Let’s face it, some keywords just aren’t popular enough to have a year-round PPC campaign behind them. You know you’ve seen them. They’re popular at Christmastime, but you get no use from them for the rest of the year. Or maybe you see surges in popularity in the summer, but drops in other times of year. Maybe the keyword popularity goes up or down throughout the year based on holiday schedules or other influences within your industry. How do you capitalize on that?

Good question. The first step, of course, is to know and understand what causes those spikes, dips, and surges. You should also be tuned in to when they occur. It isn’t enough to know that baseball gloves are more popular just before little league season begins. You need to know when (generally) the interest in them starts. By knowing this information, you can time your ads to hit when people will start looking for what you have to offer.

Don’t start your advertising campaign when interest spikes. That’s too late. Kick it off a couple of weeks before that. You want to be the first to have your advertising in place so that you can capitalize early on when shoppers first begin to go looking for a product. Then, when the competition enters the field, you’ll already have a leg up. That will count for more than just sales. It will also make a difference with optimization and quality score.

You also don’t want to leave out keyword research. Don’t shortcut it just because it is a short-term campaign. Run it just as you would any other campaign. Start at the beginning, do your keyword research, and bid according to the value of the keywords. You can also use match types for your short-term campaigns. Run it like you would any other advertising campaign.

But you don’t have to use the spikes and surges for short term advertising campaigns. They are also useful in your long-term campaigns. The ones you run year-round. Those keywords that are a part of your campaign can have bid adjustments based on the season. You might even run a long-term and a short-term campaign simultaneously based on the seasons and times of year.

One more way to use this information is in your choice of negative keywords. Use those spikes to determine when to make a keyword a negative keyword and when to focus in on it through your bidding strategy or match type focus. The bottom line is to increase your revenues. You can do that by increasing your sales or by lowering your bids on keywords that don’t quite make the cut - even if it’s on a seasonal basis.

If you find your PPC campaigns reaching their daily or monthly budget caps sooner than you’d like then perhaps you should tweak the settings on your campaigns to make them run longer. Here are a few ways you can stretch your budget our further:

• Budget Per Day - If your monthly budget is running out too soon then try setting a budget per day. If your monthly budget is reached in the middle of the month and you’d like your ads to run all month long then a daily budget can stretch that out. You’ll have fewer ads running each day and when you reach your daily budget the ads will stop running for that day. But they will run every day throughout the month.
• Set campaign settings to stretch the budget out - You can also set your campaign settings to pace your ads throughout the budget period instead of pausing the campaign when you reach your budget. If you set your settings to pause when your budget is reached then your daily budget might be low enough that you reach it mid-day. Your ads will then stop running at that point when you hit the budget mark. But if you set your campaign settings to run your ads throughout the day then you’ll miss some opportunities in the middle of the day but your ads will not pause until the end of the day. They will be paced throughout the day based on your keyword bids.
• Use negative keywords - By including negative keywords in your campaign settings, you’ll keep your ads from appearing for keywords that you do not want to bid on. This will cut down on unwanted clicks.
• Narrow your match types - Instead of setting your campaigns for broad matches of your keywords, narrow your match types. This will also cut down on the number of times that your ads run and eliminate unwanted clicks.
• Establish a time of day - Is your peak conversion time in the evening or the middle of the day? You can set your campaign settings to keep your clicks active during your peak conversion times. Establish a time of day that your ads run and eliminate unwanted clicks. This will also save your budget for that time of day.

(Source) If you haven’t tested using negative keywords for your campaigns, I highly recommend doing so in the near future. It is an excellent strategy for improving the performance of your campaigns and minimizing unqualified click-throughs to your landing pages.

Google slipped one through on me. They changed the way you perform negative keyword selections in Google AdWords. It happens. But I’d like to say that this author is absolutely correct. Negative keywords can improve your click through percentage and your profits and it’s relatively easy to implement.

The main reason you want to use negative keywords in your pay per click campaigns is to prevent your ads from showing for searches that are unrelated to your product or service. For instance, let’s say that you sell dancing shoes. If you use the broad search terms “dancing shoes” without bracket or quotations (and I wouldn’t recommend doing that for that search term) then your ads will show up for any search related to dancing or shoes. So if someone types “brake shoes” into the Google search box because they are looking for prices on auto parts then your ad could draw clicks from unqualified customers and you’ll money. Unwanted clicks can really eat into your budget.

Similarly, if someone is looking for dancing schools then you’ll have your ads appear on the wrong pages for totally unrelated terms. So negative keywords can save you a bundle.

