PPC Bid Management

PPC bid management isn’t just about ‘getting to number 1′, it’s about buying clicks that are going to convert at a financially justifiable rate.

But rewind – it’s also about impressions. Because if you bid high, you are likely to appear high and if you appear high, you’ll get more impressions from which you must get a good number of clicks to maintain a high quality score – remember that?

Quick recap – quality score is the metric that Google multiplies your bid by to calculate your ad’s position. In other words, a high quality score means that you’ll be able to out-position some of your competitors with a lower price.

So… getting back to my original point – if you bid high on the wrong keyword or use poor ad text, you’re going to increase your impressions but not necessarily your clicks. This will make your click-through-rate drop and quality score drop simultaneously.

Why does this matter?

Because the quality score that a keyword has is calculated by the performance of your whole account! So what looks like an unrelated experiment could actually be affecting your cost-per-click (ie your margin) of other keywords!

What should you do?

So blindly bidding on keywords can both decrease your quality score at the same time as being a high-risk ‘all-in’, ‘head-first’ marketing strategy,

Instead, you should use what we call ‘stacking’. This means you should:

1. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find out the estimated position 1-3 bid for a search term

2. Bid this amount for the [exact match] version of the keyword

3. Bid on this keyword again (in the same ad group) using “phrase match” – but use 70% of this bid

4. And finally, bid on the broad match using just 50% of the bid

We sometimes keep the broad match version of a keyword paused until we’ve seen how successful the phrase and exact match is doing or, alternatively, you could put the broad matches in their own separate campaign to give your safer phrase/exact match bets what I call ‘budget immunity’ – ie prevent the unpredictable broad matches from eating up the low-risk budget of your phrase/exact matches.

So PPC bid management is a bit more complex than it first seems but if you appreciate how to use match-types and the effect of quality score, you’re well on your way!

If you’d like any help on this, don’t hesitate to call us on 0843 289 2336 or contact us using our online form.

Google Adwords PPC Tip: Use Ad Scheduling

Here’s a really quick and easy way to improve your Google AdwordsPPC campaigns – turn on ad scheduling!

What’s Ad Scheduling?

Ad scheduling is simply configuring your campaigns to be on or off at given times of the day. Now there are 2 key considerations that you need to take into account:

1. When your users are likely to search for your product/service – this can vary significantly according to whether your offering is B2B or B2C.

2. When your competitors are likely to be showing their ads. We have observed that it is often the case that the competition begins to disappear towards the end of the day as daily budgets run out. When this happens, the bids can drop a little bit and your conversion rate can go up.

What Should You Do?

Your aim here is to make sure your ads are showing to the people you want to attract (of course it is!)… but it is also to ensure that you aren’t wasting your budget on the people who you don’t want to attract. Typically these would be people in foreign countries that you don’t sell to. So here’s what you need to do:

1. Start by making sure that ‘Accelerated’ ad display is off and that your ads are showing 24 hours a day – because we’re going to gather some data to find out the conversion rate on an hourly basis, which can be seen in Google Analytics.

2. Set up a Goal in Google Analytics to measure visits to your conversion page.

3. Let the campaign run for 250 conversions. It doesn’t have to be this high but we regard 250 as the benchmark for getting results that are vaguely reliable.

3. Once this has been achieved, use Google Analytics to see the conversion rate per hour of the day. This can be seen in Traffic Sources / Campaigns / Adwords Campaigns

4. Once you can see this, you should be able to determine when best to run your ads. This will clearly be a decision you make in conjunction with the daily budget you have available.

5. Set your ad display to ‘accelerated’ in your campaign settings so you can scale your campaign up.

6. Check that your budget is correct and that you are not running out before the day is over!

And You Thought It Was Just A Simple Setting!

Getting this right isn’t rocket science but there is more thought behind it than you might have first though. This is a real chance to get some competitive advantage because most business don’t get this right but if your lights are on when everyone else is closed and there are still customers outside then you could be hitting a goldmine…

Call us on 0843 289 2336 or use our online form if you would like any free advice.

Google Adwords PPC: Questions You Need To Ask

Having optimised adwords accounts since the Overture days, it has struck me how the vast majority of Adwords users/companies don’t really know what they are buying.

When you buy advertising space or PR, you would normally expect to have a meeting with a sales rep, get shown everything about the product/service you are buying and work out which advertising space, which message and which price suits you best. In short, you would evaluate most marketing channels in details to ensure they fit into your marketing mix.

Yet with Google Adwords there still seems to be a strange ‘lets do Adwords’ approach to things, with many marketing managers and directors already committed to doing ‘Google’ far before the above process has even started.

So what questions should you be asking at this stage?

1. What are our ‘SMART’ objectives?

This means defining your maximum feasible CPA (cost per acquisition or conversion), your minumum volume and the timeframe in which you want to achieve these 2 targets. It is not simply saying lets see what happens!

2. What will our daily budget be and how many clicks can we expect to buy with that budget?

Just deciding on a budget is almost meaningless if you are serious about PPC. When you do PPC, you buy clicks and turn these clicks into profit – so you need to know how many clicks you are buying to make genuine estimations on what you can expect to pull out the other side. If we say the average website has a 5% conversion rate then you’ll need 20 clicks to get one customer. Google’s Keyword Tool will tell you what kind of cost-per-click to expect for a given keyword, meaning you can then plug the figures in and make some forecasts.

