Depending on your talent with words, today may be a fun little excursion into copywriting, or it may be as frustrating as trying to bait a fishing hook with mittens on. If you have writers on your team, this is a great time to include them. For each of your keyword categories, you’re going to create a succinct, compelling ad that is substantially more interesting than your competitors’. You may want to write two or three ads for each ad group if your PPC service rotates ads for you. Your HTML title and meta description tag for each landing page are a good starting point, but you’ll probably need to edit them substantially for PPC use, in part due to editorial guidelines and character limits. You can read your PPC service’s guidelines for lots of advice on writing ads (after all, they make money on your click-throughs, so they have every interest in your success!).

Here are some additional tips that we think will help you:

DO use keywords in the text. Studies show that people are more likely to click on your ad if the exact keyword they searched for is incorporated into your ad text.

DO be true to your landing page. Make sure that you write each ad with its intended landing page(s) in mind. Does the ad mention a specific product or solution? The landing page had better contain a clear path to it. Does the ad set up a need? The landing page should tell your visitor exactly how to fulfill it.

DO snoop on your competitors. If you’re stumped, and even if you aren’t, enter your keywords into the search engines and see what you’re up against in the paid search venue. If everyone’s ads are mentioning a certain topic, such as their low, low prices, you might not want to ignore it in your own ad.

DO use dynamic keyword insertion if it’s available… You researched whether your PPC service of choice allows you to automatically insert searched-for keywords into your title. If a searcher enters the term “halogen bulbs” or “chandeliers,” you may want to format your ad to say, “Halogen bulbs and other lighting products” or “Chandeliers and other lighting products” to match the search. This can be a powerful way to attract the attention of your targeted audience.

…but DON’T insert the wrong keywords. If you’ve ever seen what appear to be inappropriate PPC ads, you can probably blame careless dynamic keyword insertion. It can create almost comical messages like “Tonsillitis: Buy Now at Shop-n-Ship.com.”

Likewise, if you’re sponsoring misspelled versions of your keywords, skip the dynamic insertion.

DO include a compelling message. What makes your audience tick? Is it price? Is it the hope of succeeding at something or the fear of failing at something? Is it convenience? A desire for quality? A need to fit in, or to stand out? Use your ad text to speak to this need.

Turn On Your Campaign

It’s been three weeks since you sent out your basic site modification requests to your team or tasked yourself with making the changes. Is your site ready for its big debut? If you’ve finished optimizing your website, your landing pages will be clearly relevant to your paid search ads, and targeted users will be able to find what they need. Don’t flip the switch until your site is ready. If your site content doesn’t match your advertising campaign, it will confuse or annoy your visitors, and it may be removed by the PPC service for noncompliance of editorial guidelines.

Assuming your site is ready for the trick-or-treaters to come ringing the bell, let’s get started. It’s best to start this task early in the day so you can check that all is well before you go home for the night.

Here are things to watch out for:

No impressions Don’t expect miracles, but do make sure you actually turned on the campaign.

Too many clicks If you’re already close to blowing your budget after a few hours, something is out of whack. Either you underestimated the number of clicks your ad would receive (you could have worse problems!) or you entered your bid price incorrectly.

The wrong ad showing up for the wrong keyword It would be a fairly easy mistake to, say, place an ad meant for your Industrial Products category into your Home Products category. Enter some of your keywords into the search engine and view your ads to make sure you haven’t made this kind of error.

We do not recommend micromanaging your ads on a daily basis; the PPC engines’ bid management tools should make this unnecessary. Regardless, today is a good day to monitor them closely to make sure you haven’t made any boneheaded mistakes. Also, seeing your PPC ads online is a moment for celebration in your SEO campaign!

Hey! Where’d Everybody Go?

We spoke with Anthony Severo, founder and managing partner of Vertical Spin, a business intelligence consulting company, to learn more about conversion tracking. One way that Anthony helps his clients is finding out where their site visitors are dropping out of the conversion process. He explains:“Let’s assume that I have a 1 percent overall conversion rate from the moment someone views the keyword on a search engine to the point at which the purchase is completed.That means that 99 percent of the visitors are not converting.This is great data, but you need to get to the next level of detail to take action and optimize the conversion rate.Where are the trouble spots:

• “Is the user not clicking through the ad [on a PPC sponsorship]?

• “Is the user getting to the site and immediately exiting?

• “Is the user engaged in the product description but not buying the product?

• “Are they dropping off in the checkout process?”

Through further analysis and experimentation, Anthony works to discover exactly why users are leaving the site. For example,“…let’s say that 80 percent of the users exit when checking out.This clearly identifies an issue with the checkout process.You can conclude that the visitor is engaged, they found the product they were interested in purchasing, and were ready to buy, but somehow had a problem with the checkout process.This issue could be

• “The checkout process is too tedious and time-consuming.

• “The checkout process has a bug that prevents people from checking out (I experience this more often than you can believe).

• “The visitor continued shopping and somehow got distracted and never came back to check out.”

The good news is,“If you can reduce this drop-off by even a few percent, it will greatly increase your conversion rate.” Finally, a word of caution from someone in the know: “Tracking tools provide so much data, and you can easily spend hours per day viewing it.” For a streamlined approach, focus on the highest-priority metrics:

• “Am I driving visitors to the site?

• “Are they converting?

• “What are my ad costs?

• “What are my revenues?”

Take Anthony’s words to heart with a focus on identifying drop-off and tracking actionable data, and your SEO campaign will be sure to flourish.

Paid Search Quick Check

We’re going to remind you to check in on your paid search campaign. This weekly Quick Check will ensure that your campaign doesn’t go dramatically out of whack over the course of a month. We estimate that your Quick Check will take about 15 minutes.

Here are the steps to include in your paid search Quick Check:

1. Log in to your account.

2. Check your total campaign spending so far for this month. Is your campaign on track to spend your monthly budget on schedule? If you’ve set your daily budget appropriately, it’s difficult to spend too much but bugs on paid search services are not unheard of. You should also keep in mind that spending too little can be just as bad as spending too much; you want to be right on target. If your campaign is low, you may wish to add more keywords or increase some of your bids. If your campaign is high, reduce bids or remove or disable keywords.

3. For each keyword category, figure out how to sort the list of keywords by total amount spent. Some keywords are going to be naturally more popular and costly than others, so it’s probably not realistic to expect that your spending will be distributed evenly among the keywords. If one or two keywords are using up too much of your budget and you don’t think they’re converting well enough, you may wish to temporarily disable them or lower their bids. Some keywords with extremely high click-through rates may need to be checked on a daily basis. If you’ve found a keyword that is gobbling up your entire budget, consider moving it into its own ad group so that you can watch and manage it more closely. If you are testing multiple ads for some keywords, review which are performing better.