Ask the PPC Experts

Are there markets that you feel are too saturated to start a new PPC campaign? Examples like health insurance, lock smiths, and finance seem to have high CPC's that make achieving an acceptable ROI difficult to improbable for new businesses.

Thank you for your question. While the answer does depend on your internal economics, there are strategies you can employ to help achieve acceptable ROI results. Consider a portfolio approach to managing your SEM campaign and focusing on quality score.

While there is no official information on the weight quality score plays in SEM campaigns, there is no doubt that quality score can have a very big impact on your SEM campaigns. Focusing on Quality Score and achieving a quality score that is higher than your competitors can propel you to the top of your listings, while at the same time, keeping you costs low.

The key to a successful portfolio approach to SEM includes the following:
- Creating an extensive list of long tail keywords that are still qualified, but have less competition.
- Geo modifying your keywords (i.e. "san francisco lock smiths", "chatsworth locksmith")
- Qualifying you keyword set with prefixes and suffixes will not only allow you to better qualify you audience, but also allow you to achieve a lower CPL/higher ROI because of the inherent higher conversion rates.
- Hopefully you will have a variety of keywords performing under your CPL/ higher than your ROI goal with no room for improvement in volume or position. This should allow you start using more competitive terms at a slightly higher CPL, or slight lower ROI. The combined over performers and under performers should lead to your overall SEM CPL/ROI goal.

When determining if this approach is feasible, consider if your economics truly allow you to have loss leaders in your portfolio approach.

- Shimal

Answered: Mar 5, 2010 - 5:22 pm EST What do you think?

How should quality score be leveraged when optimizing a campaign.

There is a inverse relationship between Google's Quality Score (QS) and CPC. As keyword QS increases, the CPC decreases, & vice versa. Google makes this fact blatantly clear. However, Google is less open about the weight they give each variable in their 'QS formula' (link to QS variables: http://bit.ly/9Y7ly8)

With this inverse relationship in mind, QS should be given high importance when you are optimizing your Campaigns. Keywords with low Quality Scores (less than 4) should be purged or put into an isolation group for remediation. Keywords with mediocre QS should also be isolated into groups where you will work to increase their QS over a set period of time. Keywords that improve during this time period can be removed from the isolation group. Keywords that fail to improve should be evaluated to determine whether or not they are worth keeping.

The takeaway here is that QS is an important component to consider when optimizing your Campaigns as you are surely overpaying on keywords running with low to mediocre QS. Most importantly, improving QS on your low to mediocre keywords can translate into material cost savings as the inverse relationship between QS and CPC is realized.

- Patrick H.

Answered: Mar 1, 2010 - 6:50 pm EST What do you think?

It looks like Google makes a determination of QS within 24 hours on new campaigns (in a new account). After making adjustments to relevancy via keywords, negative keywords, ad copy, and landing page, how long before I should see the QS go up if my CTR is improved?

Let me first be clear that Google is not transparent in exposing this information. I have gathered tidbits over the years of my phone calls with Google reps. That being said:

This really depends on what you are Marketing. If you are involved actual product marketing, have a website that sells tangible products with SKUs, and an internal shopping cart, i.e. EastcoastGolfsales.com, a ladies golf store, then Quality Score adjustments should come quicker as adtext is specific, landing pages are keyword rich, and in the eyes of Google you are probably a lower flight risk to break rules. In this case I believe the adjustment will happens over 24 hours.

If you are an affiliate marketer, be it dating, diet pills, mortgages, in my experience Google will more closely scrutinize your landing pages and ad copy. This is probably due to the volume of marketers in the same vertical, and some bad eggs that ruin it for everybody else. In this case I have seen improvement over a day, or sometimes I have seen nothing happen. If unsure its always best to reach out to a Google rep and have them point you in the right direction.

- Patrick A.

Answered: Feb 23, 2010 - 1:25 pm EST What do you think?

I started our PPC campaign from the very beginning but now It's grown to over 300k spend per month. Several challenges have arisen given how large the campaigns are. Where can I find resources/expertise for effectively managing such a large campaign.

This is a resource center for SEM best practices, so we try to refrain from name dropping. But, I can at least give you a high level overview of the landscape for Search Marketers' in your spend category. You have three options: work with an Agency, use a 3rd Party Software Vendor or hire a freelance search expert. Each of these options carries its pros and cons that you will need to evaluate when deciding which path is right for you.

- Patrick H.

Answered: Feb 19, 2010 - 6:33 pm EST What do you think?

Junk Mail Publishing is an online classifieds website: 1. Currently set all our campaigns to target only people who want to place an ad-selling something and not to buy something-(Is this a good method?) 2.We have set our conversions code to trigger only once a person has placed a ad making our conversion rate very poor(What do you recommend we doing?) So withour adwords account e.g we only targetting 6% all internet users who are selling as oppose to 94% of Buyers who might become sell

Thank you for your question. Having visibility into what is going on with your SEM campaigns is one of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign. Perhaps you don’t value a "buyer" as much as a "seller" but you can still assign a value to a "buyer" conversion and optimize toward a lower goal. At a high level, sellers are only going to grow if their items are bought. So while there might not be direct income from a "buyer" you can help your business grow by attracting sellers with a larger buyer market.

