
Images
Product Group Bidding
Titles & Descriptions

Make sure to identify the terms your searchers use to purchase
your products and add those terms into your titles and descriptions.
If you don’t know where to find keywords to use as tests, you can
identify keywords with volume in the Keyword Planner and test
some ideas from there out to see if your products can get more
exposure.
However, in an existing account, I also like to mine through the

search terms report to look for ideas of how people are already
searching for and converting on your products.
You will then want to experiment with different words in your titles
and descriptions, making sure to get all variant details into your
titles.
If you are selling a small black jacket, a great title would be

something like: North Face black lightweight rain jacket, small.
Product Types
This can be confusing, as there are two primary fields in the feed for
classifying your product. There is the Google Product Category and
the Product Type.
A common mistake is to think these are the same thing and to treat
them as such, but they are not. The Google Product Category is
Google’s way of classifying products within their system, and there
is a specific list of options to select.
The Product Type, on the other hand, is your way of classifying your
products within their category tiers on your website. While Google
used to require the Google Product Category, they do not anymore
as they have begun to see the value of user-submitted classification
data.
We see a lot of products not filled out correctly, or at all, in the

Product Type field, so it’s advisable to fill this attribute out well. Try
to have at least three levels to the hierarchy, and don’t be afraid to
get descriptive.
Modern Furniture > Sofas > Leather Recliner Couches

Images
Your image is the crucial visual part of a Shopping Ad. Getting this
right could have a decent impact on your traffic and sales.
The key tip to bring out for images in Shopping Ads, is to make them
stand out from the crowd, and clickable.
One way to do this is by testing lifestyle or product images. Just

make sure they are in line with Shopping Ad image policies.
Marketing is often about distraction and catching attention. There

is a strong case to be made for testing images that disrupt your
current SERPs, especially if all of your competitor images look the
same.
Product Group Bidding

The final ongoing optimization in Shopping Ads to note is the topic
of bidding.
In thinking through micro-bid adjustments, it’s important to note

that bid automation is increasingly valuable. Yet, there are still not
a ton of affordable options that work for small to mid-tier Shopping
clients.
You may want to investigate some of the automated bidding options

in Google, as their algorithms have improved over the years.
I recently wrote an article here about the current bidding models in

Google Shopping with pros and cons to each.
There are certain models you will want to consider in different use
cases, however, as with everything else, make sure you are testing
your bidding model tests and monitoring carefully.
Make sure you also have enough conversion data to give the
algorithms enough to work off of.
If you are like me and you want to build your own bidding rules, you
can do so easily with Saved Filters in the Google Ads UI.
What you want to do is to think through the ways you normally

make decisions on how to determine whether a product group is or
is not profitable.
Save that filter and voila! You have an easy bidding rule. You can
check once a week or whatever preset to your rules.
One rule example to demonstrate this, create a filter for Product

Groups in the Google Ads UI with the following parameters:
Profitable products with more market share to be gained.

Past 7 Days (give enough time to make a good decision)
All product groups spending over $100 (ignore product groups
without enough data to make good decisions)
Search Impression Share lower than 50 percent (there is more
market share for them to be gained)
Tracked ROAS above your target (let’s say 300 percent)
Over 1 Sale (you want to make sure this is more than just
catching products with accidental, big one-time sale
anomalies)
The key here is to make sure that you are identifying what
product groups:
Have enough data to make a wise decision.
Have room to grow or shrink in market share.
Are or are not meeting your goals.
Once you focus on these aspects, you’ll be able to create smart

bidding rules in bulk for your product groups in your Shopping
Campaigns.
One final note of caution: don’t forget that Shopping Ads target all
stages of the funnel.
This means you need to think wisely about how the bidding
decisions you are making are impacting total online revenue and
you will want to pull campaigns to target queries based on where
they are in the funnel, and then use a different attribution model to
identify success.
Whatever you do, make sure you aren’t under-valuing sales by

making decisions based only on last-click attribution ROAS.
SMART SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS
Perhaps you have begun to hear suggestions from Google

representatives to give their new Smart Shopping Campaigns a try,
and you are hoping to better understand what this campaign type is
all about.
While we won’t go very deep right now, I wanted to give a brief

overview of what Smart Shopping Campaigns are and what you can
expect from them.
Watch this introduction to Smart Shopping campaigns on YouTube.

