One of my coworkers recently brought to my attention how I've been neglecting both the how-to and PPC sides of this blog. Consequently, I thought that I'd throw a post up on how to PPC advertise properly. So, before I take off for the weekend, here are 8 basic rules of running a PPC campaign. I've also posted some links to some of our How-To PPC archives below.

(1) Long tail keywords might be less trafficked, but they're also less expensive and much more targetted.

(2) Make sure you have landing pages for each one of your keywords.

(3) Stand out from the competition by looking at what they're doing and learning from both their mistakes and monotony.

(4) Let your ad placement vary. First of all, if it's a sponsored search result, third is usually more effective than first because it touches the first organic result. Second, as far as ads themselves go, it might be worth it to show up for a broader keyword, but not quite worth bidding high enough to appear first on the list.

(5) Avoid bidding wars: after all, their point is to exhaust your ad budget. If you won't fight and up your bid, your competitor can't win and will only lose (money).

(6) Make sure to use negative words so that you don't show up for common keywords that won't convert for you.

(7) Use an ontology tool to find commonly mispellings of keywords that you can bid on.

(8) If your products and services are restricted to a certain area, GEO-target your ads.

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