When discussing PPC performance, people love to refer to the low hanging fruit.  You know, that’s the stuff that’s easy to accomplish with little effort that yields great results.  This typically refers to getting more conversions for cheap, but how do you do it?  Here are a couple ways to pick that low hanging fruit and have cheaper conversions within a week or two:

Turn off the Content Network: Don’t get me wrong, the content network can produce great results–if managed correctly.  To manage it correctly it needs to be seperated from search, so turn it off on your search accounts and isolate content ads in their own content campaigns.

Add negatives: Run a search query report and look at all the search terms that have generated clicks.  Sort by impressions largest to smallest, and look for terms that are not converting and don’t resonate with your target customer.  Add them as negatives so future searchers of that term won’t see your ad.  If they’re weird terms but are converting, leave them alone.

Add misspells of converting terms: If your keyword “shoes” is converting like crazy, then I’m betting you that “sheos” or “shoeses” will too.  Add common misspellings and keyboard errors as exact matches as keywords, but make sure that the ad group doesn’t have keyword insert enabled, because then it might be taken down for editorial reasons.

Check landing pages: If terms that used to convert no longer do, maybe it’s the page you’re sending them to.  Make sure your page is what you want it to be.  If it is, test a different page or even create a whole new landing page for that keyword or ad group.

Pause poor performing ads: If one ad accounts for 80% of your conversions and the other only 20%, get rid of that 20% ad!  Let all those impressions and clicks flow to the better converting ad, and you should see an immediate lift in results.

Following these basic steps should yield immediate results (often times within hours or days).  If you have already done all of these, go back and run another search query report for a different time period than your original one.  After all, Google announced a while back that 20-25% of queries are ones they’ve never seen before.  Repeat this step every 30-60 days.  Now, go get some conversions!