Mother’s Day is just around the corner. Have you started your advertising campaign yet? Have you started planning it?

When it comes to holidays, there is perhaps none so endearing as Mother’s Day. For retailers and e-tailers the key is getting people to your storefront, whether online or off line, and turning them into customers. That is, converting traffic to sale. It all starts with your advertising.

Pay per click advertising’s effectiveness boils down to two things:

1. Optimization
2. Effective Calls to Action

On both parts, you’ve got to be successful with your ad copy and your landing page content. The question is, do you create special content for Mother’s Day or use something more generic? The answer is, it depends on your business and its goals but I’d hazard to guess that for most businesses you should lean toward a special landing page just for Mother’s Day. And along with that, you should tailor your ad content for Mother’s Day as well.

Research your keywords, see what the competition is doing, match the right keywords for your landing page, and write killer ad content to get the click through. You can close Mother’s Day sales with good optimization and a call to action. Go do it.

Staying organized is the key to being successful with pay per click advertising, especially if you run several PPC ads across several different channels or niches. How do you keep track of it all?

Generally, you have three tiers of organizational structure for your PPC ads:

• Campaign Level
• Ad Groups
• Individual Ads

We will discuss here how to organize your campaigns if you run ad groups within the same niche and how to do it if you operate in several niches. First, within the same niche.

Let’s say your niche is widget sales. You have three campaigns running in widget sales and within each campaign you have three add groups. Within each ad group you have three separate ads. There are several ways you can organize your campaigns. Here is one way that we’ve found helpful.

Take your broad keyword categories for widgets and make those your campaign names. For instance, let’s say you sell automatic widgets, semi-automatic widgets, and manual widgets. Those could be your campaign names. Within each campaign you’ll have your ad groups. Break down your ad groups into phrase matched keyword groups. For instance, for automatic widgets it might look like this:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

Under each of these phrases you could have a variety of options to narrow down your widgets into more specific categories. Don’t do that at the ad group level. Use the phrase match as an organizational element for your ad groups. For each individual ad, you could narrow it down further into the specific key phrase that you are targeting and that key phrase could be a broad match phrase, phrase match, or exact match. It could look something like this:

Ad Group Name = Cannon-Nose Widgets

• Ad #1 Keyword Phrase: Cannon-Nose Widget
• Ad #2 Keyword Phrase: “Cannon-Nose Widget”
• Ad #3 Keyword Phrase: [Cannon-Nose Widget]

Notice that in each case you are using the same keyword phrase but you narrow your focus in each individual ad by focusing on a match type of that phrase. You could have several such ads for the individual keywords that relate to the phrase match within that ad group. In other words, if that ad group focuses tightly on 5 separate keyword phrases related to Cannon-Nose Widget, you could potentially have 15 individual ads – 3 for each keyword, breaking them all down into a broad match, phrase match, and exact match ad units.

Now let’s examine an organizational structure for campaigns in non-related niches:

If you are involved in several niches such as Internet marketing, business franchising, and widget sales then you’ll want to separate your niches into campaigns by themselves. Within each campaign you’ll have a variety of ad groups related to that campaign. Those ad groups should be named according to some convention related to your broad match and/or phrase match keywords for that niche. For instance, sticking with widget sales again you could name your ad groups:

• Double-barrel widgets
• Single-barrel widgets
• Cannon-nose widgets

sticking with the phrase-match keyword phrases as above. Your individual ad units would then follow the same protocol as above for targeting a specific key phrase by broad, phrase, and exact match.

That’s it. Pretty simple. There are of course other ways to organize your campaigns. This is just one way that it can be done. What ideas do you have for organizing your pay per click campaigns?

Andy Beal wrote a guest column at WebProNews about click fraud. It seems there has been a drop in click fraud cases from last quarter until now. Beal asks the question, “is this drop a blip or a trend?”

Good question. I guess we won’t know until the next quarter so that we can see if there is still a continued downward trend in click fraud or if it goes back up to its normative 15%=17% range.

It would be nice to see less pay per click click fraud. That would be a big plus to the industry and a big plus to advertisers. Andy asked the question and I’ll ask it too. Are you see a decline in your click fraud statistics?

I forgot where I read it, but I saw a few days ago a statistic that leapt out to me like a frog in a mossy pond. Google reported that 24% of its search queries are first time or unique queries. That’s a lot higher than I expected. But it makes me ask, How does that relate to pay per click management?

For starters, pay per click ads appear on the SERPs for queries that use a specific keyword. What I think this statistic means is that there is an element of unpredictability with regard to PPC CTRs that is uncontrollable. If 24% of the search queries are first time queries then that means an equal percentage of PPC ads will appear for queries that were unintentional on the part of the advertiser. There may be a fudge factor in there somewhere, but I’d imagine that this number is at least 20%.

Let’s just say that 20% of your PPC ads show up for first time queries. They are search queries that you didn’t expect to happen and didn’t target your ad to. How many of those queries will result in click throughs and how many of those click throughs will never result in a sale due to unqualified click status?

Here’s the point: No matter how well you plan and manage your PPC campaigns, there will always be an element of unmanageability with regard to your click through rate resulting in a less-than-desirable ROI. It is best just to stick with the things that you can control and not worry or fret about those you can’t.

Pay per click advertising is all about keywords. You can’t run a successful campaign without them. But what is effective? How can you win with keywords? What should you do with them?

There are all kinds of answers to those questions, some right and some wrong. But I’d like to share the most important keyword trick of all. There is one keyword trick that is so important that, if you get everything else wrong, at least you’ll have this part right and your quality score should be muchly improved.

It’s not really accurate to call it a trick, but for lack of a better word, let’s call it a trick. You know what it is? It’s a tight ad group.

In essence, fewer keywords is better than a long list of keywords. Instead of putting hundreds of keywords together in one ad group, focus your ad group into a tight group of keywords that are related in relevancy. That’s the most important trick in the book and it leads to more success than just about anything else.