What Is Smart Shopping?

Smart Shopping is Google’s newest black box solution utilizing
almost complete machine automation to sell products through the
Google Merchant Center feeds.
These campaigns serve across (nearly) all Google properties and

are a good way of easily expanding into Display and YouTube with
no additional work on your end.
I used the term “black box” above simply because Google keeps all
data points close to its chest in this campaign type.
If you run a Smart Shopping campaign, you can expect to get

no insights into what search terms fed your campaigns, which
audiences are being utilized and targeted by Google, or which of
the Google networks your campaigns are serving at and what the
success ratio is.
This, of course, is a trade-off worth considering.
While Smart Shopping campaigns can be very successful in driving

sales and profit with minimal work, this also means you are unable
to take advantage of any data insights from Shopping campaigns to
implement in Search campaigns (for instance, identifying successful
search terms in Shopping campaigns and targeting them in Search
as specific keywords).
Should You Use Smart Shopping?

While the lack of data noted above can have consequences, it is
also not advisable to completely ignore an entire campaign type
in Google and in my agency, we have strived to strike a balance
between experimenting with Google’s latest and greatest in
automation… as well as not sacrificing months or years of valuable
data in my client accounts.
We have seen Smart Shopping perform better than our advanced

query filtering structures (noted previously). We have seen our
structures trounce Smart Shopping in tracked, and high intent terms
and profitability.
That being said, I like to experiment with utilizing Smart Shopping

with a portion of our products and to keep the majority of our
products in a more advanced Shopping campaign strategy.
This allows us to take advantage of Google’s machine learning

algorithms, which often return lower CPCs and broader placement
opportunities (especially in the GDN and YouTube) to showcase our
products that may be more likely to be purchased by a wide user
base.
For instance, we may create a Custom Label in our Shopping Feed

assigned to the Top 25 products with over 500 reviews that are at
least 4.5 stars or greater.
Then we will take these highly rated, popular products and

showcase them in a Smart Shopping campaign. At the same time,
we keep the rest of our products segmented out in a more manual
Standard campaign to continue to receive our data and ensure we
are purposefully owning specifically valuable mid to lower funnel
search terms.
It is still something to investigate and explore. Still, I definitely have

hesitations at running only Smart Shopping in an entire account and
risk losing out on such crucial data over time.
15
THE 10 MOST
IMPORTANT PPC
KPIS YOU SHOULD
BE TRACKING
AUTHOR
CHANDAL NOLASCO
DASILVA
1 0 I M P O R TA N T P P C K P I S YO U S H O U L D B E T R AC K I N G
Key performance indicators, or

KPIs, are used across almost
every industry as a metric of
how well something is or isn’t
working.
In PPC, you can use KPIs to determine how successful your
campaigns were.
Understanding the key indicators of campaign performance is

essential for anyone working in PPC right from the get-go. The goal of
every single PPC campaign should be matched to different KPIs first
during the campaign planning phase.
Knowing what your campaign is trying to achieve and how you will
measure it will allow you to set up Google Analytics and Google Ads
ahead of time, ensuring you are measuring performance properly
from day one and securing the integrity of your campaign results.
Proper measurement of your campaign performance is the only way

to demonstrate ROI both to your clients and to your employer.
Here are the ten most important PPC KPIs to use.

1. CLICKS
Every conversion starts with a click. That’s why clicks are an early
indicator of PPC campaign success.
This KPI measures how many people clicked on your ad.
Campaign managers often check in on accounts throughout the

month to pause ads that are not performing and even increase the
bids on ads that are.
Clicks are a great KPI for that mid-month account performance

checkup; however, the success of a campaign shouldn’t be
determined solely by clicks.
2. CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)
Similar to measuring how many clicks your campaign generated,