Each market helps to grow the other grow. You can continue to focus on sellers, but be sure to have some way to optimize to buyers.

-Shimal

Answered: Feb 18, 2010 - 8:05 pm EST What do you think?

I am running PPC Campaign for a website www.cruiseanswers.co.uk.... I am spending a lot ( monthly budget: $ 30000 ) but not getting expected number of conversions. Please guide me how i will increase the number of conversions and reduce my CPA and CPC and overall ROI from the PPC Campaign

Good PPC marketing parallels an early lesson I learned when in Grammar School with a slight twist; Who, What, When, Where, and How am I?

Who am I marketing to? - Cruises are usually segmented by types of people. There are Singles, Seniors, Religious, Families, etc..

What am I marketing? Cruises, vacations, Getaways. Its more than a boatride, it's a vacation or an experience and someone may be looking for something they just don't know it's a cruise.

When/where am I marketing? - Is it being shown at the right times, in the right places.

How? - There are lots of Hows.
How is the usability of my website?
How much do I want to pay for a lead?
How am I capturing my conversion information?

So the answer lies in those elements. Unfortunately, it's not that easy to just get more conversions.

- Patrick A.

Answered: Feb 16, 2010 - 8:41 pm EST What do you think?

Do you have any tips on how to optimize Yahoo? Generally it seems as if all the blogs only mention Google.

An extremely useful feature from Yahoo is the Ad Delivery Report. This report shows a breakdown of all the domains where your ads have been displayed as well as the cost from each domain. This report is particularly useful in finding domains of spurious nature. If you have the Yahoo pixel installed you can even see cost/conversion on a particular domain. The most actionable steps is to block any referring domain that has a significant cost/conversion well above your threshold or block a domain that you feel does not relate well to your offer.

To access this report click the Reports tab in your Yahoo account and then click on Ad Delivery Report.

- Amy

Answered: Feb 12, 2010 - 8:04 pm EST What do you think?

Should I run search and content in the same campaign?

It is best to split out search and content into separate campaigns. While Quality score is not a concern as there is a separate quality score for search and content distributions, there are still several advantages to splitting out these two distributions. Ideally, search and content should have separate budgets that should be allocated appropriate to maximize profit. Sharing the budget can dangerously allocate incorrect budgets to search and content campaigns. Reporting will be much easier if metrics are split from each other. Structure may also vary as content campaigns inherently require different keywords and structure than search campaigns. The small amount of work required to build separate campaigns is well worth the effort.

- David

Answered: Feb 11, 2010 - 9:03 pm EST What do you think?

How much data should I look at when bidding a kw up or down?

It depends. There are pros and cons to both looking at too much or too little data when determining bids. If you look at too little data, the data that you have gathered may not be very telling of the true performance and could be very noisy. Looking at a lot of data can smooth out the noise and average out the outliers, but it may not reflect the most current bidding landscape. So then what's the optimal amount? This is dependent on the conversion rate and volume that your keywords achieve. If your keywords on average achieve a really low conversion rate and low click volume, you may need to look back months in order to gather enough clicks and conversions to be able to make a bidding decision, versus a high conversion rate, maybe a week or a few days give you enough data. For example, if your keywords achieve around a 1% conversion rate and 10 clicks a day, looking back only at the last 3 days would not be enough data as with that average conversion rate, you’d expect there not to be a conversion in that 30 clicks. All in all, try to use as little data as possible to account for recent market changes, but also make sure you include enough data to account for your conversion rate.

- Sam

Answered: Feb 9, 2010 - 4:53 pm EST What do you think?

The search query report through Google Adwords is a powerful tool for seeing which queries a user actually used to when they clicked on your ad but simply running the report and adding in keywords which you deem relevant could result in unintended consequences. How do you recommend utilizing data from the search query report to grow a PPC campaign?

Google's search query data is good, but having a tracking platform that captures all queries can be even more beneficial. This way, you won’t run into the issue of Google showing partial data, i.e. "50 other unique queries like this". That being said, you can still leverage search query data to bolster your list of negative keywords. This is a great source of information to see which of your broad match keywords are pulling in any unwanted traffic. For instance, if you are running a lead generation campaign for mortgage refinancing and you have "loans" as a broad keyword, then you can be getting traffic from "student loans" or "veteran loans"... basically unwanted traffic. From the information gathered you would implement the appropriate negative keywords, like "student" or "veteran". Checking the search query logs on a regular basis will help keep your traffic clean, cost down and conversion rate up!

- Amy

Answered: Feb 8, 2010 - 8:33 pm EST What do you think?