EQUTE — Montreal-based PPC management tool Acquisio released a whitepaper dubbedAdvanced PPC Bidding Strategies which gives 10 good best practices for a PPC marketing campaign.

The first strategy is logical, but it’s not how most people run a PPC campaign. Instead of bidding on a hundreds of thousands of keywords in an ad group, find logical keywords. Do some research on Google trends and see the real keywords people are using.

It seems obvious, but going through any auto generated list of 500 keywords will have a lot of really bad keywords. Cut them out, they only lower the quality score and make things tougher to track.

Another of the strategies is a good rule of thumb for the current state of the economy. It’s pretty obvious to most people running a PPC campaign, but focusing on savings is key these days. Traffic to coupon sights is way up and people are looking for just about any way to save. So advertise to that, emphasize coupons, discounts, sales and bonuses.

The Acquisio list also goes into the pros and cons of the array of Google AdSense options, it’s a pretty good resource for people trying to figure out what kind of advertising model they want for their online ads but are stuck trying to decide which would be best.

Another strategy only comes into play for some advertisers, but it emphasizes that advertisers shouldn’t neglect trademarked keywords, if ad dollars need to be cut, they should ferret out unnecessary keywords but keep control of your brand. Cutting back on your own brand keywords opens the door to competition or affiliates to take control. Letting others take control of a brand’s advertising will increase competitors’ quality scores, making it more expensive to battle them when you start bidding on trademarks again.

The inverse strategy says something similar for affiliates and competitors, if most any marketer can bid on brand names now. Spotting a big brand that bows out of their own keywords should strike while the iron is hot. Keeping a good quality score for a big brand will make money in the long run.

The white paper went on to say to bid by true customer value; which is a pretty wise thing to do that people don’t see when looking only at direct-response keyword ROI. Companies should take note of how customers use the site after their first visit. Calculate how even a low-performing keyword drives customers to loyalty programs or repeat business.

Looking at only percentages will also make some keywords look ill performing to others with a higher conversion rate, but looking at the efficiency is key:

For example, a company driving strictly for ROI using PPC advertising as a cash machine will now be driving by dollars, not just percentages. Aiming for a 50 percent cost-to-margin ratio may generate less net revenue (margin minus ad costs) than aiming for a 75 percent cost-to-margin ratio. But would you rather keep 50 percent of $1,000 or 25 percent of $5,000?

The final strategy on the list was targeted toward SEM marketers.

According to SEM expert Jeremy Schoemaker (a.k.a. ShoeMoney), bid the minimum for each of your campaign keywords. When setting up campaigns, have strict budget and performance requirements. If your campaign has 300 to more than 500 visitors without any sales, consider making modifications or perhaps killing it and starting over.

Acquisio said search engine marketers should also take care to get all the misspellings they can to get all the missed keywords in their niche. These misspellings come into play when marketing in Europe too, where non-native English speakers are searching in English — misspellings abound.