PPC Interview Questions and Answers 2016
Table of Contents
Free to Check Top High Paying Keywords
What is PPC?
What is PPC (pay-per-click) marketing? Pay-per-click marketing is a way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website, rather than “earning” those clicks organically. You know those sponsored ads you often see at the top of Google’s search results page, marked with a yellow label?
As we’ve established, PPC advertising offers a unique opportunity to:
- Grow Your Customer Base – Connect with searchers actively looking for products and services like yours, and respond to that need by providing them with an offer relevant to their search query.
- Generate Leads at Low Costs – Because pay-per-click marketing allows you to reach leads and prospects when they’re researching and looking to buy, it’s a highly effective way to bring interested visitors to your site. Plus, you can enjoy an algorithmically generated discount from the search engines in exchange for making their users happy.
Once you've created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the best predictors of account success. You should be continuously analyzing the performance of your account.
- Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your pay-per-click campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
- Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
- Split Ad Groups: Improve click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller, more relevant ad groups, which help you create more targeted ad text and landing pages.
- Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
- Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and calls-to-action (CTAs) of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Don’t send all your traffic to the same page.
What do understand by Quality Score?
Quality Score is a metric which is calculated for each keyword between 1 to 10. The QS defines the quality of keyword compared with Ads and Landing Page. This metric is used to calculate the AdRank, which is used to calculate the ad position.
What is the impact of Quality score on CPC and Ad Position ?
Quality Score is inversely proportional to CPC and Directly proportional to Ad Position. That means higher QS means lower cost and higher position.
What is Actual CPC ?
The actual cost of a click for an advertiser in an auction. The actual CPC is calculated in realtime and we cannot know the Actual CPC, but we can see Avg. CPC.
Actual CPC = (AdRank to Beat/QS)+$0.01
What Kind of Quality Score you can achieve for keywords ?
In my past campaigns I achieved the QS of 7 – 10. I can improve the quality score by using optimization techniques in campaign.
What are the Factors which affect Quality Score ?
Quality Score depends on the following metrics
- CTR of the Keyword
- Relevance of Keywords and Ads
- Landing Page Quality
- Historic Account Data
How can you Improve Conversion Rates ?
By creating ads which match perfectly with keywords and creating tightly themed ad groups so we can get targeted users to best landing page. Also by improving the Landing Page quality we can improve the conversions.
Is PPC Advertisement effect ranking of websites on search engines ?
Never, Search Engine don’t mix them. Google and other search engines rank both organic and ppc results separately
Can you tell me limit of character used for PPC Ads ?
Different Search Engines have different Limit on ads character as for Google you can put maximum 25 for headline and 70 for description 1 and 2 combined.
Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.
Quality Score’s a part of Google’s way of determining ranking of AdWords ads. This can be achieved by, among others, improving relevance between ad copies and keywords, improving quality of landing pages. By obtaining high quality score for my keywords, I can reduce expenses for my PPC campaigns.
Explain what is Adwords?
Adwords is the system that Google has designed to assist in marketing product or services in Google search engine and its affiliated sites. It will place a text ad that appears when people search for phrases associated to your offering.
Explain how Adwords work?
Adwords work on bidding system if the bidding price is higher your ad will appear on top of the Google page. Adwords works on “pay per click” that means you only pay the amount you have bid if someone taps on your ad as a result of a web search.
Explain why to use Google Adwords?
Google Adwords behave differently to traffic that comes from Google Adwords or “Pay Per Click”. The traffic that comes through surfing often visits the website for information, whereas the traffic via pay per click knows what they are clicking on and what they want to buy. So few visitors through Adwords might be more valuable than million visitors.
Explain what is Ad rank?
Ad rank determines your ad position on Google page, and it is determined by your bid for that keyword and quality score.
Explain how does Ad rank impact Cost-Per-Click?
Ad rank plays a huge role in defining the actual cost-per-click that your opponents pay, when someone clicks on their ads. Your CPC can be calculated by following way
Your Price = The ad rank of the person below you/ your quality score + $0.01
Explain how does a Google auction work?
Each month auction gets run billion of times, and the result are such that users find ads that are relevant to what they are looking for. The search engine processes the request and runs the auction that determines the ad positions and each advertisers CPC.
Explain what gets entered into a Google Account?
Once the advertisers determine the keywords that they want to bid on, Google will enter a keyword from your account which is most related into the auction with the maximum bid specified as well as the associated ad.
Explain what is Google Quality Score?
Google’s quality score determines how beneficial and relevant your ad is to the user, based primarily on your ad’s CTR, quality of your landing page and keyword relevance. Higher quality score keywords will save your money and earn better ad ranking.
Explain what is an ad group in Google Adwords?
Ad group is a container of your keywords, advertisements, and landing pages. Google rewards advertisers who prepare Adword campaigns with tightly structured ad groups. Its not advisable to include all your keywords into the single ad group, but to organize keywords into themes.
10) Explain what is conversion optimizer in Adwords?
Conversion Optimizer is a tool used by Google Adwords for bid manipulation and decides which clicks on the ad will be valuable. It can help you to return maximum on your investment.
Mention some of the Google Adword Ad Extensions?
Different ad extension can enhance the increase in traffic. Some of the common Ad extensions used in adwords are
- Sitelinks
- Call Extensions
- Location Extensions
- Social Annotations
- Seller ratings
- Mobile app extensions
- Offer ads
- Communication Ad
- Review extension
- Image and drop down navigation Ad extension
Mention in google Adwords that options can’t be changed after creating an account?
After creating account Currency and Time Zone, cannot be changed.
Explain how you can improve conversion rates?
By creating ads that match properly with keywords and create tightly themed ad groups, you can target users to the campaign that helps in conversions.
Mention what is the limit set for the number or characters for Adwords ad?
Limit for Adword is
- Description line 1st : 25 characters
- Description line 2nd: 35 characters
- Destination URL: 1024 characters
No images are allowed in URL.
Explain what is the meaning of CTR and how you can calculate?
CTR stands for Click through rate that tells the number of visitors visited on your ad on the web page. The formula for calculating CTR is
Number of click / Number of impressions X 100
These will give you an answer in percentage like what percentage of customers have viewed your ad.
Mention what are the type of Keywords?
There are no specific types for Keywords however they are classified on the basis of how likely is going to be clicked by visitors
- Research Keywords: It tends to contain one or two words – Tea
- Consideration: It tends to contain two or three words – Green Tea
- Purchase: It must have more than three words – buy loose green tea
- Loyalty: This must be shorter- Starbucks
Explain what is Google Ad API?
Google Ad API is designed for representing large, tech savvy advertisers and third parties. It allows developers build an application that directly interacts with Google Adwords server.
Mention what all things can be done using Google Ad API?
With Google Ad API, you can build an application that can do following things
- You can automatically generate keywords, ad text, custom reports and landing pages
- Develop additional applications and tools to help you manage accounts
- Synchronize Adwords data with your inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock
Explain how you can track conversions in Google Adwords?
In Google Adwords, conversion tracking can be done in following ways
- Tracking purchases by involving basic tracking code provided by Adwords and modifying it with additional code unique to your particular e-commerce platform
- View-through conversion window options tracks when a person sees your ad but does not click it (impression)
- By enabling your ad rotation setting to optimize for clicks, meaning that Adwords will serve the ads it feels are likely to be clicked
- By accessing search funnels inside tools and analysis, you can also know when customers clicked on your ad for the first time and how frequently they saw your ad before converting.
Explain what are the other two options for bidding other than C-P-C?
Other than CPC the other two options are CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) and CPA ( Cost Per Action ).