Furthermore, from an optimisation point of view, we always say that, to make a valid judgement on whether a keyword is working for you or not, we need 200 clicks for that keyword. The faster those clicks happen, the faster your campaign will be optimised so, generally, the more you spend the better value you’ll get for your clicks because we can optimise sooner and get those extra conversions coming through.

3. How are we going to measure success?

For e-Commerce sites, this is something we can do for you using Google Analytics. If your aim is to generate leads for offline selling then we’ll need to look how we can streamline Adwords with your database. Many lead generation businesses successfully implement Adwords conversion tracking yet are still largely blind to what is making them successful because they cannot see which keywords are actually producing the sales.

4. Do we have a good landing page?

A good landing page is one which continues the ‘scent’ that the user’s search query follows. Therefore, as a starting point you want a landing page which targets the most popular keywords that you think users will type in and one that corresponds closely with the message being conveyed in your Google Ad Text.

If you’re addressing the above 4 points then you’re in a good position to start PPC. If not… then we’d really recommend you stop spending money on Adwords now and spend a bit of time answering these questions!

If you’d like some help preparing for PPC marketing, feel free to give us a call on 020 3 239 8565 or email us at ppc@managed-ppc.co.uk.

Alternatively – you can use our online form and we’ll give you a call back.

Are You Using Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are one of the most powerful methods of Adwords optimisation available – yet so many campaigns we see don’t have any in them at all!

If you are using broad or phrase matches (see my post on this if you are not sure what they are), then you are not in full control over which keywords you are advertising under and which ones you aren’t. That’s not a bad thing, it’s actually a great thing because it means your campaign is being driven by what users type in and not what you think they type in.

Of course – the catch is that you are also end up having your ad shown for completely irrelevant search queries. An example of this would be a company advertising training courses that appears when people type in ‘train times’.

You might say – ‘well, who would actually click on my Ad if that happened?’. Well, people do click and your money does get wasted!

So this is where negative keywords come in. By running the Adwords ‘Search Query Performance’ report or, using the new interface, going to your keyword tab and pressing the ‘See Search Terms…’ button, you’ll be able to see the *actual* search terms that people have typed in to see/click/convert within your campaign.

From here, you can mark terms as Negative Keywords on an ad-group level so that your ads don’t show for such terms.

You can also mark search terms to be added into your campaign as bid-for keywords to give you more control over bid, ad text and landing page.

Negative keywords are an absolute cornerstone of Adwords success. If you aren’t using them then you are effectively paying for advertising space in completely inappropriate places…

The Secret To Good Ad Copy

Writing good text Ads is a key part of the PPC marketing process. Your ad needs to be both irresistable and have the correct ‘scent’.

The ‘irresistability’ of your ad, will drive Click Through Rate (ie the number of visitors your site gets and the resulting sales volume) and the ‘scent’ of your ad will drive your margin (relevant ads whose ‘scent’ is carried through on to the landing page’ will get a good conversion rate and, therefore a low cost per acquisition (CPA).

We recommend using a combination of intrigue, features, benefits and a very strong call to action.

Generating intrigue: Try using words like ‘discover’, ‘the secret’ (sound familiar?), ‘revealed’…

Features & benefits: Always start with the benefit in the 1st line of your ad text and then move on to the supporting feature in line 2.

Calls to action: Make sure your customer knows that your offer ends soon. You can strengthen your call to action by relating it to a specific seasonal time such as ‘Offer Ends Bank Holiday Monday’. This way, customers are more likely to believe that the offer is real and, more importantly, limited.

Our final tip is to always use the keyword in the headline and, where possible, in the display URL. Relevance is key and these words will be bolded by Google in the search results page.

Do You Know What Keyword Match Types Are?

Knowing your match types is absolutely critical to success as it is using these correctly that determines which keywords your ads show up for.

Match types are Google’s way of allowing you to control a keyword’s reach. In other words, you get to decide whether you want to advertise under specific terms only, such as “purple nike trainers” or more general terms, such as “trainers”.

Here’s how Google describes match-types:

1. Broad match: keyword
   Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
2. Phrase match: “keyword”
   Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
3. Exact match: [keyword]
   Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
4. Negative match: -keyword
   Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term

When we create campaigns, we usually start by only using phrase and exact matches of the keywords that our research suggests we bid for.

Using the broad match can be very dangerous but it can also be very rewarding, as it offers you the chance to find new ‘niche’ keywords that your research hasn’t picked up. When we turn on broad matches, we usually advise doing so in a separate campaign in order to protect the daily budget of your phrase and exact matches.

Once you know which broad match keywords work, you can then move them into your ‘main’ campaign.

Advertise Cheaply With Google’s Partners

You can advertise on a wide variety of search engines by running a Search Partner campaign. In our experience, these partners often bring lower conversion costs due to the lower amount of competition.

With PPC still growing and bid prices rising, finding niche areas to source your customers is critical and we can’t think of an easier way to do this than running a Search Partner campaign.

Get Cheaper Clicks With A High Quality Score

If you’re just entering the world of Adwords, you may not know that Google rewards advertisers who get a high ‘Quality Score’.

What Is Quality Score?

Google defines this as:

• The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network – not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

For more info on quality score – take a look at Google’s Quality Score page.