A very basic driver of success in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is relevance - relevance of ad text to a keyword, and relevance of the landing page to the keyword and ad text. Lack of relevance creates a bad user experience.  As a result, search engines have learned to charge more for ads that do not enhance user experience, and produce relatively less revenue for the search engine itself.

Imagine yourself as a searcher: when you search for a general keyword like ‘digital camera’ your eye is naturally drawn to ads containing the phrase ‘digital camera’ in the headline or descriptive lines. And if you click through to land on a page that doesn’t immediately appear to be about digital cameras, you hit the back button and return to your search, slightly annoyed.

What can you do to improve your PPC ad relevance? Monitor these PPC Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for upward or downward trends:

• Click-through-rate (CTR) and ad position as a measure of ad text relevance
• Single page visit rate as a measure of landing page relevance

Check outliers (ads that over or under perform ) and compare the best and worst performing ads to determine what works and what doesn’t.  This will help you develop your own best practices to follow and optimize your PPC ad performance.

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