You enter your negative keywords the same way you do your positive keywords - one line at a time. But you select them based on your product or service and your target customer. Any potential keyword search that can be performed that is similar to the keywords used in your ads but that won’t deliver you targeted, qualified clicks should be a negative keyword. If you employ the negative keyword strategy you can bet that you will see an increase your ROI almost instantly.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog is trumpeting a new keyword policy. Well, it’s not really new, but it’s negative. And that’s positive. So they tell us.

While negative keyword match types have been allowed until now, they were limited to 50 if using pay per click network Yahoo! Search Marketing, but the search portal has recently expanded its negative keyword exclusion to 250. That means if you have a lot of keywords that would work for finding your business but that don’t apply to your particular business then you can add those to your list of excluded keywords and keep on trucking.

The negative keyword exclusion allows you to block unwanted searches and therefore stop unwanted clicks, which means an decrease in CTR and an associated increase in conversion percentages. Isn’t that every small business owner’s dream? Well, I hope so and I congratulate Yahoo! on taking this important step to making search marketing for small businesses a whole lot better.

So you’ve set up your pay per click campaign and you’re all set to go. How can you ensure that potential customers get the click?

One thing you want to consider is that you don’t just want anyone and everyone clicking on your ad. You’ll be paying for traffic that isn’t converting. So you want to ensure that so many customers don’t click on your as well. How do you do that?

The surest way to target a particular customer that you want to click on your ads versus someone you don’t is to target the right keyword. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting in your ads correspond with what is on your landing page and, even more importantly, make sure the keywords you are using on your landing page and your pay per click ads correspond with what you are selling.

For example, if you are selling tube socks, you don’t want to target the more general keyword “socks” as your primary keyword. Tube socks are much more specific that simply “socks.” Make sure that you narrow your targeted keywords to the right keyword for each of your campaigns. Match types will help you do this a lot. Learn how to target the right keywords with match types.

Another thing you have to pay attention to in order to reach the right customer is to write your headline in such a way that it encourages the click. You want your keyword in the headline, but you also want to spark some level of curiosity, fear, greed, or one of the basic human emotions. Use trigger words that get people to notice your ad.

The last thing to do in your pay per click ad to ensure you get the click to write a description that is specific, narrowed, and, like the headline, sparks an emotion. Your description must state precisely what your customer expect to find on your landing page. You should include a benefit in that description using a trigger word that sparks one of the basic emotions.

If you do these things in your pay per click, you’ll target the right customer and get the click - every time.

Keyword research is one of the first things you should do before you start a PPC campaign. It’s also one of the places where you can go wrong if you aren’t careful. Many new PPC advertisers make their first mistake while conducting keyword research. Quite frankly, it’s easy enough to do and even some expert Internet marketers make keyword research mistakes too.

When it comes to researching your keywords, don’t settle for the general keywords related to your niche. That’s where most newbies go wrong. The general keywords are usually the least profitable. Your most profitable keywords will be what they call “long tail keywords.” Those are the keywords that are not as high in demand but that can drive traffic to your website and help you close the sale. Search those keywords out. It’s worth the extra time it takes to find the right keywords for your campaign.

Another mistake new PPC advertisers make related to keyword management is using the broad match. Just because you’ve found the perfect long tail keyword doesn’t mean you should focus on that word in the broadest sense. Use the match types and single out the specific keyword. If your keyword research leads you to a long tail keyword phrase that is two or three words long then put those words in brackets or quotes. Otherwise, the PPC search engine will seize upon each individual word separately. But you want to target the phrase so be sure that you use the proper match type and target your keywords specifically.

There seems to be a little confusion about the difference between phrase match and exact match when using Google AdWords. Phrase match includes keywords surrounded by quotation marks while exact match includes your keyword phrases within brackets. But when should you use each keyword match type?

Let’s suppose we are running an AdWords campaign for our new silver metallic widget. If we simply use the keyword phrase “silver metallic widget” without quotation marks or brackets then our ad will appear on pages that are optimized for any of those three words. To narrow our ad placement, we would either select a phrase match or an exact match and limit our ad appear on SERPs when people are looking for silver jewelry or metallic furniture.

The Difference Between Phrase Match And Exact Match
By limiting our keyword match type to the phrase match and including our keyword phrase in quotation marks (like this: “silver metallic widget”), we are asking that our ad appear on pages where people search for this phrase exactly as it appears whether something else is preceding it or following it. In other words, if a searcher Googles “silver metallic widgets” then our ad will still appear. If a search is made for “long silver metallic widgets” or “silver metallic widgets that spin” then our ad will appear as well.

If you put your keyword phrase in brackets instead of quotation marks then you are telling Google to place your ad on SERPs where a user searches only for that specific phrase. In other words, searchers will see your ad when they type in “silver metallic widgets” and if they type in “silver metallic widgets that spin” then your ad will not show.

When Should You Narrow Your Keyword Focus?
If you sell metallic widgets of various colors then you might want to use the phrase match, but you’ll want to leave off the “silver” because your ad will appear when searchers Google “red metallic widgets,” “blue metallic widgets,” or “silver metallic widgets.” In other words, your keyword will be “metallic widgets” and what ever color a searcher includes with that keyword phrase will show your ad.

On the other hand, if you sell only silver metallic widgets and nothing else then I’d recommend that you include that phrase within brackets so that your ad appears for that specific phrase. I see no reason to include the same exact phrase in any AdWords campaign using both the phrase match and exact match because your exact match phrase will supersede the phrase match and render it useless.

When it comes to keyword match types for your Google AdWords campaigns, I recommend giving it some deep thought before you start selecting your keywords.

Some pay per click advertisers go crazy on keywords. By that I mean they select a list of keywords loosely related to their ad and make sure all of those keywords are used in their optimization efforts. It’s like a “wish list” of words you hope searchers will find your ad by. But that isn’t the best approach.

You’ll do better, especially if you are new to pay per click, to pick just a handful of keywords that are directly related to the content in your ads and use only those keywords. Make all other keywords inactive. For instance, if you are selling blue widgets and your pay per click ad states that you have blue widgets made in China then you likely want to keep your keyword list small and related only to blue widgets. Useful keywords might include:

• widgets
• blue widgets
• widgets made China
• widgets in China

That’s your starting list. Next, take your list and make the keywords more specific by narrowing the match types, like this:

• [blue widgets]
• [widgets made China]
• [widgets in China]

You might also throw in a few, only a few, variations, such as:

• Chinese widgets
• Chinese blue widgets
• [Chinese widgets]
• [Chinese blue widgets]

Don’t get carried away with this. The idea is to keep your keyword list small and to use only keywords that are related directly to the words in your pay per click ad. You can expand on this list later.

SEO Scoop had a brilliant analysis of the current SEO scene back in April. The author included this little bit of insight on PPC in his analysis and I’ll have to say it makes a lot of sense:

Hitting my numbers. THAT is what is important to me as a marketer. I must always keep my eye on the margin because it is not about what you make. It is about what you keep.

Search engines are merely a means to an end. No real marketer wants search engine traffic. They want conversions. Organic placement is time consuming, difficult and expensive. THAT is why PPC makes so much money. Not because it works so well, but because it works better than nothing and it is far easier and usually cheaper.

Pay per click is misunderstood by those who don’t use it. It isn’t just another advertising medium through which you toss away unwanted money. It is a traffic driving tool. The whole point to PPC advertising is to drive traffic to your high value landing pages so that you can convert that traffic to sales. The manner in which you do that determines, to a great deal, how successful you are. The key is in your keyword research, landing page optimization, and the sales message. Do they work in tandem or do they work against each other?

If you see PPC as just another advertising medium then you don’t really understand it. Not until you treat it as a tool for driving targeted traffic to your pages that you want to make the highest sales will you ever make the most of it as a business tool. How you manage the tool depends on your goals, your business, and your message.

Pay Per Click Journal would like to thank you for your continued readership. We will not be posting tomorrow or on New Year’s Day. But we would like to take a look back over the last three months of our life and highlight some of the more popular blog posts we’ve made since October.

Our first blog post was made on October 13. Since then, we’ve published 76 posts. These are 10 of our favorite:

• Who’s Going To Manage Your Pay Per Click?
• Google AdWords Vs. Microsoft AdCenter
• Microsoft AdCenter Upgrades And New Features
• Keyword Match Types: When Is Narrow Too Narrow?
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Quality Index
• Landing Page Optimization Is Of Supreme Importance
• PPC Bidding: How To Aim For Position No. 3
• Google Analytics Gets An Upgrade
• Landing Page Basics: Is Too Much Enough?
• Microsoft AdCenter Offers Free Pay Per Click Training

We hope you’ll check out these Pay Per Click Journal posts from the past three months. Meanwhile, if you have a favorite post about pay per click advertising, we’d like to know about it.

Yesterday we talked about narrowing your match types for the best targeted message. There’s one other way to narrow your match types that I didn’t. You can use negative keywords and tell the search engines not to display your ads for certain keywords.

For instance, using the green widgets example again, if you make plastic widgets but not wooden widgets then you can use “wooden” as a negative keyword. Just add a minus sign (-) in front of the keyword and that tells the search engine not to use that keyword for your ad placement. The negative keyword “wooden” will not return your ad and for every search made for “wooden green widgets” your ad will be passed over. But if a searcher searches for “plastic green widgets” or a similar variation then your ad will display. Negative match types are one more option for you to use to optimize your ad displays.

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When should you narrow your keyword matches? That’s a good question and one that every pay per click advertiser should answer for themselves. There are times when going with the broad match type is best and times when you should narrow your match type for greater effectiveness. But which is which?

Google’s default match type is the broad match type. The narrow match type if the phrase match type. I would use this match type a specific key phrase is important for your landing page. In other words, if you are marketing an eBook that is all about green widgets then “green widgets” would be a phrase that is very important for your campaign. You’ll want to enclose this keyword phrase in quotation marks to ensure that your PPC ad is optimized for that specific phrase. It tells the search engine that the exact phrase is important rather than both words separately.

Keep in mind, however, that with the phrase match your keyword phrase could be matched with other keywords. For instance, if a searcher queries “wooden green widgets” then your ad would appear for that search phrase because “green widgets” appears in the query exactly as you have it in your phrase match type. The fact that “wooden” has been added will not affect your ad placement. If you sell both wooden and plastic green widgets then that is the way you should style your match type.

But what if you sell ONLY plastic green widgets and you are not interested in your ad appearing on a search results page for “wooden green widgets.” The exact match, placing your keyword phrase in brackets like this - [plastic green widgets] - tells the search engines that you want your ad to appear ONLY on pages where searchers query that exact phrase. Your ad will not appear for “green widgets,” “widgets,” or “wooden green widgets,” but only for the search phrase “plastic green widgets.”

When it comes to PPC optimization, the match types that you use could be vital to your campaign.

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Is easy, online, to misspell a word and keep going as if it is perfectly natural. It happens all the time. But sine many professional writers have started writing the copy you read online, it happens less often than it used to. Still, every now and then you’ll run across an incorrectly spelled word. A few times, I’ve noticed, it appeared as if the misspelling was intentional.

The truth is, sometimes you can misspell a word and profit considerably. People do, after all, misspell words in their search queries. People misspell words incorrectly in their search queries so many Internet marketers have used incorrect spellings to increase their search engine positioning, intentionally misspelling keywords in order to gain the organic traffic from those who make misspelled queries. Will that strategy work for PPC advertising? I see no reason why not.

You will likely get a very good ranking for most keywords if you use intentional misspellings. Although it becoming a popular practice to misspell words in PPC advertising, you can still sometimes get a very good bid on misspelled words. I highly recommend researching the most popular misspelled keywords in your niche and bidding on those as you set up your PPC campaigns.

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Another way to match keyword types is to use negative keywords. Negative keywords are keywords that you tell the PPC company not to display your ad for. For instance, if you don’t offer anything for free on your website then you might enter the word “free” as a negative keyword.

Other negative keywords could be just as important, though. The way you select keywords depends a lot on how much targeted traffic you receive. If you don’t select negative keywords then the PPC company will display your add for your primary keywords without discrimination. That could cost you very valuable click throughs and send you non-targeted traffic. In some cases, those words that should be negative keywords could cost you a lot per click.

If you sell blue widgets then you probably want to use other colors - red, yellow, white, black, brown, orange, etc. - as negative keywords. Otherwise, you’ll get traffic for those keywords and anyone looking for yellow widgets is not going to be a part of your targeted market. You are looking for people in the market for blue widgets.

When it comes to matching keyword types, don’t forget about the power of negative keywords.

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There are three ways to match your keywords to the your ads. They’re called keyword match types and essentially work like this:

Broad Keyword Match - This is the default position for all of the search engines. A broad keyword match appears just the way you type it in. If your keyword is Automobile Tires then that’s how it will appear on your keyword list. Your ad would be eligible to appear when either word, automobile or tires, is searched for, or if you select the Content Network option then on any page that is optimized for either keyword. The important thing to remember about broad keyword matches is the words can appear in any order and with any variation. Single or plural forms of the words apply and even synonyms. In other words, your ad might run on pages that are about auto tire or car tire.

Phrase Match - Phrase Match is an option you have to choose and the way you choose it is to encapsulate your key phrase in quotation marks. “Automobile tires” means that your ad will run on pages that display this key phrase exactly the way you have it inside those quotation marks. This is a more targeted way to select appropriate keywords, but it still isn’t limited in scope as much as it could be. Your key phrase can still appear along with other words. For instance, your ad might run on pages where a searcher queries “yellow automobile tires” or “truck automobile tires” and maybe even “automobile tires 2005,” but it won’t run if a query is made for “automobile tire” or “car tires.”

Exact Match - Exact Keyword Match is the most targeted way to match your keywords. If you enclose your keyword in brackets, like this: [automobile tires], then your ad will run on pages where the keyword phrase is that specific phrase exactly as it appears within the brackets and without any other words before or after it. In other words, if a searcher queries “automobile tires 2005″ then your ad will not appear. It will appear only if a searcher queries “automobile tires” and nothing else.

Those are the three keyword match types that are available to you as a pay per click advertiser. Which one you choose could determine whether or not your pay per click campaign is successful or not.