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NetMarketShare.com daily tracking of Windows 7 usage market share shows that only 10 days after its general release to the public Win7 surged to 3.67 share. From November 2007 to now, we can see a slow and steady decline in XP usage, as well as a slow and steady increase in Vista usage. The early adoption of Win7 looks very strong, and I don’t believe Vista enjoyed the same early success. Plus, we’ve seen surges the past two weekend days, and Windows has historically seen much higher usage market share on weekdays than on weekends. This could indicate home users are flocking to Win7 far more than previous Windows versions, or we’re about to see some really huge gains during the weekdays ahead, or both.

But, at the same time, we should note that Mac OS gained usage market share from the usage of the total of all Windows versions for October. All Windows versions total 92.52% usage market share for October, and all Mac OS versions total 5.27%, up from 5.12% in September. I’ve seen predictions that Win7 will spur new computer sales, but some XP users will switch to a Mac instead of a Win7 PC. The early numbers support that theory so far, but we’ll know much more in the months ahead.

If you’re after serious traffic, then it’s hard to go past pay per click marketing.

Not only can you draw huge amounts of traffic in a short amount of time, but it’s extremely measurable and easily related back to your ROI.

Even with more marketing channels opening up, such as social media marketing, PPC marketing is still one of the most effective (and profitable) ways to connect people with your web site – if done correctly.

It really boils down to being surgically precise in targeting your market. With a planned, tactical approach to your PPC marketing, you can get miles ahead in the game, without necessarily spending more money.

Here you’re laying the foundation for everything else you’re about to do, so you want to build your campaign for quality, to give you the best launch pad.

Speaking of quality, good campaign structure is also integral to achieving great Quality Score on Google.

Why is Quality Score so important? High Quality Score means you’ll be paying the lowest bid prices that you need to, to hold your position. So it can reduce PPC costs significantly and you could even be paying less than an advertiser whose ad ranks below yours!

Low Quality Score can see you paying through the nose for each click, that’s if it doesn’t choke your ad impressions in the first place.

By targeting an audience with a higher conversion rate, and also paying less to do it – you end up with far more in your pocket.

By creating smaller, more tightly themed ad groups, you can be more targeted in the ads that you write for each ad group.

For example, if you had an ad group with several hundred keywords, it’d be hard if not impossible, and to write an ad that was targeted at every single one of them. Your ad would need to be broader to cover the general range of keywords. Whereas, if you created an ad group that had say 5 keywords in it that were all based on one strong theme, it’s a piece of cake to write an ad that caters to every keyword in that ad group.

For the most granular targeting, you could create ad groups based on each keyword. What do you think happens to your click through rates and conversion rates when searchers see ads and landing pages featuring the exact term they were looking for?

Quality Score is also directly related to the relationship between keywords and ad groups, so this is a hugely critical step in your PPC campaigns.

Leading on from point 3, you can now write highly appealing ads directly targeted at the searcher’s keywords.

Try a little test. If you’re currently using “broad-spectrum” ads, then try a few ads including the actual keyword that the searcher was looking for. The difference in click through rate is usually astounding.

And after all, the point of your ads is to attract people to your web site so you want to make sure they’re performing their job as effectively as possible.

After achieving a high click through rate on your ads and getting prospects to your site. Your next task is to keep them interested, long enough to convert them.

Keyword-rich landing pages which are obviously relevant to what the searcher looked for, capture interest and lower your bounce rates significantly.

If you’re marketing specific products or services, then sending a visitor to your home page can be the kiss of death. They’ll be seeing a lot of information that isn’t directly related to what they searched for, and off they go.

And don’t forget you’ve already paid to get the visitor, so you’ll be copping a loss.

With today’s software tools, there’s no good excuse for sending visitors to an un-targeted landing page.

It stands to reason that if you go to more places, you’ll connect with more people.

While certain target audiences may primarily search on one particular engine, it’s worth testing your PPC campaigns on other search engines to draw an even larger volume of traffic, and perhaps to find that one particular search engine in the first place.

Often, this traffic can also be of higher quality and cost you less. The bottom line is that you’re attracting even more prospects to your site to increase your profits.

If you knew which keywords worked and which didn’t, how much more would you invest in the big earners and stop losing on keywords you’d pause?

Along with other campaign statistics, it’s vital to be able to track right down to keyword level what’s working for you and what’s not. You can then expand on what’s bringing you revenue, to grow your profits further.

Keyword-level tracking allows you to increase your ROI and make informed decisions where to re-invest your profits.

Keyword-level tracking deserved its own special point for its importance. However, there is so much more to tracking your web site activity and conversions so you can further refine your targeting strategy.

For example, using a specialized analytics program such as Hitslink you uncover:

Knowing all of the above and more - can you how imagine how much clearer it is for you to know how best to use the keywords you found in Search Terms. [Link to www.searchterms.com]

This is just some of the information obtained from Hitslink. Luckily you can customize your reports to see the statistics you need to make the best-informed business decisions. Set it up to email you alerts and reports automatically and you’re lopping off precious hours that you can use elsewhere.

Having real-time statistics at your fingers tips (with no installation necessary) makes it far easier to decide on your tactics for both SEO and PPC purposes.

A well informed PPC campaign means less trial and error, less time and wasted expense, bringing you a greater return on investment.

The competition for pay per click marketers is fiercer than ever, with many advertisers forced out of their space through reasons that could be fixed or avoided with smarter methodology.

Additionally, search engines like Google are very unforgiving on poor quality marketing, with penalties being dealt out in low quality score and high bid prices.

Using the above 8 tips, you can work smarter and more strategically to create top quality PPC campaigns to carve out a strong competitive lead.

NB: To learn more about creating PPC campaigns for maximum ROI, download free eBook “The Anatomy of a Perfect PPC Campaign”.

About the Author

Reena Shohet is a PPC marketing specialist and the Product Manager for SpeedPPC. Increase your profits by overcoming the Top 7 Challenges of PPC marketing. Discover how and sign up for a FREE Email Course to Improve your PPC marketing - visit www.SpeedPPC.com.

This report lists the click throughs, transaction counts, and revenue for all campaigns that have had activity during the reporting timeframe.

This report also lists activity that did not come from a campaign under 'Non-Campaign', for comparison purposes.

There are three types of campaigns this report can display results on:

Campaign - A marketing term referring to a distinct marketing activity, such as direct mail, banner ads, pay-per-click ads, etc.

Please note that the system will track eCommerce activity based on the campaign name assigned on the 'source' parameter on the URL of your links to your site. For example:

http://www.yoursite.com?source=Bing

In this case, the campaign tracked would be 'Bing'.

Also note that activity without a campaign assigned will be tracked under a special campaign name called 'Non-Campaign'.

The campaign source name can be changed from the Account / Setup / eCommerce / Options menu item.

Visitor - Also referred to as a 'Unique Visitor'. By default, this value represents a visitor that comes to your site for the first time in a day. All subsequent visits during the day by the visitor are not considered unique.

The definition of a visitor can be customized. You can set a custom period of inactivity that will cause the next access of the visitor to be considered a new visit. The visit definition screen can be found on the 'Setup' menu.

This differs from a page view or hit in that a single visitor can have one visit per day but many page views during a visit.

Pages Per Visit - The average number of pages viewed per visit.