How to set up wordpress

Archive for the ‘Bid/Budget Management’ Category

Working with an unlimited budget would be wonderful, but since that isn’t the case for anyone I know, I thought I’d share 10 things that we look at when an account is projected to be over budget at the end of the month. By managing your budget throughout the month you’ll be able to stay on top of your spend, and hopefully you won’t be in a situation where you have to completely pause your account.

As you go through the following suggestions, keep these two questions in mind:

Are you spending without converting?

• If you are spending money without getting any conversions, something has to change! Start at the campaign level, then look at ad groups within the problem campaigns, and make adjustments or pause keywords or ad groups as needed to help cut back on costs.

Is your cost per lead (CPL) too high?

• The majority of our clients are leads based (remember a lead doesn’t have to be an eCommerce sale), and we set goals for our CPL as well as our budget. If all of your accounts are converting, find the campaigns, ad groups, and keywords that convert at the highest CPL, and work with those first.

1. Identify the “problem” search engine. Most of our clients run on Google, Yahoo and MSN all at the same time, and while it’s easy to focus on the largest spending account (usually Google), by doing so you could be overlooking your biggest problem areas. Even if an engine only spends 10% of your monthly budget, it’s a waste of money if it isn’t generating leads, and you need to start with that account first.
2. Lower campaign daily budgets. Look at your campaigns, and identify those that are spending their daily limit. Start with the campaigns that convert the least, and cut their daily budgets back. To make sure you don’t cut back too far, first calculate your estimated savings depending on how much you cut back the budget by. For example: If your average daily spend is $20, it is June 15^th, and you want to cut back the daily budget to $15, you will save $75. I calculated this estimate by using the following calculation:
   • Calculate the number of days that are left in the month
   • Calculate your estimated savings by using:

   (Current daily budget * Days left in month) – (New daily budget * Days left in month)

3. Sort by CPL. Starting at a high level will help you identify the big issues that need to be addressed first. Look within the interface to find the campaigns that have the highest CPL for the month. Once you have identified those campaigns, look at their ad groups, and evaluate them on the following criteria:
   • High CPL – Though your CPL is high, you are still getting conversions, so you want to be sure that you don’t cut out any potential leads. First find the keywords that have a 0% conversion rate for a long period of time (at LEAST 3 months), and pause them. Watch the account, and if costs don’t improve, look at the ad group level, and pause any ad group that hasn’t historically converted following the same criteria you used for keywords.
   • No Conversions – If you aren’t converting this month, don’t just start pausing things! Follow the steps above, and first identify the keywords and ad groups that have not converted for a while. If that doesn’t help cut down your spend, start pausing keywords and ad groups that either that have a very low conversion rate, or only have a few conversions per month.
4. Run long-term reports. You want to be sure that you always make decisions based on a large enough amount of data. Run 30 day, 60 day, YTD and last year reports to analyze your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords to help find areas of concern. By assessing metrics like your cost, CPL and conversions for long periods of time you’ll be able to spot items that have always been a problem, and should be paused, or items that used to convert that are paused, but can be turned back on after a little bit of optimization.
5. Adjust keyword bids. Before you start adjusting bids, remember that you do NOT need to be in position 1 to get conversions. Instead, focus on being on page 1 (to make sure you are seen), and make your bid adjustments based on overall ROI. We typically target positions 3-5, but you will need to make decisions based on your business goals, and what the data tells you is your optimal position.
6. Add site exclusions. If you are running campaigns on the content network, make sure you are adding site exclusions. To do this in Google, run a Placement Performance report, and identify the sites that are either spending money without converting, or have a high CPL. Be VERY careful to run this report on a long enough period of time to make sure that you aren’t excluding a site that is typically good, but may be having a slow spell. We also recommend excluding sites based on the URL, not the entire domain when running this report. We’ve found that some pages on various sites will work, so if you cut out the entire domain you will be eliminating conversion opportunities.

   If you are diligent about running placement reports on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to go into the interface and look at a minimum of 60 days to double check that there aren’t any domains that are spending without converting. By regularly blocking URLs, when you do check the interface you’ll be more confident that blocking a site on the domain level within the interface will be beneficial, and can help reduce your spend.

7. Add negative keywords. Remember to regularly run search query reports (SQR). These will help you identify keywords that you want to block to help reduce irrelevant clicks, thereby lowering your overall cost.
8. Pause underperforming ads. Look at your ads on a fairly regular basis to find those that have clicks without conversions. When possible, pause the ads that are underperforming, and you will help increase your quality score, and ultimately lower your bids, which will help reduce spend.
9. Pause ad groups that haven’t converted. If you’ve made smaller changes within the account and you are still projected to be over budget, you will need to identify entire ad groups that can be paused. As with any other change you will want to make sure you have enough data to make a good decision.

   View all of your ad groups, and sort by CPL. You will then be able to quickly identify the ad groups that have a high CPL with a low amount of conversions, or those that have spent without converting at all. I typically start on the month-to-date view to see which ad groups are currently having problems, but before I pause anything I look back 30-60 days (or more depending on the amount of traffic), and make my decisions based on longer term data. If the ad group hasn’t converted very much over the longer period of time, and it hasn’t converted this month either, it’s fairly safe to say that you can pause it without sacrificing leads.

   Tip: Be aware that when you are pausing ad groups within a campaign that you still have the potential to spend your daily campaign budget. If, for example, you have 5 ad groups within a campaign, and one of them is spending 60% of the daily budget but not converting, and the others are only spending 10% each. When you pause the ad group that is spending the majority of the budget the other ad groups will then have the opportunity to spend more, and you may not end up saving any money. As long as you are aware of this, you can monitor the other ad groups, and quickly identify if the campaign daily spend needs to be cut back too.

