Need help with my SEM campaign

i am running the SEM campaign for sherdog(dot)com. it is a MMA and UFC site. it a very high quality and content rich site. i have $200/day budget and can't even seem to get close to spending it all. I am paying an avg. of .40 cents per click as well. i want to know how to get my CPC wayyyy down.

i know another site (soap opera site) is buying keywords for .02 cents per click and is able to spending $250 per day. how is this possible?? how do i get a lower cpc and get much more volume. any help would be great! thanks

Get More From What You Already Have
-Analyze organic key phrases bringing in the top 25% of search engine traffic from the last three months (with an Alexa of 2,761, I am sure you will have plenty of data).
-Organize & add those those queries strings in the form of 3 - 5 words/phrases into well structured adgroups with tightly written & specific/targeted ads.
-Buy all the fighters' names.
-Buy all three match types (Broad, Phrase, Exact) of every keyword, as well as plurals where appropriate (Google's expanded match is supposed to account for these, but does not always. It also helps helps lower cpc & get more clicks for the budget).

Pump up the Volume
-Do keyword research with Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, Overture's keyword tool, or Digital Point's Free Keyword Suggestion Tool, identifying high volume, but relevant keywords by thinking about several targeted areas of the site and the people that would be interested in those areas specifically.
-Create new adgroups & add those keywords.
-Edit Campaign settings & switch to accelerated ad serving.

Minimum Bid Requirements
These .02 bids may be bids from the Content Network, which allow bidding as low as .01. Are you for certain they get tons of .02 clicks? The search network typically starts at .05, but I have seen the "minimum bid requirement" as low as .04, after submitting. Minimum bids go down as quality goes up.
Improve Quality Score(s)
-Improve your quality score on your ads, landing pages, as well as whole site so Google will only require the minimal bid.
Here are some top tips on improving ad quality:

Ad Quality Score
-Have your two- three word key phrase in the title & text.
-Achieve a high CTR by making your ad compelling & through a/b split testing.
-Put very high volume keywords in their own adgroup with their own ads, so as not to average in the zeros of keywords not getting clicked.
-Many other things such as historical keyword performance data, some of which you can not control go into play.

Landing Page Quality Score
-H1 of keywords bid on serving ad and in ad as well as Other Factors

Whole Site Quality Score
-Have these items as well as a lot of quality content
1. Sitemap
2. Privacy Policy
3. Terms and Conditions
4. Contact Us
5. About Us


The fastest way to get your "CPC wayyyy down" is simply to bid lower. Also consider other ppc networks such as Miva and Ask, where the competition is less fierce.

Quite simply, Gary's article on long-tail application to PPC campaigns.

thanks! those are some excellent tips.

so many of my keywords are inactive and need to be raised to $1-$5 to be active...why is that?? this is in regards to all keywords containing "ufc". how do i increase the quality for this keyword? any other tips?

also, i need to increase QS for chuck liddell related keywords. for this, would it be better to send the traffic to the sherdog(dot)com homepage or to the chuck liddell specific page within sherdog? (sherdog(dot)com/fightfinder/fightfinder.asp?FighterID=192)

Work on keywords, titles, ad copy and cta's (call to action) elements.

I posted here somewhere about the visual layout of your ad and making the keywords for each ad in a right angle arrow so that when the kw is searched it forms a r/a arrow bcuz the kw's are bolded.

Test, test and retest. Use googles optimizer to gauge which elements of your landing page work best.

check out hittail.com and use it.

make up a custom list of keyword strings using the ibp>aerelis>kw generator with your known keywords only concatenated with the use of that tool.

create many campaigns and monitor every hour during peak times.

setup day parting based on analytics as well as demographical in msn.

bid for #3. the conversion cost is lower. Unless you are bidding on your own brand name its usually better to chase the 40%-90% than the top 10%. The smart ones evaluate their traffic analytics and pick and choose.

This thing doesn't happen overnight.

Keep testing and data mining and asking q's here. Don't buy stupid software like automated bidding. The only way to do it is by hand.

Much more to say, but that will keep you busy.

GaryTheScubaGuy

ok lets say i create an ad group around the keyword "chuck liddell"...should i dedicate that ad group to only having chuck liddell keywords and misspellings and so on or also have longer phrases with other keywords such as "chuck liddell and rampage jackson"..should i make each ad group very specific to only include that one keyword and minor variations?

makes no difference. quality score is measured at the kw level not the adgroup level. just keep between 100-200 kw in each - max.it will be easier to manage.