PPC-Advice.com

Poor Conversion? Nip it in the Bud!

Poor conversion doesn’t have to be a life sentence, but that’s exactly what many advertisers are living with every day. Many advertisers accept status quo, mediocrity or starter campaigns as being industry-standard. Problems aren’t always obvious to beginners in the PPC game.

If your PPC campaigns don’t break even, you may have problems. As Barney Fife would say, we need to nip it in the bud. Sometimes it’s easier said than done to bring campaigns back to the wood shed, especially on high-profile campaigns that may speak more to branding efforts than strict revenue goals.

Find out where to look to determine problems in a campaign, and find out what you can do when campaigns take over.

Problematic Campaign Elements

Many advertisers will wonder where spend goes so quickly, especially if their campaigns aren’t optimized to make the most of their advertising dollar. All the search engines do a great job of spending money for you, with starter programs that enable you to start advertising quickly, with little to no technical experience using their interface. After a while, you’ll come to see that ROI isn’t that great for starter campaigns. What should you look out for?

• Broad or auto-matched keywords: certainly you can think of alternate keyword combinations you can target that might convert better than “cars”?
• Geotargeting options outside of your delivery or service area: fine tune your campaigns and target only those regions you’re interested in selling or servicing.
• High bounce rates: these may indicate invalid landing page choices, poor web design, or misleading ad text. You can also exclude certain regions don’t convert well for whatever reason.

If you haven’t tried optimizing campaigns yourself, start out small and scale slowly to bigger budgets that continue to convert.

Strategies for taking back the reins

There are a number of strategies advertisers can use to take control back. Once upon a time I wrote an article about curbing runaway PPC spend, but I thought we might need to revisit these strategies and introduce new elements to the list:

• Target the long tail: move from single word keywords to longer keyword combinations. The longer keywords you target, the lower your average CPC should be.
• Day parting sometimes make sense: if you notice that your campaigns convert better during off business hours, by all means, turn off your campaigns or lower your daytime bids accordingly.
• Position preference: sure, number one will likely get you the most clicks, but maybe position 3 or 4 will get you more conversions for your advertising dollar. Be wary that the higher your targeted position goes on a very small budget or low bid, the less impressions you’re likely to generate.
• Content or search? You decide: don’t do both, it won’t help matters. Keep your search campaigns and content network campaigns separate, they tend not to work well together.
• Bid strategically: You need not bid what you can afford to pay for a lead, you need to bid what you can justify from a spend versus return perspective. Many think ROAS or ROI is enough, but perhaps a better measure could be cost per acquisition (CPA) versus average revenue per order (ARPO).
• Nip it in the bud: the easiest thing to do sometimes is just to turn off a campaign entirely. If you have a few days worth of data in your analytics package, analyze it, dig deeper, research Adwords reporting features, and fine tune your settings prior to turning your campaigns back on.

For additional tips, feel free to check out a pretty decent article I wrote back in January entitled “Three Tips to Curb Runaway Campaign Spending“.

Buzzworthy? Bookmark to: