PPC campaign Options

[Diane]

Hi all,

Since the new to SEO area has been reorganized out of here, I'll put this question here.

I am looking at signing up for a PPC campaign (About.com). This forum, and www. cre8pc.com have helped me gather "to do" lists about other types of SEO work (linking, submitting etc.). Does anyone have a good monitoring, to do list for submitting to a PPC campaign? It seems to me that they require constant monitoring, so it would be nice to have some guidelines to follow for monitoring the clicks.

Thanks.

Diane

[Black_Knight]

Sure thing, Diane - I teach companies this as part of my consulting services.

Here's a very brief (highly summarised) guide to successful PPC campaign management with an emphasis on maximising ROI:

Evaluating Search Terms

Use the four criteria to evaluate potential search terms:

Relevance
Cost
Popularity
Performance

Relevance: Relevance is not just making sure that a search term can apply to your product or service but, more specifically, that it is unlikely to apply to any other product or service.

Cost: In a competitive market, you may often find that the top bid for a search term is far higher than your own margins allow. In general, you can attain far better value by choosing more specific search terms.

Popularity: Popularity is simply the relative usage of one search term over another. People searching for a product may often be more likely to use certain words than others in their search request, e.g. ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’ may mean the same thing but people are generally much more likely to use the word ‘buy’ than ‘purchase’ when searching.

Performance: Performance is something you will have to determine for yourself by tracking your customers from initial referral through to the sale.
You will often find that while some search terms will generate more visitors, others will actually generate more sales. This is because many people will simply be researching a potential purchase while those who are ready to buy will use slightly different search terms.

Effective Titles for search listings

Titles are the text shown as the main link in your listing. Select your title carefully as this is the ‘headline’ of your advertisement in the search listings. Titles should be very short, ideally no more than 5 words, and to the point.

The greatest advantage of PPC search listings over other forms of SEO is that you can craft titles to draw clicks, without fearing that it will affect your rankings. Select a title that shows what the page offers, and promotes brand awareness.

Effective Descriptions for search listings

The description can be a little longer than the title, but ideally should be no longer than 25 words, and should likewise be to the point. The description should be one or two punchy sentences that show how clicking on your link will answer their search query.

Example

Search Phrase: ‘cheap widgets’
Title: Best value widgets from DigiWidget.com
Description: Wide range of widgets to suit all needs and budgets. DigiWidget gives you great quality and even better prices.

Effective URLs for your search listings

People online generally want to answer their queries and find the resources they seek as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Additionally, many ‘Net users are not particularly adept at using search engines most effectively, and find that results for their searches are often not as relevant as they had hoped. For these reasons it is best to use a URL that will take the visitor direct to the specific content they are seeking, and not to the homepage of your site.

Managing campaigns on Google AdWords

Google provide the most advanced system for managing keyword variations. With Overture or Espotting, your search terms must match almost exactly with the words used in the search. On Google, however, your listing can be shown for any search that merely includes your selected words, unless you have deliberately excluded them.

Google have an extra level of ‘review’ for listings, in that if any campaign fails to attain a 0.5 percent click-through rate, they will drop the campaign automatically.

Google are the only PPC search listings provider that will allow you to have multiple ads targeting the same keywords. One advantage of this is that you can simultaneously run more than one style of ad, and directly compare the performance.

Google do not display their AdWords advertising in strict order of bid price, but rather factor in the click-through rate too, so that relevant advertisers can compete with companies with less relevant (but higher ROI) products and services.

With all Google campaigns, you need to focus on gaining the highest click-through rate that you can, as this will give you better exposure for less cost.

Dealing with competition

One thing that will certainly happen sooner or later with campaigns is that you will have to take rival bids and competitor actions into account in your strategy. The first time that this is likely to happen is when you first bid for a specific search term and find there is already a rival bid.

It is vital to know enough about your own ROI to accurately determine what your absolute maximum bid per visitor for each search term can be without diminishing your profit per sale. This is something your own tracking of results must tell you and without accurate data you should always play safe. Assume a 1%-2% conversion rate unless your data shows otherwise.

Your competition may very well not understand this marketing model or their own ROI and so may outbid you to the detriment of their own business. This can be hard to take at the time, but there are plenty of failed companies to show that those who understand ROI win in the longer term.

Never be drawn into overbidding which would eat away at your profit margin. If another company does outbid you remember the value we showed earlier of choosing more specific search terms, which most companies don’t think of. You have an unfair advantage of this knowledge – use it.

While still talking of competition, it is important to regularly review your bids, your competitors and your overall search placement. Your competitors will not drop you a line to tell you when they have outbid you so it is important that you review your own campaigns frequently.

One of the most important reasons for regularly reviewing your campaign is that a competitor may suddenly cease to compete for a certain search phrase. This may enable you to drop the amount of your own bids considerably without loss of position. Remember you only need to be 1p higher than the next highest bid. Anything more means that you are throwing away profit.

Without naming names there are countless examples where you can find the number one bid at around 30p, while the number two bid is at 8p. The owner of the number one bid is spending 22p per click more than needed. This represents an overspend of 375%.

Bidding Wars

Generally bidding wars are bad for both competing bidders. Bidders who do not fully understand the ROI of their search terms may pay far more than they are worth.

Even though a smarter bidder may have reached the ceiling bid he is prepared to run to, he may sometimes deliberately bid higher to force the less wise competitor into a massive overspend. To do this he would push the bidding price up for just one or two days (budget allowing) and then drop his bid back down to the minimum required to be in second place.

Many companies forget to drop their bid after this kind of bidding battle. Therefore, a smarter bidder has a good chance of having that competitor continue with the massive overspend indefinitely. In fact, since many companies allocate a total monthly budget to their account, the above tactic may cause the account to become depleted before each month is finished. When an account is depleted, all listings for that account are removed until the account is once more in credit.

In the best-case scenario where a close competitor is overbidding for a large number of search terms the tactic described above could potentially result in the competitor’s monthly spend being reached in just one week, causing his listings to disappear entirely for the remainder of each month. In other words, he would be number one for one week, the smarter competitor would be number one for three weeks of the month, and the competitor is spending far more each month for this.

Bid tactics to minimise time-wasters

One of the biggest headaches of PPC listings is that many people using certain search terms may be looking for something quite different to what you had expected when you decided to use that search term. However, if they click your listing, you have to pay for it, even if they buy nothing.

You can use the Description of your listing to mention any limitations, such as if you were only supplying the UK market, for example. This can help prevent clicks from people who simply will not buy because of such limitations (e.g. shipping costs).

A variation on this tactic is to deliberately choose Titles and Descriptions that do not attract clicks, but make a positive brand awareness statement. In this way, you can ensure that many people see your company name at the minimum of costs. Remember, with PPC you only pay for the click-throughs – all the eyes that see your listing but do not click are ‘free advertising’.

[Diane]

Wow Ammon, what a great reply. So much information. Thank you very much for the info and for spending the time to put it up here on the forum. I bet the client will be surprised that it isn't so easy after all!

Thanks again.

Diane

[glyn]

Depends how many keywords you are targetting to determine whether monitoring is necessary.

Things like MatchDriver I believe does a similar thing to that which Google does nowadays. Therefore you have to be careful you don't burn your balance.

Glyn

[Web Diversity]

Depends how many keywords you are targetting to determine whether monitoring is necessary.

I'd have to say that monitoring is ALWAYS necessary.

By tracking every click you can refine a campaign to get the most out of it.

Probably one of the least utilised facilities on Google Adwords Select is negative keywords. Unless it's an integral part of your offering one that should almost be on by default is the keyword "free". If you are paying for the traffic the last thing you want is a tire kicking tight wad who wants something for nothing.

Ammon is right with what he said. One thing I'd add is the word "niche". If competitive is too expensive, more specific doesn't work the way you expect, turn to niche keywords that exists in every sector, on every PPC.

To give you an example of this :

The keyword "epson printer" is currently for sale on Overture US for $1.78 a click. The term "epsom printer" is currently for sale on Overture US for 31 cents. Last month the latter had over 14,000 searches made for it and nobody will argue against me in thinking that the poor spellers of this world are looking for the same product but going niche can get you a bigger slice of the pie. (The day PPC's have a spell checker is the day PPC will cease to work!)

Other niches could be to bid singular and plurals. some of your competition will only bid singulars and others will bid plurals and not realise that on some PPC's you can bid both.

You can try suffixes and prefixes so it might be "uk widgets" and "widgets uk" and some PPC's will sell both.

On some of the lesser known PPC's click spam is a big issue. Using an industrial strength tracking system will save you a lot of money in fraudulent clicks or give you the ammunition to approach the PPC provider and decline to accept traffic from specific search partners.

If you have 50 clicks from a partner and 49 of them arrive at your landing page and last less than 5 seconds then it could well be some sort of bot that is creating the "clicks".

Be prepared to change the titles/descriptions on ads that don't have a good ROI. If you can't get your conversions and ROI up to a decent level, eliminate the word from your pool. Don't get all sentimental on increased traffic volumes. Those poor performing keywords are like lazy employees (sales or marketing ones at that!) and you need to be ruthless with them.

I'll go as far as to say if you can't track it then don't do it. To use an analogy: If I gave you a bow and arrow and told you that behind a wall was the target and you had to shoot over the wall and guess whether you hit the bullseye or not how long would you do it for?

If you can't measure the success of your campaigns in cold hard cash then don't do PPC. Some people say to me "ah, but I am actually offering a free newsletter subscription, so I can't measure that in cold hard cash". My answer to that is that you can.

We offer a free web ranking report to visitors to our site, on the basis that for every A free reports we do, B will turn into a meaningful dialogue and C become clients. On that basis if we take the profit from C and divide it by A then we can say that each report will earn us £D. If there is no ongoing revenue stream then if the margin you want to make is say 50% then you should have an inkling as to the sort of price you can go to when bidding for traffic. That is a simplistic way of measuring ROI on intangible value sales.

My only other bit of advice would be to try to avoid some of the lesser known PPC's as a testing ground and to stick with the tried and trusted first.

Good luck.

Jim Banks
http://www.webdiversity.co.uk
Don't let your web site kill your business

[Black_Knight]

Great to see you here, Jim

An excellent post to announce your presence too.