The Adventures of PPC Hero » Bid/Budget Management

Align your bids with your CPA within 5 minutes using AdWords Editor and Excel

guestblogger — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:52:17 +0000

That’s right, changing your bids isn’t something you want to spend a lot of time on, and if your goal is to reach a certain CPA (or CPL, CPS, CPO, etc.) it doesn’t have to take you much more than a couple of minutes, even for large accounts.

But before giving you the theory and step by step instructions, there are a few things we should agree on about the kind of bid management we’re going to do:

‘Great bids can’t fix a lousy campaign’. This is actually the title of chapter 15 of the ClickEquations eBook (highly recommended) and it’s right on the money. It basically comes down to this: if the relationship between the search queries, your keywords, ads and landing pages isn’t thoughtfully managed or optimized, bidding will not solve your problems.

CPA might not be the optimal KPI for you. Especially if you sell goods with greatly differing prices or margins, goals like ROAS or ROI are more suitable. This article however, is about reaching a certain CPA. You might also use different CPA’s for different campaigns, that is not a problem with this method.
If you measure your variable conversion value with the AdWords conversion tracker, then consider the method described by Brad Geddes in his article (Setting Max CPC) to align your bids with your ROI goals.

The AdWords conversion tracker credits the last keyword (and corresponding ad) that was clicked before the conversion that followed. So when we use the AdWords conversion data, we’re also bidding based upon last click attribution. This might not be optimal, especially if you have a lot of keywords that often assist conversions. Luckily, you can find these keywords in your Search Funnels report and manually credit assisting keywords, if necessary.
Conversion attribution is a subject worth exploring. Don’t forget to read what Andrew Goodman (Traffick) and Adam Goldberg (ClearSaleing) have to say about it before you join this debate.

Consider the bids that the discussed method will provide you as suggestions, based on historical data. Your past data might not be predictive of the future, and when we change bids based on your statistics, we assume just that. So if you know that this assumption isn’t valid, then use your own judgment to change bids.

We are going to change bids on the keyword level. So it will not work for your campaigns on the Display Network or for search keywords that have no conversions (more about these later).

Conversion rates do not vary by position. The debate is still out on this one, although according to Google it shouldn’t vary much. As always, you should test this for yourself, but I personally believe there are tons of things that influence conversion rate more than ad position.
And when changing bids based on conversation rates (which we will do), we simply have to assume these will not vary by ad position.

You track conversions with the AdWords conversion tracker and are bidding manually. These are requirements for the method to work.
Maybe you use the Conversion Optimizer in some campaigns, needless to say that you can’t change bids manually in these campaigns. And if the conversion optimizer is giving you good results, you shouldn’t want to.
However, you can still use the method for campaigns that are not using automated bid management.

Theory

Before we go to the how-to section of this article, let me explain the simple theory it is based on:

Your CPA is the result of your CPC and conversion rate.

To calculate your CPA, you multiply your CPC by the number of clicks you need to get a conversion. If a click costs you $0.50 and you need a hundred clicks for a conversion, then your CPA will be $50.

You probably already knew that. And we also know that a lot of factors influence CPC (like quality score) and conversion rate (like your landing page) and that you should always keep optimizing these.

Now let’s turn the equation around: if you know that your target CPA is $40 and you need a hundred clicks for a conversion (i.e. your conversation rate is 1%), how much should you pay for that click?
Exactly, you should pay no more than $0.40 for that click, which happens to be 1% multiplied by $40. Consequently, if your conversion rate is 2% you can pay up to $0.80 to reach your target CPA of $40. And if your conversion rate is 100% you can bid your full CPA for that keyword. Just make sure your conversion tracker isn’t on the landing page instead of the thank you page first.

Hence, to calculate the right bid to reach your CPA, you simply have to multiply the conversion rate of a keyword with its target (or max) CPA.

So we’ll consider conversion rate as a given and CPC as the variable we will change to reach our CPA.

So how do we quickly do this with AdWords Editor and Excel?

1) Open your account with AdWords Editor, get recent changes and download statistics for the date range you want to use to base your bid decisions on. I can’t tell you which date range is the right one. On the one hand you need enough conversions to be able to make decisions, on the other hand you don’t want to go too far back in time for the data to be representative. So choose a date range you’re comfortable with.

2) Select the keywords tab on the account level to see all keywords within your account.

3) Sort your keywords by conversions (make sure you have the conversions column in your view) and select all keywords that have at least 1 conversion:

Campaigns, ad groups and keywords have been blurred on purpose in the screenshots.

4) Copy this selection.

5) Paste this selection into a new Excel file. The only columns we need are: Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Keyword Type, Max CPC and Conversion Rate (1-per-click, or many-per-click if you prefer to use many-per-click). You can safely remove all other columns.

6) Now, in an empty column to the right, insert a formula that multiplies the conversion rate with your target (or max) CPA. In the example below the conversion rate of 8.06% (in cell F2) is multiplied by the target CPA of $40

Important: we are changing your Max CPC’s. As you know, this isn’t the same as your actual CPC. So you can enter a number that is slightly higher than your target CPA into the formula, if you feel comfortable doing so.

Furthermore, if you have different CPA’s for different campaigns, it is best to make these changes one campaign at a time (by filtering out all the other campaigns in Excel).

7) Populate this column by double clicking the fill handle (the skinny plus sign that appears in the bottom right corner) in the cell in which you just entered the formula. Now all your new CPC’s are calculated:

8) Now that you have your CPC’s that are aligned with your CPA and conversion rate in this column, we just need copy and paste them (as values) back into to the Max CPC column. You can overwrite the existing Max CPC’s in this column.

9) If you want, you can format the Max CPC column to contain numbers and round off to two decimals. This isn’t necessary for the AdWords Editor import we’re going to do next.
However, AdWords Editor will not round up your CPC’s, but just use the first 2 decimals. So 3.536 will become 3.53. If you want this to become 3.54, format this column first.

10) Select and copy the Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Keyword Type and Max CPC (with your new CPC’s) columns in Excel.

11) Go back to AdWords Editor and select the Keywords view on the account level.

12) Click on the ‘Make Multiple Changes’ button and select ‘Add/Update Multiple Keywords’

13) Now paste the selection you just made in Excel into the Keywords area. Make sure the box ‘My keyword information below includes columns for campaign and ad group names.’ is selected.

14) When you click the Next button, it should say how many keywords will be updated. If you get the message that new Ad Groups or Campaigns will be created, something went wrong, so make sure you copied all the right columns.
If some keywords get ignored, that’s just because they already had the Max CPC you imported, so that’s fine.

15) Congratulations, you have now aligned your CPC’s with your CPA and conversion rate!

Before you post these changes consider a few things:

Some keywords may have gotten a very high Max CPC. Theoretically these CPC’s are justified, but you may not want to to set your bids this high. To review these, just order your keywords by Max CPC in AdWords Editor and manually lower the bids that are too high for your taste.

You didn’t change the bids of keywords with 0 conversions. This doesn’t mean that these should stay untouched, especially if they accrue a lot of costs.
You will have to manually adjust or even pause these keywords according to your CPA goals. For example, you could pause all keywords that have cost you (at least) 2 times your CPA and still didn’t convert. And you could lower bids to the first page bid estimates for all keywords that have cost you between 1 and 2 times your CPA and didn’t convert.
If they are early buying cycle keywords, you might want to set them apart, assign other goals to them and let the Budget Optimizer do the bidding, as Brad Geddes describes in this article.

These are just suggestions to get you thinking in a methodical way about bid management, feel free to use any limits and rules that work for you.

Use the advanced search and advanced bid changes options in AdWords Editor to quickly find these keywords and make these bid changes or reorganizations.

You didn’t change the bids in your campaigns on the Display Network (if any). However, you could apply the same logic on the ad group level instead of the keyword level and change bids on the ad group level accordingly.

The title of this article promised you to align your bids within 5 minutes. Maybe the first few times will take you a bit longer, but once you get the hang of it, you will be done in a couple of minutes.

For me personally, it certainly beats reviewing keywords one by one and increasing or decreasing bids based on CPA & position.

If you’re going to try this out for your account, I’d love to hear your experiences! And If you’re not, I’d love to hear why

Guest Blogger Bio: Wijnand Meijer is Sr. Search Advertising Consultant at Netsociety, an online marketing agency based in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Brussels (Belgium).
Once a freelance web designer and online copywriter (between 2000 and 2006), he specialized in PPC in 2007 and is currently managing paid search campaigns for clients in the travel, finance and retail sectors.

Top 10 Tactics To Help When You Are Projected To Be Over Budget

Jen — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:35:01 +0000

Working with an unlimited budget would be wonderful, but since that isn’t the case for anyone I know, I thought I’d share 10 things that we look at when an account is projected to be over budget at the end of the month. By managing your budget throughout the month you’ll be able to stay on top of your spend, and hopefully you won’t be in a situation where you have to completely pause your account.

As you go through the following suggestions, keep these two questions in mind:

Are you spending without converting?

If you are spending money without getting any conversions, something has to change! Start at the campaign level, then look at ad groups within the problem campaigns, and make adjustments or pause keywords or ad groups as needed to help cut back on costs.

Is your cost per lead (CPL) too high?

The majority of our clients are leads based (remember a lead doesn’t have to be an eCommerce sale), and we set goals for our CPL as well as our budget. If all of your accounts are converting, find the campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that convert at the highest CPL, and work with those first.

