John Chow published a review about the new version of SpeedPPC: Pay Per Click Marketing 72,500% Faster. SpeedPPC is a useful tool to those who use the long tail strategy. With SpeedPPC you can create a complete PPC campaigns within few minutes.

In the past I talked about EfficientPPC which is another great software (and cheaper) for same purpose.

After reading John Chow review I had a thought that I would like to share with you: On the same way that EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC can be useful they can harm your PPC campaign.

After saying that its time for the explanation:

Right after you uploaded a new PPC campaign to Google, the campaign start to gain what so called “The Overall Campaign Quality Score”. Your campaign CTR is examined. In general, if you have a high CTR your ads will be seen on the top of the ads list and you will pay less per click. If you have a low CTR your ads will be seen on the bottom of the ads list or even will not be seen at all and you will need to pay more per click.

EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC will create for you lots of keywords in variety of combinations. For most of the keywords you will have between one or two impressions per day. The odds that you will get a high CTR for long tail keywords is pretty low. Since you have lots of long tail keywords with the campaigns that were produced by EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC, your overall campaign quality score will be low right from the start. This is not something that you would like to happen. Low CTR from day one harms your overall campaigns quality score.

My advice is to start with a limited list of keywords that you believe will best serve your offer. For the first few weeks your goal should be to get the best CTR that you can get for your campaign. A good CTR can start at 3% up to 20%. Better to start with the mainstream keywords although you will find that with those keywords you will loose money! Try to stay close to breakeven by reducing the bids but don’t try at that point to make a profit.

In most cases a CTR below 3% for the mainstream keywords will imply about a trouble with your ads or the demographic target.

After you have achieved a high CTR for your campaign start adding long tail keywords to it. At this point keep the balance between the keywords with the high CTR and the keywords with the low CTR so the overall CTR will be above 1%. You can keep your CTR even above 3% if you will add the long tail keywords not at once but in a group of keywords every few weeks while eliminating the keywords with the low CTR.

I hope you will find this strategy helpful.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS.