Greetings comrades. After a few months in the Quirk gulag for bad behaviour, I have managed to escape to bring you some great PPC insight, which I scraped off the walls of my cell. It seems the previous occupant had quite a lot of time on his hands before our PPC guru made him eat the Analytics manual.
Speaking of time, the initial stages of a medium-sized PPC campaign are critical to its success. Starting a campaign is tricky business if you are under pressure to get results for impatient clients from the word ‘go’. To maximise your efforts in the short term initial stages while planning for long term success, here are some basic tips:
Richard claims his knowledge for getting PPC results was gleamed off the wall of a prison cell. Um, ok Richard. Image Credit: Doug Kerr
- It should take three months for a campaign to get to the stage where client goal achievement should be a regular occurrence. I would suggest planning ahead and structuring the campaign as well as possible before you start. This will increase set-up time, but later on it will make understanding the account a lot easier. If you didn’t have the time or the wisdom to do this before launching, use the first months to continually break up adgroups into smaller, tighter groups.
- Google removes the effect of a high advert position on your historical CTR when calculating your quality score. If you don’t believe me, check it out here and repent. Technically this means starting out with high CPC bids (to get the bonuses of a good initial quality score before lowering bids while retaining the same bonuses) will not work, but in our experience it can help to kick-start a slow campaign.
Take the time to test and space out your split tests into meaningful intervals.
- After a month, you should have sufficient data to know which are the 10% of keywords that drive 90% of your traffic (and therefore also most of your conversions). Focus on these keywords first as the smallest changes can have a big impact on your campaign.
- After two months, you should have enough data to institute the first round of definite changes based on the results of whatever split tests were done to the 10% of high volume keywords the previous month.
- After three months you should focus on the long-tail. For instance, you could take all the keywords from an adgroup and run them through both the keyword tool and the search-based keyword tool in Google AdWords. Also, search query reports are a good source of long-tail keywords.
More in-depth techniques to use when you have enough data are:
- Advert Rotation: Set the advert option in the campaign settings menu to “Rotate” rather than optimise. This way you can continually compare two adverts on a monthly or weekly basis. Write new advert, replace worst performing advert, shoot some Cossacks and Repeat.
- Keyword Auditing: Use Google Analytics to see which advert positions are best for your Adwords keywords. Use the Traffic Sources tab, and click on the Adwords sub-menu on the sidebar. You will see an option called “ad positions”. This option allows you to see various metrics applied to the different ad positions a particular keyword has experienced. A good idea is to incorporate this into your initial months of data capture by setting a timeframe for each keyword to be at each position. This makes comparing metrics and conversions per advert position much easier since the time periods are standardised.
- To reiterate, this is especially useful in determining what the optimal CPA or CPC for a keyword is, and by scheduling which advert positions you want a keyword to run for on the “Edit keyword settings” page, you can take advantage of the time benefits of a semi-automatic campaign structure in this manner.
This should provide a framework for most general campaigns if the goals in question are relatively straightforward and the account is anywhere from 500 to 5000 keywords.
Until next time.