Identify the “problem” search engine. Most of our clients run on Google, Yahoo and MSN all at the same time, and while it’s easy to focus on the largest spending account (usually Google), by doing so you could be overlooking your biggest problem areas. Even if an engine only spends 10% of your monthly budget, it’s a waste of money if it isn’t generating leads, and you need to start with that account first.
Lower campaign daily budgets. Look at your campaigns, and identify those that are spending their daily limit. Start with the campaigns that convert the least, and cut their daily budgets back. To make sure you don’t cut back too far, first calculate your estimated savings depending on how much you cut back the budget by. For example: If your average daily spend is $20, it is June 15^th, and you want to cut back the daily budget to $15, you will save $75. I calculated this estimate by using the following calculation:
- Calculate the number of days that are left in the month
- Calculate your estimated savings by using:
(Current daily budget * Days left in month) – (New daily budget * Days left in month)
Sort by CPL. Starting at a high level will help you identify the big issues that need to be addressed first. Look within the interface to find the campaigns that have the highest CPL for the month. Once you have identified those campaigns, look at their ad groups, and evaluate them on the following criteria:
- High CPL – Though your CPL is high, you are still getting conversions, so you want to be sure that you don’t cut out any potential leads. First find the keywords that have a 0% conversion rate for a long period of time (at LEAST 3 months), and pause them. Watch the account, and if costs don’t improve, look at the ad group level, and pause any ad group that hasn’t historically converted following the same criteria you used for keywords.
- No Conversions – If you aren’t converting this month, don’t just start pausing things! Follow the steps above, and first identify the keywords and ad groups that have not converted for a while. If that doesn’t help cut down your spend, start pausing keywords and ad groups that either that have a very low conversion rate, or only have a few conversions per month.
Run long-term reports. You want to be sure that you always make decisions based on a large enough amount of data. Run 30 day, 60 day, YTD and last year reports to analyze your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords to help find areas of concern. By assessing metrics like your cost, CPL and conversions for long periods of time you’ll be able to spot items that have always been a problem, and should be paused, or items that used to convert that are paused, but can be turned back on after a little bit of optimization.
Adjust keyword bids. Before you start adjusting bids, remember that you do NOT need to be in position 1 to get conversions. Instead, focus on being on page 1 (to make sure you are seen), and make your bid adjustments based on overall ROI. We typically target positions 3-5, but you will need to make decisions based on your business goals, and what the data tells you is your optimal position.
Add site exclusions. If you are running campaigns on the content network, make sure you are adding site exclusions. To do this in Google, run a Placement Performance report, and identify the sites that are either spending money without converting, or have a high CPL. Be VERY careful to run this report on a long enough period of time to make sure that you aren’t excluding a site that is typically good, but may be having a slow spell. We also recommend excluding sites based on the URL, not the entire domain when running this report. We’ve found that some pages on various sites will work, so if you cut out the entire domain you will be eliminating conversion opportunities.

If you are diligent about running placement reports on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to go into the interface and look at a minimum of 60 days to double check that there aren’t any domains that are spending without converting. By regularly blocking URLs, when you do check the interface you’ll be more confident that blocking a site on the domain level within the interface will be beneficial, and can help reduce your spend.
Add negative keywords. Remember to regularly run search query reports (SQR). These will help you identify keywords that you want to block to help reduce irrelevant clicks, thereby lowering your overall cost.
Pause underperforming ads. Look at your ads on a fairly regular basis to find those that have clicks without conversions. When possible, pause the ads that are underperforming, and you will help increase your quality score, and ultimately lower your bids, which will help reduce spend.
Pause ad groups that haven’t converted. If you’ve made smaller changes within the account and you are still projected to be over budget, you will need to identify entire ad groups that can be paused. As with any other change you will want to make sure you have enough data to make a good decision.

View all of your ad groups, and sort by CPL. You will then be able to quickly identify the ad groups that have a high CPL with a low amount of conversions, or those that have spent without converting at all. I typically start on the month-to-date view to see which ad groups are currently having problems, but before I pause anything I look back 30-60 days (or more depending on the amount of traffic), and make my decisions based on longer term data. If the ad group hasn’t converted very much over the longer period of time, and it hasn’t converted this month either, it’s fairly safe to say that you can pause it without sacrificing leads.

Tip: Be aware that when you are pausing ad groups within a campaign that you still have the potential to spend your daily campaign budget. If, for example, you have 5 ad groups within a campaign, and one of them is spending 60% of the daily budget but not converting, and the others are only spending 10% each. When you pause the ad group that is spending the majority of the budget the other ad groups will then have the opportunity to spend more, and you may not end up saving any money. As long as you are aware of this, you can monitor the other ad groups, and quickly identify if the campaign daily spend needs to be cut back too.
Pause underperforming campaigns. After looking at all other aspects in the account, if you need to make some serious cutbacks you will need to look at the campaign level. You will want to focus not only on the campaigns that are spending with little to no conversions, but you will want to identify those that are reaching their daily spend. When you pause campaigns that are reaching their daily spend, you will have a concrete idea of how much you are going to save, and can therefore calculate what your total savings is going to be, and know when you’ve paused enough to come in under budget.

As I mentioned before, at the end of the day you want to make sure that you are managing your budget throughout the month so you aren’t forced to pause the account. The most important thing is that you constantly tweak your accounts, and you don’t try to do all of these things at once. Make small changes first, and focus on the more granular levels. Always be aware of the number of conversions you are cutting out when pausing or decreasing budgets, and be sure to communicate the effects of your changes to your clients. There are some people that would rather go over budget if it means bringing in leads, so by being transparent with clients you can make sure that you are managing the account in such a way that you will help them meet the goals that are their top priority.

http://www.ppchero.com/

Combining Yahoo Interface Reports with the Desktop Tool for Bid Adjustments

Jen — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:32:40 +0000

The Issue:

The keyword report from the interface gives you the average CPC, not your max CPC, and the desktop tool doesn’t show you the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you will want to see to base your decisions on, like average position and click-through rate.

A Solution:

I’ve always been a big fan of using excel to help make tasks as “automatic” as possible, so I wanted to share the following process for combining the interface report with the desktop tool to make your bid changes. There is a lot of information here, but I promise that if you go through it a few times it will shave time off of your bid adjustments, especially if you are still manually typing bids into the interface one by one.

The point of downloading both the report and the desktop tool is so we can do two things:

Pull the actual CPC into the report that shows us our KPIs.
Create a file with the updated bids that you can easily import into the desktop tool.

Formulas To Use:

First you will need to know a little about the following formulas in excel. I’ll explain how to use them later on:

Vlookup – This formula is used when you want to look up, and pull over information from another sheet. When creating a vlookup formula I use the following saying to help keep everything in order: I want to look up “X” in “this range”, and what I want to pull is in column number “Y”, and if it can’t find what I’m looking for, give me “FALSE”. Now, if you’ve never done this formula, I’m sure that saying doesn’t really make much sense, but it will be easier to understand when you put it into practice below.

Concatenate – This formula allows you to combine text and/or cells together. You will need to put a comma between each piece that you are concatenating, and remember to put quotes around spaces and text that you are adding. If you’d like some more information, you can review another post of mine about adding tracking parameters to URLs.

Setting Up Your Bid Change Workbook

The first thing you will need to do your bid changes is a keyword report from the Yahoo! interface, and a download of the keywords from the Yahoo! desktop tool.

To get the keyword report from the interface, follow these steps:

Log into your Yahoo! account, and go to the Reports tab.
Choose the Keyword Performance report from the left hand navigation.
Set your time frame for the report. We typically run our reports for 30-day time periods, but you can do more or less depending on the amount of volume your account gets.
Download the report to a .csv, and open the file. Save the workbook as an excel document, and give it an appropriate name.
The report heading information is not necessary, and all of those rows should be deleted so cell A1 contains the header “Keyword”.
The row immediately below the report headers can also be deleted, because we don’t need to know any of the totals.

Once you have cleaned everything up your sheet should look like this:

Looking at the interface report you will see that there is a column for cpc (in yellow above), but as I mentioned before, this is the AVERAGE cpc over the time period you are looking at, and NOT the actual cpc bid that you have set. Because this data isn’t what we want, you can delete all of the data in that column.

To get the keyword download from the desktop tool, follow these steps:

Open up the desktop tool, and make sure you have downloaded the most recent data of the account you want to look at. You do this by clicking on the “Get Account” button in the upper right hand corner, and entering your login information.
When the account download is finished, make sure you have the entire account highlighted in the left hand navigation, and click on the keyword tab so you are looking at every keyword in the account.
Export the entire account to excel.
1. Go to “More Actions” in the upper right hand column, and choose “Export to Bulksheet (CSV).
2. Click the account box so all of your campaigns are automatically selected, and hit “Export”
3. Save the file, and open it.
4. Copy the entire sheet, and paste it into a new tab in the report download file that you saved earlier.
5. You won’t need the desktop export file anymore, so go ahead and close it.

Now that you’ve downloaded everything you will have an excel file with 2 sheets, one with the interface data, and one with the desktop tool data.

If you think about it, the probability of having duplicate keywords in your account is pretty high. For example, if you have restructured your account and moved “Keyword A” from “Ad Group 1” to Ad Group 2”, even though you’ve paused it in Ad Group 1 it will show up in the account download. When you download your account it would then look something like this:

If you were to do a vlookup in this example, the cpc bid for Keyword A would pull from the first time it shows up, which would in Ad Group 1 where it is paused. But we would want to know where it is Active in Ad Group 2. But never fear – it is possible to get around this by concatenating the Campaign, Ad Group, and Keyword, to create a unique “name” that we can vlookup against. That may sound more difficult than it is, so let’s walk through the few quick steps to set this up.

First, you will need to insert a column on the far left of the sheet, like so:

Then, starting in cell A2, you will need to create a concatenation formula that will combine your campaign, ad group, and keyword into one long phrase. You can copy and paste the following into your sheet:

=CONCATENATE(D2,C2,B2)

Drop it down for all of the other rows in your sheet. Just be sure to copy this formula into cell A2 when you start. Once you do that, your sheet will look like this:

Set up the second tab of your workbook the same way, but use this formula instead:

=CONCATENATE(B2,C2,G2)

Tip: Double check that your concatenation is pulling from the Campaign, Ad Group, then Keyword columns on both sheets, as you may have different report layouts set up. At this point I would also save the file if you haven’t done so already.

Combining the reports

A simple vlookup is all we need now to pull the actual CPC bid from the keyword download into the interface report. To do this, just copy and paste the following formula into the report in the CPC column:

=VLOOKUP(A2,’Desktop Tool Download’!A:J,10,FALSE)

Be sure to place this formula in the cell H2 when starting, and verify that it is pulling from the correct columns on your sheets. When you have made sure the formula is correct, pull it down to the rest of your rows so your sheet looks like this:

Tip: You’ll notice in the image above that I’ve also added a column header to the far right called “New Bid”. By doing this you can easily type in your new bids, or set up a calculation to increase or decrease your bids. This is also a good way to keep a record of the changes you make so you can revert back to the original bids should your changes cause a negative effect on the campaign.

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed those pesky bids called “Default”. When you see that it means that the keyword is using the ad group default bid, and you can pull that in by doing a vlookup against just the ad group name:

=VLOOKUP(C3,’Desktop Tool Download’!C:J,8,FALSE)

Tip: You will need to change the cell numbers to match your sheet. This is just an example to get you started.

Pulling It All Together

Once you have set your new bids, the final step is to put it back into the format of the desktop tool.

If you’ve been using formulas to get your new bids, copy and paste the values.
Go to the second sheet that contains your desktop tool download.
Highlight the header row, and turn on filters.
Set a custom filter to show you everything that does NOT contain “keyword” in the component type column. Delete all of the rows that are showing.
Take the filter off. You should now only see keywords.
Assuming you have not deleted any columns in either sheet, in the “Sponsored Search Bid (USD)” column enter the following vlookup formula to pull your new bid in:

=VLOOKUP(A2,’Interface KW Report’!A:Q,17,FALSE)

Copy and paste the values of the bids, and format them to be currency.
Delete Column A that contains your concatenated names.
Copy the entire sheet, and save it in a new file as a Unicode Text File. Once the file is saved, change the extension to .csv.

10. Upload the file into the desktop tool using “More Actions”.

If you’ve hung in there until the end, well done! Though this process has enough set up steps that is seems daunting when you are getting started, it really will help shave time off of your bulk bid adjustments in the end.

If you have any other suggestions on how to easily make bulk adjustments, please share them with us!

Generate Extra Revenue this Holiday Season with These 5 PPC Tips

Amber — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:05:51 +0000

Hanapin Marketing is hiring three search engine marketing (SEO + PPC) specialists! We’re the publishers of PPC Hero and SEO Boy and are an award-winning and fast-growing search engine marketing company located in Bloomington, Indiana. You’ll work with clients on both search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, helping drive strategy and day-to-day management. We have a comprehensive and intensive 12-week training program, so while experience in SEO and PPC is helpful, it’s not required. Apply here: http://www.hanapinmarketing.com/careers_open_positions_sms.aspx

Whether it’s Cyber Monday or the week before Christmas, you need to be set and ready to go with your PPC campaigns in advance. Missing out on extra holiday traffic can be detrimental to your revenue. Here are five things you can do now to prepare for this holiday season.

Run keyword reports from last November (2008) through January (2009) to see which keywords converted well last year during the holiday season. More than likely those keywords will perform well again this holiday season. Make sure you bid higher on those particular keywords for the next coming months to take advantage of the additional traffic.
Start running promotions early. If you plan on running any promotions like free shipping, gift with purchase, or a discount, start running that promotion in early or late October, or possibly early November. Yes, the economy is still down, but people still have to buy Christmas presents. Like last year, people are looking for the best offer they can find and are willing to spend more time researching many different websites to find the best offer. Check out your competition to be sure you’re promotional offer beats all others.
Create a holiday gift finder landing page. It’s true that some people know exactly what they’re looking to buy and will type in very specific, long tail keywords. But there are people who are buying gifts for their neighbors, co-workers, or just people they don’t see very often and have no idea what to get these people. By having a gift finder on your site you’re calling out great gift ideas at great prices. You can even categorize your gift finder by price, gender, age, demographic, and some sites even create categories like ‘for the chef’, or ‘for the pet lover’ and will feature these types of products in that category.
Re-activate paused campaigns now. If you have campaigns that are paused during the summer months because they don’t convert well, consider turning them back on for the holiday season. Since so many people are buying even if you get a one-off conversion you may yield a very high ROI.
Be ready for ‘Cyber Monday’. Cyber Monday is known as the Monday after ‘Black Friday’. (Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the largest shopping day of the year for brick and mortar.) Cyber Monday is said to generate sales from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for in-store. Make sure you’re keyword bids are set higher for this day over any other day. If you’re going to have a holiday gift finder, have it up and running on your homepage before this day hits. If you’re going to have a special promotion for the holidays, be sure you have it up and running before this day comes. If you don’t take full advantage of Cyber Monday traffic you’re missing out a lot of potential holiday revenue. This day is also known to have really awesome sales and deals online, so if you don’t have any of those, try and talk your client or upper management to at least do a free shipping promotion on orders of $xx.xx to drive up your average order value.

The biggest tip is to make sure you are prepared and not working on your holiday PPC campaigns when it’s too late. Be ready for the traffic, have your keyword bids and budgets set, and monitor your accounts daily so you can make adjustments if necessary. Happy Holidays!

Beware of Low Bids and Low Budgets When Setting Up Your Google AdWords Account

Amber — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:21:32 +0000

A few weeks back one of my clients performed a search for one of his keywords and it didn’t come up in Google search. So of course I review the keyword in the AdWords interface by checking on the ad diagnostic tool and saw that the keyword was not showing due to a low keyword bid and that it wasn’t on page 1 of the Google results pages.

I had a few co-workers here in the office search for the same keyword and some found our ad, while others did not.

I asked my Google Reps about this and they mentioned two things of particular interest.

1. Because I was hitting my campaign budget almost daily, our ads were only showing periodically in order to keep our ads displaying for most of the day. This was happening despite the fact that all of my campaign settings are set to ‘accelerate’ which means they will show our ad each time someone searches for a keyword until the budget is depleted.

2. They also said that because my keyword bid put us below page 1, our ads would only show part of that time, whether your hitting your daily budget or not.

The ad is showing. It’s not showing all the time because of the low bid, says my Google rep.

I asked for any documentation on this and she didn’t have anything to give to me to support her comment.

The point of the story: watch out for those keywords that are below page 1 in the Google SERPS. If they’re important keywords that must be shown, maybe think about increasing their bids.

Also, I have had this problem with new clients before, where AdWords says their ads aren’t showing, but their campaign budget is set to $5/day and their keyword bids are at $1 each. Obviously, Google is going to stop showing your ads at some point to be sure you don’t go over your campaign daily budget.

And always remember to check your settings for each campaign and if you want your ad to come up as many times as it can throughout the day, then chance your default settings from ‘standard – show ads evenly over time’ to ‘accelerated – show ads as quickly as possible’. This will help you ads be active anytime anyone does a search on your keyword until you have hit your campaign budget.

How to Spend All That Money: A Few PPC Budgeting Strategies

Andrew — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:00:02 +0000

When you are in the process of building a pay-per-click advertising campaign, one of the least enjoyable but most important things to consider is your budget. How, in fact, do you intend to spend your (or your clients’) money?

The answer, as always: It depends. Are you a veteran online who is trying to drive a specific part of the business? Or are you a first-timer trying to find out what exactly happens in this untapped advertising medium? Do you have a thriving storefront business that you’re seeking to expand, or are you an online-only retailer dealing with razor-thin margins?

There’s lots to it, of course, but budgeting always starts with your basic strategy.

With these thoughts in mind, here are a few tactics to consider:

Budget by product line or service offered
Perhaps the most logical to first-time online advertisers, budgeting by product line is probably the easiest to conceptualize. This budgeting tactic involves the simple campaign strategy of devoting a campaign to each individual product line, and setting your daily budget accordingly. Because you have organized your account with product-specific campaigns, you will be able to easily check whether or not you are on track to hit your monthly spend goals or limits.

Budget by desired conversion
If you have a website that seeks to accomplish multiple things, you have a different type of budgeting task. There are many sites that seek to drive, for instance, “Contact us” form completions, online purchases, email newsletter subscriptions, and job applications. Each of these four elements impacts the business in a different and beneficial way.

To budget by desired conversion, then, pool your keywords into relevant groups by conversion type. From there, organize these keyword groups into separate campaigns and track your spend, similar to in the first option. You may run into difficulty here, as several keywords may have overlapping conversion possibilities.

Alternatively, you may consider “by landing page” rather than “by conversion” budgeting. Rather than adjusting keywords on a desired conversion-by-desired conversion basis, you could simply run the same keywords in each campaign, and use advanced dayparting options to focus spend on a different landing page according to the time of day.

In addition, if your company has separate business units or altogether separate budgets handling these tasks, you might want to go so far as to create completely independent online accounts.

Go where the traffic takes you
The most basic tactic is sometimes the best tactic. One budget. One campaign. Press “Go,” and see what happens. Rather than try to make the internet and a competitive online advertising space fit your motives, simply deal with the nature of the market. This is the easiest budgeting tactic, but probably the most harrowing.

It can be particularly helpful for new online advertisers, however, as high conversion rates can indicate your strengths relative to the rest of the online sphere, while high search-traffic terms can call attention to areas where you can expand and improve your business.

Another note on budgeting: I have always found that, at the outset of a campaign, you are better off operating with a full flow of water, rather than a trickle. Be aggressive, and let your keywords build quality score. As the month progresses, more carefully track your day-by-day spend to ensure that you are tracking towards your ultimate goal.