CTR is a key metric for campaign performance.
CTR is measured by dividing the total number of clicks your

campaign got in the month (or period being reported) by its
total impressions. This equation tells you that out of say 1,000
impressions, your ad was clicked 100 times, and your CTR is 10%,
for example.
Knowing what CTR is and how to measure it is key to being able to

indicate your performance, but keep in mind that there is no perfect
CTR campaign managers should be striving for.
PPC performance varies by industry and a number of other

campaign variables.
For example, WordStream found that the average CTR in search

was 4% in the auto industry versus 6.05% in the dating and
personals industry.
Campaign managers running campaigns in the U.S. could use the

numbers reported by WordStream to benchmark their own CTR
success, but should be wary of other variables not accounted for in
the analysis like budget spend – but it’s a place to start.
Benchmarking and improving the CTR of different campaigns is

important not just as a measure of success, but also because it can
affect other KPIs like Quality Score.
3. QUALITY SCORE
Quality Score is the most elusive KPI amongst PPC advertisers.
It is a metric created by Google that tells them how relevant your ad

content is, using metrics like CTR and other performance variables
like landing page experience.
Advertisers find it difficult to understand Quality Score because it’s

less straightforward than other easily measured KPIs, like clicks.
Using the expected CTR, landing page experience, ad relevance,

and ad format, Google is able to determine a campaign’s Quality
Score.
Google is transparent about how Quality Score is measured by their

team and why it’s necessary. Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist,
explains how Quality Score works in the Google Ads auction in this
popular video.
Google improved how Quality Score was reported in Google Ads

in 2017, but it still comes down to this simple fact:
A good Quality Score (between 7 and 10) means you pay less
money to advertise with Google Ads.
A bad Quality Score (6 or lower) means you pay more money.
Google’s changes to Quality Score reporting made Quality Score

easier for advertisers to use in Google Ads and began providing
historical data about the KPI as well. These insights give advertisers
the necessary information to make smarter campaign decisions.
Despite the confusion, advertisers remain extremely interested in

improving Quality Score because it determines how much they pay
for each click. In turn, Quality Score can affect other KPIs such as
CPC and CPA.
4. COST PER CLICK (CPC)
PPC advertisers know how much they can pay for an ad campaign
because they typically have a predetermined budget.
However, while they specify a budget and a bid when doing the
setup of a PPC campaign, it doesn’t mean that this is what they will
pay.
Advertisers outcompete competitors for ad positions with their bid

but pay the next highest bid price. The image below demonstrates
this concept:
Therefore the cost of putting up an ad and for the clicks it

generates is largely determined by other competitors in the PPC
auction.
CPC measures exactly how much an advertiser has paid. You

can measure CPC by dividing the total cost of a campaign by the
number of times the ad was clicked in that campaign.
If you want to manually check the cost of your campaign, you could
multiply CPC by the number of clicks a campaign received.
5. COST PER CONVERSION/ACQUISITION (CPA)
Similar to CPC, you can set a cost per acquisition (CPA) when you
set up your advertising campaigns.
Google defines the average CPA as the price advertisers pay for
every new customer they acquire, which is calculated by dividing
the total cost of conversions by the number of conversions. Google
determines the CPA based on your Quality Score.
However, there is a bit more to the CPA story.

While average CPA is pretty easy to digest, advertisers can also

make use of Targeted CPA, a bidding technique applied during
campaign set up.
Targeted CPA helps advertisers set bids automatically to get as

many conversions as possible, based on a set CPA determined by
the advertisers’ budget.
However, to make use of targeted CPA, you have to understand

different bidding strategies, set up conversion tracking, and have at
least 30-50 conversions in the last 30 days.
6. CONVERSION RATE (CVR)
Conversion rate is not only an indicator of campaign success, but it

is also the reason PPC marketers are hired in the first place.
You can measure conversion rate in Google Ads by dividing the

number of conversions the campaign received by the total clicks.
Since conversion rate is expressed as a percentage, if the

campaign had 100 clicks and 10 conversions, 10/100 means that the
conversion rate would be 10 percent.
While campaign managers always have an eye on conversions,

they will often set up campaigns to optimize for clicks rather than
conversions.
You can now aim for conversions based on CPA goals rather
than focusing on clicks or impressions. However, to be eligible to
optimize for conversions, your account must have had at least 15
conversions in the last 30 days.
7. IMPRESSION SHARE (CPM)
An impression occurs when a person sees your ad. It doesn’t matter

whether they click on it.
Looking at how many impressions a campaign generated isn’t an

indicator of success because it doesn’t express how many people
found your ad effective.
However, impression share does add context to the reporting story

by stating how much of the total impressions your ad campaigns are
getting.
Determined by dividing the total impressions your campaign

received by the total number of impressions your campaign was
eligible for, Google says:
“Eligible impressions are estimated using many factors, including

targeting settings, approval statuses, and quality. Impression share
data is available for campaigns, ad groups, product groups (for
Shopping campaigns), and keywords.”
Impression share gives marketers indirect competitive insight.

