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September 13, 2008

A couple of weeks ago Google announced a number of changes to the user interface. One of the changes that is slowly rolling out across all AdWords accounts is the change from 'Minimum Bid' to 'First Page Bid.'

This particular change certainly has its benefits, primarily greater transparency on what you must bid to acquire the maximum number of impressions and clicks available based on your daily budget. Ideally you want to drive as much traffic to your website as possible while remaining profitable. There is no question that if your advertising is not showing on the first page of search results, you are passing up the majority of available traffic for your product or service.

With this increased transparency, advertisers will now be able to determine very easily what they must bid to display their ads on page one and acquire those much desired impressions and clicks. Inevitably, this will produce more competition to display your ad in one of the top 8 positions simply because it is easier for advertisers to manage their AdWords accounts.

Now, of course, one way to continue serving your ads on page one would be to increase your keyword and ad group default bid amounts if you see an increase in competition. However, there are many other ways to remain on page one without increasing your bid amounts and also to maximize customer value.

• Ad Creative: The more relevant you can draft your ad headlines, body copy, and display URLs to that of the user's search query, the greater your quality score will increase, which will reward you by driving down your average CPC. By constantly conducting A/B split testing with your ad creative, you become more and more relevant, allowing you to display on page one for less than your competitors who may not be testing ads and are holding onto one of the top 8 spots by constantly increasing their bid amounts
• Landing Pages: Again, just like your ad creative, the more relevant your landing page is to what the user has searched for, the greater your Quality Score will increase and therefore lower your average CPC. Relevancy reigns supreme in paid search and this does not just span your AdWords account. From your keyword lists to your ad creative and ultimately where you send your traffic all plays an integral part in the overall performance of your PPC campaigns. Constantly test new landing page formats and content to match as closely as possible what the initial search query was on Google.com in order to maximize relevancy and to keep your ads displaying in those most coveted spots.
• Up-Sells and Back-End Offers: For practically all products and services there is potential to drive traffic for not only the immediate desired action, but also for subsequent signups and purchases, sometimes at the exact moment your customer is making their first conversion. Once you have your customer in your sales funnel and they are checking out, offer them another product or service that relates to this initial purchase.
  

For example: If your are selling a CD Player you could offer a spindle of blank CD-Rs during the checkout process. Maybe your customer opts into that offer. If they do, you could have another up-sell asking your customer if they would like CD cleaning wipes to eliminate dust and smooth out scratches on those CD-Rs.

Another method to maximize lifetime value of a customer is to collect their email address and contact them through an auto-responder with similar products to that which they have already purchased from you. Why pay for their click on your advertisement to sell one product or service once when you can stay in touch with them over time and provide useful information and products that could further benefit your customer?

With 'Minimum Bid' being replaced with 'First Page Bid' it is quite possible to see an influx in competition due to the increased transparency available to maximize your PPC efforts. Between ad creative optimization, landing page optimization, and the use of up-sells and back-end offers, you can counteract this increased competition by remaining more relevant and provide more useful content and solutions for your customers.

Here is to your paid search success!

We've recorded a few more AdWords strategies and posted a six-minute video to help you get better results with your online advertising.

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