Also, as you set your daily budgets, always remember that, as a rule, weekends will see lower search and click traffic than weekdays. Therefore, never simply construct a monthly budget and divide by 30 to set your daily budget. Consider, instead, that you will probably spend about 80% of your budget from Monday through Friday, though this figure can vary drastically based on the contents of your site and the demographics of your target market.

Do you have any other budgeting tactics that you have used? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Improve PPC Performance with Efficient Bid Management

Andrew — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:31:33 +0000

Bid management –adjusting keyword-level bids in an effort to land in a certain region of the search results – is monotonous, inefficient, and (perhaps) better handled by machines. That said, it is also a crucial tactic that can be used to improve a mature campaign.

Though my colleague mentions it as a crucial weekly task (on Tuesdays), all too often, I see bid editing and bid maintenance as an ignored annoyance by less-devoted PPC practitioners. However, with proper execution and attention to detail, a test of alternative bidding strategies can bring forward great benefits and drive ROI to new heights.

Here are some of the ways to do it best:

Hold Everything Else Constant.
It should go without saying, but make sure that your test is with ad copy that you’re comfortable holding steady for a bit of time. You want to make sure that you only test the impact of alternative bids on results. For this reason, leave your headlines, ad text, display URLs, and landing pages constant.

Do It Over a Weekly Basis.
I’ve previously discussed how, depending on the product or service, different days of the week perform differently. In order to prevent overreaction to a new bidding strategy caused not by the bid, but by the day of the week, start your test on a given day of the week, and wait until the following week to check in on results.

Track Everything. Everything.
An inventory to consider – bid placed, price paid, ad position, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversion rate, total revenue, revenue per sale, cost-per-acquisition, ROI. I have seen an increase in bids show an increase in conversion rate, but with a corresponding drop in average sale that offset the increase in number of sales. (Follow that?) By tracking every metric, you will be sure to see what your ultimate results actually are.

Focus Only on High-traffic Keywords.
Depending on your site and your product line, there are probably just a handful of keywords that are your key drivers of traffic and conversions. These terms, and not the five word (including a verb) long-tail keyword of your dreams, are the ones to test. In order to acquire actionable results, you need actionable data, and this can only be achieved with lots of data. Consider working with your top trafficked term, and move from there.

Challenge Your Own Conventional Wisdom.
It is easy to become complacent with your thinking as a PPC manager, and to draw conclusions too soon. I am generally averse to bidding for top position, due to costs and a belief that the top spot brings in too many impulse clicks for my liking. However, a bid test on a key term with one of my clients showed the bid increase to bring in better traffic (that is, higher conversion rate, bigger-ticket sales) than I had been getting even out of the two or three spot. By the same token, I saw a client’s conversion rate and ROI skyrocket after a drop from mid-position to the bottom of the page. These things happen, and it is up to you as a campaign manager to make sure that you consider all possibilities.

Consider Initiating Tests at the Start of the Month.
For PPC vendors out there, this should be standard operating procedure. Often, clients are in an end-of-the-month review cycle. Initiating a test at the start of the month allows you the opportunity to fail. It is up to you to make up for loss in sales, leads, or registered users during those final three weeks (and, depending on the client relationship, to let the client know that you’re initiating a test in the first place).

Bid management is a tactic so simple, and yet so easy to ignore. I’d love to hear your thoughts on bid maintenance – and your bidding success stories – in the comments.

And Yet Another Wave of Yahoo! ‘Minimum Bid Requirements’ and Keyword Updates

John — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:41:28 +0000

This will admittedly be a short post. But I find it incredibly odd how Yahoo! has programmed their minimum bid system. In lieu of dynamically updating accounts that need attention on an as-needed basis – instead, Yahoo! rolls out massive updates to everyone at once.

For a bit of perspective, with Google, your Quality Score and first-page bidding system is a living breathing thing. When a keyword drops below a certain threshold, your Quality Score drops, and so does your “estimated bid to reach the first page.” This real-time data is extremely important to quality PPC management.

Yahoo! instead pushes out massive changes all at once. Starting yesterday afternoon the entire PPC Hero team started receiving emails with this general message:

This is a courtesy notice to inform you that the minimum bid requirement on one or more of the keywords in your account ‘Generic Account Name‘ [*********] has recently decreased.

And the emails kept coming… all night. I can’t imagine this being a good strategy for Yahoo! pushing all of that out all at once. Plus, for us advertisers, that means we’re potentially in the dark about potentially important changes coming down the pike because we have to wait for the email blast. But I digress. I’ve had my rants on Yahoo! before, yet I keep coming back for more. At least I haven’t lost TOTAL faith in Yahoo! and I had reason to receive those emails at all. I’m still getting some solid results for quite a few of my clients.

I’d be interested if anyone else was a part of this ‘minimum bid requirement’ email blast yesterday/last night? Let me know in the comments below!

Take the Mystery Out of PPC Budgeting

guestblogger — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:00:50 +0000

This week we are featuring guest articles from our PPC Hero allies! We requested submissions from our readers and we received excellent responses from some great PPC bloggers! The PPC Hero team will return to our regularly scheduled articles next week. Enjoy!