10. Pause underperforming campaigns. After looking at all other aspects in the account, if you need to make some serious cutbacks you will need to look at the campaign level. You will want to focus not only on the campaigns that are spending with little to no conversions, but you will want to identify those that are reaching their daily spend. When you pause campaigns that are reaching their daily spend, you will have a concrete idea of how much you are going to save, and can therefore calculate what your total savings is going to be, and know when you’ve paused enough to come in under budget.

As I mentioned before, at the end of the day you want to make sure that you are managing your budget throughout the month so you aren’t forced to pause the account. The most important thing is that you constantly tweak your accounts, and you don’t try to do all of these things at once. Make small changes first, and focus on the more granular levels. Always be aware of the number of conversions you are cutting out when pausing or decreasing budgets, and be sure to communicate the effects of your changes to your clients. There are some people that would rather go over budget if it means bringing in leads, so by being transparent with clients you can make sure that you are managing the account in such a way that you will help them meet the goals that are their top priority.



Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Hanapin Marketing is hiring three search engine marketing (SEO + PPC) specialists! We’re the publishers of PPC Hero and SEO Boy and are an award-winning and fast-growing search engine marketing company located in Bloomington, Indiana. You’ll work with clients on both search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, helping drive strategy and day-to-day management. We have a comprehensive and intensive 12-week training program, so while experience in SEO and PPC is helpful, it’s not required. Apply here: http://www.hanapinmarketing.com/careers_open_positions_sms.aspx

Whether it’s Cyber Monday or the week before Christmas, you need to be set and ready to go with your PPC campaigns in advance. Missing out on extra holiday traffic can be detrimental to your revenue. Here are five things you can do now to prepare for this holiday season.

1. Run keyword reports from last November (2008) through January (2009) to see which keywords converted well last year during the holiday season. More than likely those keywords will perform well again this holiday season. Make sure you bid higher on those particular keywords for the next coming months to take advantage of the additional traffic.
2. Start running promotions early. If you plan on running any promotions like free shipping, gift with purchase, or a discount, start running that promotion in early or late October, or possibly early November. Yes, the economy is still down, but people still have to buy Christmas presents. Like last year, people are looking for the best offer they can find and are willing to spend more time researching many different websites to find the best offer. Check out your competition to be sure you’re promotional offer beats all others.
3. Create a holiday gift finder landing page. It’s true that some people know exactly what they’re looking to buy and will type in very specific, long tail keywords. But there are people who are buying gifts for their neighbors, co-workers, or just people they don’t see very often and have no idea what to get these people. By having a gift finder on your site you’re calling out great gift ideas at great prices. You can even categorize your gift finder by price, gender, age, demographic, and some sites even create categories like ‘for the chef’, or ‘for the pet lover’ and will feature these types of products in that category.
4. Re-activate paused campaigns now. If you have campaigns that are paused during the summer months because they don’t convert well, consider turning them back on for the holiday season. Since so many people are buying even if you get a one-off conversion you may yield a very high ROI.
5. Be ready for ‘Cyber Monday’. Cyber Monday is known as the Monday after ‘Black Friday’. (Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, the largest shopping day of the year for brick and mortar.) Cyber Monday is said to generate sales from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for in-store. Make sure you’re keyword bids are set higher for this day over any other day. If you’re going to have a holiday gift finder, have it up and running on your homepage before this day hits. If you’re going to have a special promotion for the holidays, be sure you have it up and running before this day comes. If you don’t take full advantage of Cyber Monday traffic you’re missing out a lot of potential holiday revenue. This day is also known to have really awesome sales and deals online, so if you don’t have any of those, try and talk your client or upper management to at least do a free shipping promotion on orders of $xx.xx to drive up your average order value.

The biggest tip is to make sure you are prepared and not working on your holiday PPC campaigns when it’s too late. Be ready for the traffic, have your keyword bids and budgets set, and monitor your accounts daily so you can make adjustments if necessary. Happy Holidays!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

A few weeks back one of my clients performed a search for one of his keywords and it didn’t come up in Google search. So of course I review the keyword in the AdWords interface by checking on the ad diagnostic tool and saw that the keyword was not showing due to a low keyword bid and that it wasn’t on page 1 of the Google results pages.

I had a few co-workers here in the office search for the same keyword and some found our ad, while others did not.

I asked my Google Reps about this and they mentioned two things of particular interest.

1. Because I was hitting my campaign budget almost daily, our ads were only showing periodically in order to keep our ads displaying for most of the day. This was happening despite the fact that all of my campaign settings are set to ‘accelerate’ which means they will show our ad each time someone searches for a keyword until the budget is depleted.

2. They also said that because my keyword bid put us below page 1, our ads would only show part of that time, whether your hitting your daily budget or not.

The ad is showing. It’s not showing all the time because of the low bid, says my Google rep.

I asked for any documentation on this and she didn’t have anything to give to me to support her comment.

The point of the story: watch out for those keywords that are below page 1 in the Google SERPS. If they’re important keywords that must be shown, maybe think about increasing their bids.

Also, I have had this problem with new clients before, where AdWords says their ads aren’t showing, but their campaign budget is set to $5/day and their keyword bids are at $1 each. Obviously, Google is going to stop showing your ads at some point to be sure you don’t go over your campaign daily budget.

And always remember to check your settings for each campaign and if you want your ad to come up as many times as it can throughout the day, then chance your default settings from ‘standard – show ads evenly over time’ to ‘accelerated – show ads as quickly as possible’. This will help you ads be active anytime anyone does a search on your keyword until you have hit your campaign budget.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.