At Just Search, we’ve been managing PPC for medium and large blue chip companies for quite some time now. PPC is a ROI-based product. The return on investment can be calculated by putting a measure across the sales, enquiries, goals and leads a campaign generates. We run campaigns across many sectors including bathrooms, clothing, holidays, greeting cards and jewellery. There are many questions we’re being asked on a daily basis, so we thought it would be a good idea to go through some of the key areas in these blog posts.
Q1. Why is conversion tracking important? Can I run campaigns without them?
Yes, you can run campaigns without installing conversion tracking, but the question is: how would you actually measure whether the campaign is a success? The conversion tracking helps in identifying the ad groups, campaigns that generate sales and enquiries which help in allocating the budget effectively.
Q2. I’ve started using an automated tool to optimise my campaigns better, but why am I seeing an increase in CPA / CPC? My profit margin has reduced, so how can AdWords work for me?
Automated tools help in scheduling adverts and making life easier for analysts when there is a lot of data to play with. However, from our experience, manual optimisation will perform better than any tool – although you don’t necessarily need to implement everything that the tool suggests. Some of the common tool related warnings / suggestions are as follows:
- Quality score for X keywords has reduced – competition increases on a daily basis. The quality score is based on many factors; a lower bid, landing pages, ad text, poor CTR, etc. It really does depend on whether you want to take action on this or not. If a quality score of 6 gets you more conversions than a quality score of 9 for the same cost, then we are better off with a lower score. There are many other factors that need to be considered before implementing changes to the campaign. An ad at position 5 might result in better ROI than an ad at position 2 – it all depends on your advertising goals, KPIs and account strength.
- My CTR is 7% but I don’t get a lot of sales – look at the campaigns that result in a higher CTR. Are you actually bidding on something for which you sit low in stock? Did you pass on the right message to people before they actually clicked on your adverts? Do you have specific PPC landing pages and are you taking users to the most relevant landing page? If you mention ‘15% off everything’, does it actually say this on the product page people land on? If not, chances are that you have a high bounce rate and low conversions as you were unable to navigate traffic correctly. If the tool has suggested you to bid higher on keywords for which you sit low in stock, then you would need to drill down to profitability and ROI that you’ll be questioning while implementing this action.
- My budget gets taken up by 1pm, but I get more sales naturally after 1pm, so I was wondering how PPC would help me get even more sales during those timings when none of my adverts show up at present? – Check what ad delivery option you are using. Is it accelerated or standard? Standard mean your budget will last for a full day but adverts would show up occasionally as the budget needs to last for the whole day. If it’s accelerated, then you will show up every time a search has occurred until you finish your budget for the day. Make use of the ad scheduling feature; if most of your sales come in the evening or at certain times of the day then schedule your adverts to show up during those times. Alternatively, you could make use of the bid implementation feature in setting hours to increase your positioning. You can then assess whether this helps in generating more sales. If a tool has suggested that you need to increase the budget and you can’t do this due to financial reasons then make use of these features to get more out of your current budget.
- Tool suggested I have no negatives for particular campaign – It’s a good suggestion, so make use of it if necessary. However, if you have a campaign where all the keywords are declared as ‘exact match’ then you don’t really need any negatives for the campaign. Exact match means that your advert won’t show up for anything other than the keyword you have declared. For example, if you have declared ‘designer umbrellas’ as exact match, then the ad will only show up if the user types ‘designer umbrellas ‘ in the same sequence -with nothing before, after or in between them.
- Tool recommended adding Sitelinks. I’ve read that Sitelinks increases CTR – We would suggest testing it on one campaign first and then implementing it step-by-step. Of course, you would see a boost in CTR, but is it worth spending money on Sitelinks? If your current campaign has all the ad groups you need, pushing products reasonably well, then it might hurt to let a user deviate from this buying path. Sitelinks can be beneficial when you need to advertise an offer, your phone number or when you have a generic campaign and need the traffic to see what other product options they have. Again, it all depends on your business. Think before you actually act on this.
I will be posting some more FAQs related to PPC in Part 2, so please watch out for my next post.
Many thanks,
Adil Jain
Head of Paid Search
