Let Your Bids Do the Boosting

If you can't see your ads when you search for your keywords and you're confident your ad copy is good, then the next thing to look at is your bidding.

Competitive bidding is central to any successful Pay-Per-Click campaign. But remember, while increasing your bid is the quickest way to move up the rankings, the best way to stay there is to improve the click-through-rate (CTR) – which means making sure your ads work hard.

Pay-Per-Click is an evolving market, so it's worth keeping an eye on your bidding, and looking as often as you can, to make sure you're keeping up with the competition. Once a week is a good habit that won't take up much time. Here are some pointers to help keep you in the running:

Check Your Position

When you're bidding on keywords in the adCenter tool, look at the right-hand columns. You'll see an estimated position based on your bid price and the most recent bidding results.

Bid Individually on Keywords

adCenter lets you choose whether you enter one bid for all your keywords/phrases, or enter different bids for each one. We strongly recommend the latter approach, because different keywords will require different amounts to reach good positions. You want to try to get into the top eight at the very least, so experiment to see how much more you need to pay to get there. (If you change your bidding, clicking on Update Estimates will get you a revised estimate of your position.)

Spend on More Specific Phrases

If you've spent some time using Pay-Per-Click, you're probably getting quite good at focusing your budget on more specific phrases and better converting customers. Paying more for more targeted keywords yields more targeted customers – who convert much better, and therefore help save you money. So if you're a plumbing business in Montreal, Quebec, you should concentrate your higher bids on phrases that combine plumbing with local area names, such as 'St-Laurent Plumbers' or 'Westmount plumbing'.

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