Knowing that you have a 50% impression share for a keyword, tells
you that your competitors own the other 50 percent.
If you increase your impression share, you are decreasing the

amount of times your competitors’ ads are shown. If you’re looking
to increase their impression share, you’ll have to increase your bids
and/or budgets.
8. AVERAGE POSITION
Google balances both paid, and organic search results for almost
every search query entered.
Ads on Google or Bing can show at the very top of the search
engine results page (SERP) in position 1, right underneath the next
ad shown is in position 2, and so on.
Average position tells advertisers which position their ad is shown

in most of the time. Google can’t simply give the highest bidder the
first position all the time, so they determine average position based
on ad rank.
Ad rank is calculated by multiplying Quality Score by an advertiser’s

max cost per impression (CPM).
However, since average position is indeed an average, even

knowing how to calculate it isn’t the full story since if your average
position was 3, you may have been in position 1, 4, and 6 earlier that
day.
Since the first 1-3 ads are shown before even the organic search
results, everyone worked so hard on, many businesses advertising
on Google would like to be visible right out of the gate in position 1.
It makes sense to want to be in the first position, but the aim to do

so is mostly one of vanity because being in first position doesn’t
necessarily mean results.
Some advertisers may have more conversions in position 4 than

position 1 for whatever reason. You should use the average position
to provide context around campaigns and campaign reporting, but it
shouldn’t be used as a target indicator.
9. BUDGET ATTAINMENT
Paid search marketers are almost always given a monthly budget to

run ad campaigns with. Budget attainment measures how closely
that agency or individual came to achieving the budget they set out
to.
Most PPC marketers don’t consider budget attainment when it

comes to measuring their PPC performance, despite how much
information it provides on how campaigns are being managed.
The reason why marketers tend to overspend or underspend the

budget every month is that it’s difficult to bid consistently and
maximize results with ongoing fluctuations in the PPC auction – a
task that requires ongoing oversight and optimization (without the
use of machine learning).
Regardless, I’m making the case that budget attainment is a KPI

that PPC marketers need to think about.
10. LIFETIME VALUE
LTV is a broad indicator of account health and a PPC marketer’s

abilities.
But calculating customer lifetime value for paid search is complex.

Companies that retain customers acquired via paid search longer
will make significantly more revenue.
While LTV is a measure of a business’s customer’s lifetime with their

product and/or services, it can be measured in different ways.
For example, in the case of a MarTech provider, LTV could be

measured simply by looking at the number of days, months, or years
a client stayed with the platform.
In the case of a large company like Starbucks, measuring LTV can

actually be quite complex. There are numerous considerations (e.g.,
average customer lifespan, customer retention rate, profit margin
per customer, and applied discounts).
While PPC marketers typically wouldn’t take on complex

calculations of LTV like Starbucks, knowing how this KPI is
measured in other departments could certainly come in handy.
Just be aware that LTV means slightly different things to different

marketers, but is fundamentally the same across all of them.
REPORTING ON PPC KPIS
KPIs are not mutually exclusive.
It’s unlikely that the performance on one indicator is the best it has
ever been, while others are the worst.
For instance, you wouldn’t expect to have a super high CTR and a
low Quality Score because the two are related. They tell different
parts of the same story.
Improving CTR can positively impact Quality Score, and improving

