Quick introduction – if you don’t already know, Jim Gilbert is a Pay-Per-Click Master. Jim is a vice president at KeyRelevance, a Dallas-based search engine marketing firm, and has been involved with organic and paid search engine marketing since its infancy in the early 90s. Jim is one of the founders of DFWSEM.

As an account executive at WrightIMC, an integrated marketing communications agency, I was personally very excited to attend his presentation. We have been talking a lot about PPC campaigns, and many of us (at Wright IMC) are working on earning our Google AdWords certification. Jim’s presentation met all my expectations, and I came away with these five tips and tricks:

1. Analytics
The first tip I gleaned from the presentation (which, honestly, if you are working in the client space you should already be well aware of) is to measure towards your clients goals. As Jim says, “If you aren’t measuring, you are losing.”
I may be putting Jim’s words into my own, but regardless, the message is the same. You can’t report on just impressions or quality score. You have to pick the metric that matters to your client. Client’s care about conversions, and most importantly – Return On Investment.

2. Mobile
The second tip of the night was to find a way to integrate mobile measurement in your campaign. Apparently, phones are coming back into style people! ;) So, find a call measurement service and start reporting on those inbound calls.

3. Match Types
Jim’s third tip of the night was to bid low and use broad match. “You will be surprised what converts,” he said.

4. Quality Score
Tip four deals with quality scores. What are some of the factors of quality scores you might wonder? Landing pages, age of campaign, and click-through rate. From Jim, I learned that the higher your quality score, the cheaper the click. His statistic showed that if you had a quality score of 10 vs. 7, the lower quality score will cost 30% more.

5. Filters
The fifth, and final, tip of the night was definitely a time saver and the best lesson for anyone who is managing a PPC campaign: use filters. It is one of the easiest ways to weed out low-performing, high-cost keywords, and find those money keywords that should be getting more of that PPC budget.

Of course, this post only captures a small amount of the knowledge presented to the audience at the DFWSEM meeting. However, these are five quality tips for anyone managing PPC accounts.

Written by Jenneva Vargas; Account Executive at WrightIMC. Plano-based WrightIMC is an integrated marketing communications agency that specializes in paid search marketing programs, search engine optimization, web design, content marketing campaigns, social media strategy & implementation, and television campaigns with online components.