Pay-Per-Click Tips: Tiered Keyword Bidding

A simple way to increase ROI for Pay-Per-Click Advertising by reaching people late in the purchase process

It's no surprise that many small and medium-sized companies continue investing in pay-per-click advertising. It's performance-based and variable cost nature allows companies to compete effectively with larger companies, while maintaining flexible advertising budgets.

However, many companies could greatly improve their PPC advertising campaigns by deploying tiered bidding for keywords.

What is tiered bidding?

At Relevante Marketing, we define tiered bidding as bidding higher for keyword phrases that include action-oriented words and words that are used late in the buying process, such as "buy, purchase, quote, price, sale, or location".

For example, let's say you sell tires in retail stores in Cleveland, Ohio. Your campaign would probably be targeted within a certain radius of Cleveland, let's say 15 miles. You would probably also limit the campaign to run only certain hours of the day, say 6am - 10pm, or possibly the same times as your store hours.

Now, it's time to decide on keywords. Off the top of your head, you come up with the following keywords:

Car tires, Van tires, Truck tires, Radial tires, Low profile tires, etc.

You decide to bid $1.50 for each keyword, and direct everyone to your website's home page.

Unfortunately, This is where most small busiensses stop.

At Relevante, we would also include keyword phrases like:

Car Tire Sales, Buy Car Tires, Purchase Car Tires, Car Tire Prices, Car Tires Cleveland, etc. We would bid 1.5x the default bid for these phrases, or in this example $2.25 for these phrases.

In addition, we would set up specific landing pages for major set of keywords. I.E. a landing page for car tires, a landing page for truck tires, etc.

The Result?

By increasing the bid, it allows our campaigns to rank higher, and thus receive more clicks, for phrases people tend to use after they've researched their pruchases and are looking to buy.

In addition, having specific landing pages for each ad group allows us to focus our messaging to a customer's specific interests.

Look for our next installment on how to use negative keywords effectively

New Features in Google AdWords

Over the past year, Google AdWords has added a few powerful enhancements that many small businesses have yet to leverage. As such, Relevante Marketing thought it'd be wise to provide you with links to articles that describe each new feature so you can update your PPC campaigns accordingly.

Change #1: Remarketing.

Change #2: Product Images from Merchant Center.

Change #3: Ad Sitelinks.