The hardest part of every advertising campaign is determining how much to spend. There are numerous variables to work with like what the reach will be (# impressions) and what the company will get in return (ROI). Determining those will be more difficult if you have not worked with paid search before. It’s like asking a new marketing intern what the budget should be for the entire department on their first day to work. Many PPC experts don’t always have the best answers because the real truth is that it’s relative to what your goals are and your comfort level.

So what should your starting budget be? Here are a few tips to help you determine that and also when you should start thinking about increasing that budget. We will be covering Google Traffic Optimizer, the calculations necessary, spend level tips, and finally the points at which you should consider adding to the budget.

Google Traffic Estimator
In paid search there are a few steps to assist in budgeting. First, you need to build your list of keywords. Here are some resources for that. Once you know what you are bidding on to start with, price out those keywords. The Google Traffic Estimator is the best free tool out there (but you have to have an AdWords account to access it). Enter your terms, location and see what Google recommends for max spend.

Calculation
Then determine your max to spend a month. Think about how many leads it takes you to close a sale, phone call or walk-in. Think of those as clicks, how many clicks a day would you need to close a sale? Let’s say you have a 10% close rate. So you would need at least 100 clicks a day to get 10 sales.

Now what days of the week do you realistically think you will get the most clicks? Are you closed on the weekends? If so, count how many business days there are in one month. Let’s say there are 23 business days this month. Take your average cost for each click, let’s say $1.00, and multiply that by how many clicks you need a day, 100 x $1.00 = $100. Now take that amount and multiply that by 23, $2300. That would be your monthly budget.

Don’t Spend Too Little
Compare that to your first number and work from there. The only real risk is setting your budget too low. Few companies will see a return on such a low spend and can produce a false negative ROI on the campaign. Be sure to give your campaign a fighting chance, you don’t want to spend your entire budget in the first few hours of the day. Don’t shortchange what could be a triple digit ROI campaign.

Adding to the Budget
Once you know where to start, let it run for a few weeks at least. Then start messing with bids, calculating ROI, and changing budgets. Play with geo-location, keyword match types, and day parting (if you are B2B do you really need to be bidding at 2am?) where relevant to make your budget last and increase conversions. You will want to increase your budget if you:

Notice your ads turning off towards the end of the day
See a message from Google indicating that you are not getting all the traffic you could be getting
Run numbers that say you are doing great and could even stand to spend more
Just remember to be very careful, detailed, and take baby steps. One mistake can cost you lots, but the rewards from a well-run campaign are endless.

Guest Blogger Bio: Kate Morris is the Director of Client Strategies at New Edge Media. She specializes in paid and natural search, and recently getting her footing in social media marketing. You can find her on twitter @katemorris.

Improve Your Content Network Campaigns with Demographic Bidding in Google

Amber — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:33:10 +0000

Demographic targeting is a relatively new feature for Google. It’s the process of targeting your PPC ads and keywords to a specific age range and gender type. The purpose of demographic targeting is to really drill down on your target audience by writing extremely specific ads to a very specific audience, which in theory will help qualify your traffic and ultimately increase conversions. It also helps you prevent spending money on users who do not fit in your target audience and aren’t likely to purchase from your site.

**An important note to remember is that Google pulls demographic information only from the content network. Some sites like social networking sites do ask their users for demographic information. The demographic reporting in this tool is a combination of content network sites that do contain demographic and some sites that do not.

How to view your demographic information:

Select a specific campaign from your Google Adwords account that you want demographic information on.
Click the campaign settings link at the top of the campaign.
Go down to the middle of the settings page where it says Networks and Bidding. Click on the demographic bidding link to the right. See screen shot below:

Once you click on the demographic bidding link, you should see a page that looks identical to this:

Now that you’re in the report section of the demographic bidding, you can view which age and gender click through on your ads most frequently and convert. In the screen shot above, you can tell that a majority of my users are female between the ages of 18to 24.

What you can do with the reporting information to improve your PPC campaigns and Quality Score is increase your bids on the age and/or gender that have a higher click-through rate or conversion rate. By doing this you can increase targeted traffic to your site and increase sales/conversions.

To increase your bids on a specific age and/or gender simply click on the ‘edit’ button under the ‘make adjustments’ column. This will allow you to add a percentage of increase to your existing bid.

The bad part about the feature is that the date ranges for the demographic reporting is for the past seven days only, and you can’t compare date ranges to see your improvements. However you can still run a campaign report in the reports section of the Adwords interface to see if your CTR or conversion rates have improved. You can also use this feature in MSN adCenter, however the feature is not yet available in Yahoo!

I think this is a good feature if you can actually get conversion data out of the reports. If you’re mainly working to improve your click-through rates and have money to spend then it would be okay for that too. The only problem I find is that most of my clients on the content network the conversion data wasnt’ showing up. Therefore I couldn’t feel confident in increasing bids demographically based off CTR alone.