Quality Score can positively impact cost per click and cost per
acquisition, in turn creating more profitable PPC campaigns for
customers who stay longer.
With all of this in mind, it’s important that advertisers begin

improving their performance at the level of clicks, while also making
sure to not get caught up in one single number and remembering
to take a step back and look at the KPIs that paint a more complete
picture, like LTV.
While it’s nice to report on every metric included above, KPIs should
be assigned to a campaign based on what makes the most sense
for the client and their goals.
Stick to what clearly indicates progress according to your clients’

standards and don’t overload them with extra KPIs just to look good
– less is more when it comes to client reporting.
16
25 TOP
PAID MEDIA
EXPERTS YOU
SHOULD FOLLOW
AUTHOR
SUSAN WENOGRAD
Anyone who manages paid
media is all-too-familiar with how
fast things change.
Ad formats, what’s working, what’s not, new features, and the emerging
players keep life as a paid media practitioner interesting!
One of the things to cut down the learning curve is listening experts
who aren’t shy about sharing their experience.
Whether it’s a case study, a how-to of a new feature, or sharing

platform bugs they’re running into, following them levels up your
knowledge a lot faster.
They are also interested in engaging with the community at large to

learn in return.
TOP PAID MEDIA EXPERTS YOU SHOULD FOLLOW
Things like where people are getting stuck and where they’re
struggling to see results help them sharpen their own critical thinking
skills in return.
Some of these experts have conversations on Twitter, some speak

and teach at conferences, and many can be found blogging or creating
video tutorials.
One thing is for sure; they’re valuable fountains of knowledge that you
should get to know.
These valuable industry people are listed in no particular order, and a

randomizer was used to create the order in which you see them.
Frederick Vallaeys
As the former product specialist and
evangelist for Google PPC, Frederick is
a fountain of knowledge on managing,
scaling, and all-technical-things.
He went on to create Optymyzr, a software

platform to help PPC managers save time on
management and implementation.
He speaks and writes consistently on paid search, and recently

launched the PPC Town Hall show, a weekly panel of experts who
discuss varying topics.
Follow @siliconvallaeys on Twitter

Read Frederick on Search Engine Journal
Robert Brady
A fixture on the PPC circuit for
years, Robert generously shares his
knowledge in Google Ads and LinkedIn
Ads.
You can catch him writing for multiple blogs,

and he’s a fixture at many conferences on the
subject of paid search.
Follow @robert_brady on Twitter

Read Robert on Search Engine Journal
Melissa Mackey
Jokingly referring to herself as “PPC
Moses,” Melissa has been around PPC
since its inception.
She is generous with her knowledge on

Twitter and has an amazing repository of
context for how PPC has evolved over the years.
Follow @Mel66 on Twitter

Read Melissa on Search Engine Journal
Andrew Foxwell
Formerly of 3Q Digital, Andrew is
a powerhouse of Facebook Ads
knowledge.
He partners regularly with Jon Loomer,

runs closed Facebook Groups for ad
buyers, champions buyer needs directly to
Facebook, and also produces a weekly newsletter.
Follow @andrewfoxwell on Twitter

Aaron Levy
From practitioner to strategist, Aaron
has been around for years, writing and
speaking on the topic of paid search.
Currently a Group Director at Tinuiti, he

regularly posts thoughtful pieces on where
the industry is headed, and how media buyers
should adapt or think about evolving.
Follow @bigalittlea on Twitter

Read Aaron on Search Engine Journal
Purna Virji
Purna is a sought-after keynote speaker
and works daily as the Senior Manager
for Global Engagement at Microsoft.
She was named Search Personality of

the Year for 2019-2020, and the #1 Most
Influential PPCer by PPCHero in 2016.
Follow @purnavirji on Twitter

Read Purna on Search Engine Journal
James Svoboda
As a regular contributor to multiple
online outlets and conferences, James
is a trusted voice in the PPC industry.
He is the co-founder of MNSearch, and

the co-owner of WebRanking, a search firm
in Minnesota. His perspective from 16 years
in the industry, combined with his knowledge of organic
search, created well-rounded advice.
Follow @Realicity on Twitter

Isaac Rudansky
Best known for his massive training
following, Isaac is also the CEO of
AdVenture.
He works with clients like Forbes, Hanes,

AMC, and many others, and packages his
years of experience into sought-after trainings
taken by over 132,000 students in 185 countries.
Follow @isaacrudansky on Twitter

AJ Wilcox
AJ is the founder of B2Linked, a Linked
In-exclusive consultancy.
AJ is frequently known as “the” guy to

go to for anything related to LinkedIn Ads,
and for good reason: he has been speaking
for years, writes frequently, creates training, and
is trusted by LinkedIn themselves.
He recently launched a podcast, specifically on LinkedIn ads.
Follow @wilcoxaj on Twitter

