PPC campaigns that consistently obtain high ad position at an affordable CPC are judged to be
successful. According to a study by AdGoroo.com,here are the top tactics for retailers seeking to achieve greater efficiency from PPC campaigns.

• Keywords should be organized into well-planned ad groups so that the search engines ascribe relevance to both the ads and landing pages that an advertiser serves for each ad group. This boosts the group’s Quality Score and ensures consideration by the engine for first-SERP position for each ad groups’ campaigns.

• Do not bid for traffic which you cannot “satisfy”. Bidding on irrelevant keywords will lower the overall CTR of an advertiser’s campaigns, and this will cause their Quality Score to suffer. Test lots of keywords, but retreat quickly from those where you cannot realistically deliver and compete.
• Campaigns should be seasonal and topical. “Set it and forget it” is not a winning approach to PPC.
• Creative should be refreshed. All creative wears out over time. It may be sufficient to rotate creative versions, rather than to continually develop new versions, but if creative does not vary over time, then “wear-out” will go unnoticed. Challenger versus champion testing is good practice.

• Offers need to be competitive. If a competitor’s first SERP ads offer free shipping, then other ads that lack a similar or offsetting offer will not get clicked upon. If you cannot offer competitive pricing, deals or promotional discounts in a product category, then you should either develop an alternative positioning or offer and leave the deal seekers to the competition, or retreat from that particular playing field altogether.

• Don’t insist on premium positioning. Premium positioning is costly due to the large volume of traffic which results, although CPC’s can actually be lower than for other page positions. Comparison shoppers often click-through multiple PPC ads, so for such shoppers, right rail positioning may be just as worthwhile as premium positions.
• Negative keyword maintenance. Ensure that ads are not served to inappropriate searchers, which wastes money and/or lowers the advertiser’s overall CTR, depressing its Quality Score, impressions and position, and ushers in a cycle of deteriorating results.
• Improve landing page relevance. AdWords will penalize the position and coverage of advertisers whose landing environments don’t ‘pay off’ their PPC ads. One approach is to mimic the landing page tactics of other successful SEMs in the category.
• Focus on “Super Converter Terms”. These are the 5 percent of terms where the advertiser has a huge competitive advantage in conversion rate and can afford to outbid all others. Look to develop other super-converter terms through new landing page and campaign strategies.

 

Source: AdGooroo.com