Top 15 Takeaways for Creating Successful Keyword Campaigns

Here's the thing. We all want to hit the ground running in search marketing. We all want to immediately start working on driving clicks to a website. But, depending on where we're at, our ability to do that may be mitigated by circumstance.

So if you have a blog, start working to make your blog rise in natural search. But you may find, as I have, that blogs respond better to paid campaigns.

So set a small budget and start managing paid campaigns for it. Start another blog and try to use it as a test platform for the things you read about as well as your own wild-hare ideas.

Here's something from the good folks at Yahoo, a few of the high points on 15 steps to a successful keyword campaigns:

Campaigns: You can create up to 20 campaigns. You should create a separate campaign if you want to geo-target to a specific area, if you want to separate your budget, or if you have a seasonal/limited-time-only promotion or sale that you want to track and promote. Even if you don't immediately plan to do these things, it's still a best practice to separate your account into campaigns.

For example, let's say you are a jeweler and you want to separate the budgets for your silver sales from your gold sales. You also want to geo-target your jewelry campaigns to the west coast separately from the east coast to create more relevant ads. To achieve this, you would create four separate campaigns. You might name them "west coast silver jewelry", "east coast silver jewelry", "west coast gold jewelry" and "east coast gold jewelry". You could specify a budget for each.

Content Match® and Sponsored Search: Content Match allows your ads to be displayed on contextual partner sites based on the content of your ads (among other factors). Sponsored Search allows your ads to be displayed in response to searches on your keyword.

There's also a link to a pretty good Yahoo Search webinar on the topic as well.