Are you managing your own Pay-per-Click account? It’s a lot of work isn’t it? You might be feeling as though:
- You’re paying too much for these clicks for it to be profitable!
- You don’t know which keywords to keep and which to lose.
Once you have determined a bid management strategy for your Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign, you need to monitor and adjust the bids to maximise conversions and reduce your cost per conversion. These are the two metrics that should be driving your bidding strategy.
Below, we’ll discuss a few guidelines that should help you in adjusting your bids for the duration of your PPC campaign. And, if you’re still stressed out, you can always contact us and we’ll come to the rescue!
- Lower Ranking Keywords Are Valuable – Ranking in the top 3 positions because they get the highest click-through-rate should not be driving your bidding strategy. Even lower ranking keywords can convert and they should not be deleted unless the desired CPC cannot be lowered or they have not converted according to a set benchmark that is being measured. Think twice about deleting a keyword that has converted at least once.
- Do Not Bid Like Everyone Else – Most of your competitors are probably bidding at multiples of five or ten cents. By bidding at just one cent higher, say at $0.36 or $1.41, your ad will often rank one position higher than your closest competitor because of that additional penny.
- Develop a System for Deleting Keywords – Don’t delete a keyword that ‘isn’t effective’, because it has not received enough clicks or conversions. Set a minimum benchmark of say, 100 impressions (for measuring clicks) or 100 clicks (for measuring conversions). Even a conversion rate of 1% may be worth keeping if the cost is within an acceptable cost-per-conversion range.
-
Hitting Your Daily Budget – When a campaign hits its maximum budget, the first temptation is to delete all those keywords that have ‘not been working’. The problem with this is that those very keywords you want to delete could work for you if they got some ‘air time’.
Instead, you should try to drop your bid on the high-priced keywords that are getting the largest number of clicks at the highest price (especially if they are not converting). By lowering the bids on those expensive keywords you will give the lower-priced keywords the opportunity to appear more frequently and it may result in lower-cost conversions.
- Delete Keywords That Are Too Expensive – If there are keywords that are above your accepted cost-per-conversion, for which you simply cannot lower the CPC within a profitable range, delete those keywords. By paying more than your calculated maximum cost-per-conversion, your campaign could very quickly become unprofitable. Instead, consider long-tail variations of these keywords to increase targeting and lower cost.
If you are having trouble managing your PPC campaign and are finding that your bid management tactics are leaving you with campaigns that are losing money, October 17 Media would be very happy to review your PPC bidding strategy.
Tags: Google AdWords, Online Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, PPC Strategy