Christi Olson
Christi Olson: Operating as the Head
of Evangelism for Microsoft, Christi
is frequently on stages as a keynote
speaker and panelist, and a frequent
writer for industry publications.
She is also a frequent awards judge at industry

events across the globe, such as AdWeek, CES, and the American
Marketing Association.
Follow @ChristiJOlson on Twitter

Read Christi on Search Engine Journal
Joe Martinez
As Director of Client Strategy for
Clix Marketing, Joe’s knowledge of
YouTube ads, and alternative platforms
such as Quora ads are a mainstay at
conferences.
He writes frequently on smart targeting and

marketing tactics for lesser-covered platforms, exposing powerful
tactics. He co-creates the Paid Media Pros channel on YouTube with
Michelle Morgan.
Follow @MilwaukeePPC on Twitter

Amy Bishop
A PPC dynamo, Amy is highly
knowledgeable in PPC for companies
of all sizes. Her experience covers
both start-ups and to Fortune 500
companies across many verticals.
She is a frequent speaker on the conference

circuit, a consistent writer, and publishes a weekly news roundup via
her company, Cultivative.
Follow @Hoffman8 on Twitter

Read Amy on Search Engine Journal
Brad Geddes
Brad is a mainstay in paid search
knowledge and was one of the earliest
teachers of it at conferences.
He is a co-orchestrator for the SMX

conference series, and one of the few
Google-approved paid search teachers out
there.
He runs his own training, management, and consultancy, and created

the Adalysis platform to help streamline PPC management.
Follow @bgtheory on Twitter

Kirk Williams
As the founder of ZATO Marketing,
Kirk has established himself as a highly
respected Google Shopping expert.
He writes all over the web for various

publications, dispensing tips, knowledge,
and marketing advice for ecommerce retailers
looking to up their Shopping game.
Follow @PPCKirk on Twitter

Read Kirk on Search Engine Journal
Steve Hammer
Steve leads his own consultancy,
RankHammer, operating at the
intersection of marketing, programming,
SEO, and PPC.
He is a recurring writer for industry sites and

a speaker and trainer for many conferences, infusing his advice
with practical marketing advice on winning in search.
Follow @armondhammer on Twitter

David Herrmann
A fixture in the direct-to-consumer
Facebook Ads and Snapchat
Ads space, David brings a lot of
knowledge backed by studying platform
performance across large spends.
As president of his own consultancy, he

has deep, hands-on experience in what’s working at any given time in
strategy and creative, but also takes the time to share his findings on
Twitter and train up-and-coming buyers.
Follow @herrmanndigital on Twitter

Simon Poulton
Simon brings high-level instruction
and analysis in his role as VP of Digital
Intelligence at WPromote.
He explains sometimes-confusing
topics with clarity and humor, including
explanations around the implications for things
like CCPA and Chrome ending third-party cookies.
Follow @SPoulton on Twitter

Molly Pittman
Molly has ascended to CEO of
SmartMarketer after becoming lauded
for her knowledge and teaching skills at
DigitalMarketer.
She rose to VP level within four years, and

eventually struck out on her own, creating
highly-regarded courses on Facebook Advertising.
She recently published a book and co-hosts the Perpetual Traffic

podcast.
Follow Molly Pittman on Facebook

Adam Proehl
Adam’s tenure in the search industry
began in 2001, but his experience
in several other marketing methods
(including email and affiliate marketing)
makes him a well-rounded and highly
respected addition to SEO and PPC.
He founded NordicClick Interactive in 2007 and speaks several times a

year at conferences.
Follow @adamproehl on Twitter

Read Adam on Search Engine Journal
Jonathan Kagan
Jonathan is currently the VP of Search
for 9RoofTops | Cogniscient Media,
with a background in large-scale search
accounts for clients at firms like Digitas
and Mediacom.

