This post was guest blogged by Mr. Gary Lee, an Internet marketer for those who care about Internet marketing.

The internet provides a unique way to target certain demographics and learn how they react to varying types of marketing campaigns. Search engine marketing adds to the marketing efforts by providing real numbers that can be measured and used to make important decisions about the campaign. In this summary, we will go over the process of incorporating a pay per click campaign into your company marketing efforts. What makes this a special case is that there is a two-step marketing campaign to make the sale: Click to Lead & Lead to Sale.

1) Generate a list of keywords - Use Google Analytics to see what keywords are being used to find your site and then use services like Google Keyword generator and WordTracker ($15/wk) to generate a list of keywords based off your Analytic keywords. There are many more word generators, but stick with these first to get a better understanding of how they work. An evil method of finding good keywords is to check your competitors metatag keywords and also a service called SEODigger.com which does a sort of reverse analysis of what keywords people use to search certain sites.

2) Group Keywords - Grouping keywords into the appropriate ad group will ensure a targeted marketing effort by allowing us to create the right ad creative. The most important aspect to grasp when grouping keywords is to make sure the keywords are grouped around the same general root word. Search Volume is also taken into account when grouping so that high performing keywords are not affected by low performing ones.

3) landing Page Conversion Rate - The higher it is, the higher CPC we can tolerate. That’s the general rule when it comes to landing page if you’re lead to sales conversion rate is pretty stable. Optimizing your landing page is something that should always be done with A/B testing and one great tool to use is Google’s web optimizer, which spreads out an equal amount of impressions for different variations of your homepage so you can get a good honest look at which page performs the best. Your ultimate goal is create high converting landing pages for each ad group you have.

4) Lead to Sales Conversion Rate - Again, the higher it is, the higher CPC we can tolerate. Every business is different and there are a varying amount of sales methods from selling them online to selling them on the phone. No matter which way you do it, you must track your conversion rates so that you can make the proper decisions in your PPC campaigns.

5) Ad Copy - The is where testing is the most important. Assuming you already have a high quality score which affects the placement of your ad, the ad creative is the actual bait that catches people’s eyes. The ad creative should contain most of the keywords of the ad group in the headline and the body. This is a great way to check your ad grouping skills.

6) Quality Score - A quality score is the overall grade search engines make of your efforts. Different search engines have different names for their quality scoring, so don’t be too distracted by the different names. If you’ve done everything correctly above, then your quality score will reflect your hard work and you will be rewarded with lower bids for higher rankings. An ad creative with a lower bid, but higher quality score can still rank higher than an ad creative with a higher bid, but lower quality score:

Example: All Advertisers with the Same Quality Score

Example: Advertisers with Different Quality Scores

f your quality score is higher than the bid right above you, what Google and Yahoo does is take the max bid of the person above you and divides the bid in half. They then add one cent to it and if our max bid falls within that range, we get a higher ranking.

Criteria that must be met to achieve Optimum Quality Score

• Expected performance based on search engine algorithms
• Historical Data Performance - Basically, the higher the CTR, the better your quality score will be.
• Conversion rates of landing pages - Search engines want to provide users the best possible results so a high converting page shows a lot in proving relevance. A high converting landing page is a win-win-win situation for the search engine, publisher and consumer. There are those in the school of thought that Google does not take conversion rates into account, but it can’t hurt to assume that they do.
• Something to keep in mind is Yahoo and Google’s core search engine marketing business models depend on quality search results. Placing ads that have the highest click through rates are in their best interest in order to maximize their revenues.