By DatingFactory.us Marketing Team

YNOT EUROPE – You’ve worked hard to grow your website’s traffic from a trickle to a useful volume. You’ve set in motion good, stable Google AdWords campaigns. You’ve got respectable click-through rates and quality scores across the board, and your cost per acquisition (CPA) is on the button.

Regardless how well your traffic strategies are working, there’s always room for improvement. The question most of us reach at some point is how to make what’s already working into something bigger and better. You love the traffic you’re getting, but you want more of it, right?

Here are a few simple tips for anyone who’s fortunate enough to be in this position. Increasing your traffic can be done, but there is a price to be paid and pitfalls to avoid.

Identify the return on investment (ROI) you can afford.

When you start to go for growth, it’s worth accepting up-front that your advertising costs probably will increase, thereby affecting your ROI. So before you start, make sure you sit down and determine the highest cost per paying subscriber (or CPA) you’re prepared to accept. Doing this exercise up-front will mean 1) you have a benchmark against which to gauge changes and 2) you won’t lose your nerve as you see costs increasing. As long as costs stay within the tolerance you previously set, everything’s going to be OK.

Figure out where else you can use what you’ve already got.

If your campaigns are working on Google, the chances are they’ll also perform on Yahoo! and Bing. The cost per click generally is lower on the latter two, but so are the conversion rates. Don’t assume you can just upload your existing campaigns and expect boatloads more of good, converting traffic.

You’ll have to start on the new search engines in much the same way as you did on Google. Get it right, and you’ll increase your traffic by 10 percent to 20 percent. The downside? Yahoo! and Bing have copied Google’s AdWords functionality, but they still have their own idiosyncrasies, which means even though your traffic may have increased, the time it takes to administer your campaigns just increased significantly, too. Best advice: Start small, stay focused and take your time to assess whether the benefits outweigh the increased admin time.

Expand on your best-performing terms.

Assuming you’re using conversion tracking of some kind in your campaigns
(and if you’re not, why not?), you’ll know which of your terms are performing well and which ones aren’t. You can expand on the effective terms sensibly using Google AdWords’ tools.

To expand on the broad terms that are performing, go to the keyword in question within your Google account. Select the keyword and a meaningful time period (45 days will do). Click on the “See Search Terms” dropdown menu and choose “Selected.” This will show you all the search queries that triggered your broad keyword. Pick out the query terms that are generating good traffic and add them to your campaign. (Make sure you keep your ad groups tightly themed as you add terms.)

Depending on the keyword, you may be better off using phrase matching rather than broad terms on the newly added terms in order to ensure you’re still controlling the quality of traffic coming through. For example, broad terms like “dating” will drive tons of traffic to your site, but at least part of it won’t be traffic you can use. Keep broad terms as exact matches and phrase-match until you know what you’re dealing with.

Keep an eye on your negatives.

As you expand your broad match terms, make sure you’re paying equal attention to your list of negative keywords. By introducing new broad and phrase matches, you’ll inevitably attract some unwanted traffic. Use the Search Query Reports in the Google Reporting interface to identify the rogues and add them to your negatives. Staying on top of your negatives enables you to employ broad matching with confidence.

Expand out geographically.

You’ll notice that a lot of your broad and phrase terms pull in visitors looking for dating sites that offer matches in their area geographical area, so why not reward these people with a better, more targeted search experience? Choose two or three of your top-performing generic terms, three or four top cities or towns, and combine them to create geographically specific search terms (e.g., “dating sites Boston”). Create two or three compelling, location-specific ads for each location ad group and test which perform the best. Once again, make sure you keep an eye on your negatives list. Once you’re seeing positive results from the first three or four towns, then you can start to expand the cities-and-towns ad groups.

There are quite a few good ways you can expand your campaigns successfully beyond simply increasing keyword bids, and we’ve touched on only a few here. Later on in the series, we’ll look at some other tactics you can try, too. The key things to keep in mind, though, are how much ROI you’re willing to sacrifice and how much extra work you’re willing, or able, to do.

Good luck!

DatingFactory.us gives webmasters the freedom to build their own dating sites on their own domain names, complete with fresh and active profiles from the Dating Factory network. The service is free and allows the creation of mainstream and adult-themed sites, with optional specialty niches. The company’s motto is “We build your brand, not ours.”