The Search Term report is really great for looking for new keywords that you might not have thought of before and also for discovering invalid keywords that you can exclude from your campaigns.

Google recently added a new filter called “search term” as one of the filter options in the Search Term report. It’s useful when you want to analyze the huge amount of data gathered and you would like to develop a specific strategy. The example provided by Google was a florist trying to discover the search terms related to “valentine” weeks before it leads to February 14.

Check out the Search Term report which can be found on the Keywords Tab.

A click-through rate is the number of times that your ads get clicked on over the number of times that is shown to the visitors. In short, it’s total clicks divided by the number of impressions.

If you have ever wondered why are there so many people looking at your ads but the number of people clicking on them is so low, here’s a posting at WordStream outlining some strategies that you can use to improve your CTR.

And why should we bother on improving our campaign’s CTR? Well an improved CTR can help improve the Quality Score of the related keyword and in turn improve the ad position associated to the keyword.

Once you understand some of these techniques on how to improve your CTR, go try them out in your campaigns!

Managing a campaign manually is possible when the campaign is relatively small. But when campaigns start to scale to a size where it becomes complicated and harder to be managed manually, bid optimization software will come into play.

DoubleClick Search recently came up with 7 factors to consider if you are looking for a bid optimization platform to work on.

The 7 factors:

1. Meeting objectives with flexible goals
2. Fresh and reliable data to make smarter decisions
3. Smart algorithms for smart decisions
4. Fast response of the tool to take opportunities
5. Frequency of algorithm change and updates
6. The amount of control while automating
7. Service from the team

Accompanying the blog post is also an infographic and white paper on it.