The goWholesale Blog

Top Tips for Optimizing Your Search Campaigns

November 27th, 2007

There’s definitely both an art and a science to managing pay-per-click campaigns, whether on goWholesale or any other search engine like Google or Yahoo. It’s not just bidding higher than the other guys - it’s crafting your ads and your landing pages to get searchers to click and then convert to a prospect, lead, or customer.

That being said - here are some of my top tips for creating, managing, and optimizing your search campaigns. A couple of the tips included are goWholesale-specific, but for the most part these ring true across platforms:

Choosing Keywords

Choose a complete set of relevant keywords. This means a mix of specific and broader keywords that relate to the products and/or services you offer. Specific keywords are great for buyers who know what they’re looking for, while broader keywords help general browsers hone in on your company.

Do you dropship, liquidate, or sell closeouts? If so, don’t forget to add those keyword groups as well.

Include keyword variations and synonyms. For instance, if you sell clothing, you may also want to bid on apparel and clothes.

Writing Your Ads

Keep it short and sweet. Buyers tend to scan over listings quickly and will pick up on certain words in the ad that will make them click, which brings us into the next ad writing tip…

Keyword insertion. This cannot be emphasized enough. By creating ads that mention the searched keyword in the title and description, you can increase your click-through rate by almost 10%.

Know thy customer. Write compelling ad copy that is also highly relevant to your customers. They’re looking for the “WIIFM” – What’s In It For Me – in your ad.

Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word in Your Title. This will make your ad stand out more.

Include a call to action at the end of your ad, like “Visit us today”, “Shop now”, “Find out more”, or something related to an offer you’ve mentioned.

Landing Pages

Make sure your ad’s landing page is as relevant as possible to your ad. Take buyers straight to the page that has the products they were just looking for (and this isn’t always your homepage). Also, if you also happen to sell retail on your site, make sure to land your ads on the wholesale section so as not to confuse potential wholesale buyers.

Bidding

First page placement. Research has shown that the higher your position in search results, the more traffic you’ll receive – if you’re on the first page, as much as 80% more traffic.