In 2013, he received the Google Search Excellence Award and

frequently shared knowledge on Twitter, Search Engine Journal,
MediaPost, and many others.
Follow @jonkagan on Twitter

Read Jonathan on Search Engine Journal
Julie Bacchini
The current runner of PPCChat, Julie,
is well-known as a community voice for
paid search practitioners and one who
unites them to help one another.
She blogs regularly on thoughts and tips for

PPC practitioners at her company website,
Neptune Moon.
Follow @NeptuneMoon on Twitter

Michelle Morgan
Recently chosen as PPCHero’s #1
Most Influential, Michelle has been
a consistent fixture in dispensing
knowledge on paid search and paid
social.
She serves as the Director of Client Services

at Clix Marketing and also produces training with Joe Martinez on the
Paid Media Pros channel via YouTube.
Follow @michellemsem on Twitter

Read Michelle on Search Engine Journal
Akvile DeFazio
Recently snagging Best Small Agency
for her firm AKvertise, Akvile has used
her years of paid social experience
to build a stellar reputation for her
knowledge and client care.
She has consulted for brands such as

Postmates and FTD and freely shares strategies and tips for platforms
such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others.
Follow @AkvileDeFazio on Twitter

Duane Brown
Founder of the Canadian-based
agency Take Some Risk, Duane can be
found on conference stages the world
over, instructing people on effective
advertising in the digital realm.
His knowledge from years of working with brands such as Unbounce,

ASOS, and Grant Thorton is enthusiastically packaged into helpful
how-to’s that can level up any advertiser’s strategy.
Follow @duanebrown on Twitter

Read Duane on Search Engine Journal
Arianne Donoghue
Years of experience in paid strategy has
culminated in Donoghue’s founding of
tempest, her UK-based consultancy.
For years, she has written prolifically,

spoken on stages worldwide, and snagged
the UK Search Personality of the Year award
last year – for good reason!
Follow @ArianneDonoghue on Twitter

Read Arianne on Search Engine Journal

PPC 101 a+Complete+Guide 2020

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CONTENTS 1 WHAT IS PPC & HOW PAID SEARCH

2 7 POWERFUL BENEFITS OF USING

3 THE 8 BEST PPC AD NETWORKS

PPC BIDDING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR BEGINNERS

5 WHAT IS QUALITY SCORE & WHY IT

6 WHAT IS CLICK-THROUGH RATE & WHY

7 WHAT ARE KEYWORDS & HOW THEY

8 STRUCTURE BEST PRACTICES: HOW TO

9 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PPC

10 A COMPLETE GUIDE TO PPC AD

11 10 PPC COPYWRITING BEST PRACTICES

12 EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

14 A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SHOPPING

15 THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT PPC KPIS

16 25 TOP PAID MEDIA EXPERTS YOU

Let’s kick things off with the basics.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that lets advertisers

Search engines are popular host platforms as they allow

Advertising services like Google Ads and Microsoft Ads operate

How Paid Search Works?

To get involved in these auctions, advertisers use accounts on

Accounts are split into campaigns for ease of management and

Keywords lie at the center of PPC, connecting advertisers to

Keywords, on the other hand, are what marketers use to target

Keywords work as generalized abstractions of a wide range of

For example, advertisers can choose to match keywords with

It is also possible to have negative keywords, which will prevent ads

On a SERP, they can show up on top of the results or at the bottom

Examples include sitelink extensions, which populate an ad with

Ad extensions are great as they increase the visibility of ads by

BUDGETS & BIDS

To participate in the auction, advertisers need to decide how much

Budgets should be set according to the overall account strategy,

Many advertisers use automated bidding strategies. These allow

Bid strategies can be applied to individual campaigns or a portfolio

Search engines have their own particular ways of factoring in other

Google, for example, considers:

Quality Score is a metric that determines ad relevance.

The components of Quality Score are:

Historical click-through rate (CTR).

Ad relevance is absolutely essential; the higher Quality Score is, the

Search engines penalize advertisers who bid on keywords with low

That’s why it’s very important to have an engaging and relevant ad

But landing page quality shouldn’t be overlooked either; ads will

Choosing the right keywords is what allows advertisers to show ads

But there are other targeting options available to optimize

This way, advertisers can target users on mobile in the evening, or

These are very valuable because different variations of ad copy,

Using remarketing tools that allow for more specific ad copy

Bids can be automatically adjusted for keywords based on targeting

Common examples of conversions are:

It’s vital to track conversions to know whether a PPC campaign is

Platforms like Google Ads can track conversions using a snippet of

Conversion tracking can be tricky because conversion paths also

For starters, PPC:

Offers quick entry.

PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most

1. PPC CONTRIBUTES TO BUSINESS GOALS

This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising.

Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a