PPC - Let's Help Each Other!

[Jet Virtual]

It seems that there are lot's of people on this forum that are in the same position as me. Do I outsource my ppc? Who do I trust? I don't want to start with a large budget but don't want to pay high fees? etc

I think it would be a great idea if we all chipped in and gave our own accounts of what worked and what didn't.

This way we all get to learn more from each other and hopefully can all build successful adwords campaigns without worrying about paying some cowboys

Who's with me?

 

[Jet Virtual]

So I guess I will kick it off ...

One thing I have learned is to not let Google control what you spend but rather YOU set what you are willing to spend on a visitor to your site.

So I set my maximum CPC (cost per click) to the maximum I would be willing to have someone come onto my website.

This way I can't get burnt on just a few clicks ...

Anyone else wish to share something?

 

[Faevilangel]

Before increasing your spend on Adwords, optimise the campaign and the landing page so you're paying as little as possible for each click.

An unoptimised campaign / landing page will cost you more in the long run.

I would also invest in an Adwords book, such as adwords for dummies so you can get an idea on the best ways to use the tools available.

 

[webgeek]

Tweak your bids until your ads are showing at position 3, 4, 5 or below (depending on how much daily budget you've got to work with).

Lower positions = lower cost and reduced impulse clicks.

 

[Jet Virtual]

Thanks Faevilangel! Just had a thought ... if we can get enough great tips on here I will put together a list and publish as a blog post for all to see and gain from.

Anyone else with any advice?

Positive, negative, as long as it has to do with PPC ...

 

[Lease4Less]

I would also invest in an Adwords book, such as adwords for dummies so you can get an idea on the best ways to use the tools available.

I agree completely with this.

It is not hard to build a decent adwords campaign IF you have done your research first.

I would never outsoure PPC. You need to have direct control of it, and to do this you need to have a good understanding of it.

 

[webgeek]

I agree completely with this.

It is not hard to build a decent adwords campaign IF you have done your research first.

I would never outsoure PPC. You need to have direct control of it, and to do this you need to have a good understanding of it.

I disagree completely.

I have accountants do my books and taxes, because I don't have time or inclination to do it.
I have mechanics fix my engine, ....
I have surgeons to remove bits that go wrong...

Experts should manage things they do best. I doubt no matter how many posts happen in this thread that 99.99% of users could be anywhere close to being an expert.

Expertise comes from hard knocks, something most of us can't afford to gamble with our kids lunch money.

 

[Faevilangel]

Agree totally with WG, using an expert saves time so you can make money doing what you're good at.

I advise getting a book so you know about the tools, processes etc so when you're expert tells you what they have done, your eyes don't glaze over.

I outsource anything I don't want to do, as I can put my time to better use doing stuff I want to do which makes me money

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Thanks Faevilangel! Just had a thought ... if we can get enough great tips on here I will put together a list and publish as a blog post for all to see and gain from.

Anyone else with any advice?

Positive, negative, as long as it has to do with PPC ...

you would be breaching copyright if you took other peoples intellectual property and turned it into a blogpost.

 

[Jet Virtual]

you would be breaching copyright if you took other peoples intellectual property and turned it into a blogpost.

Hmm I guess I will have to get permission from each author then..
But we will need to get quite a few more suggestions before it will be feasable...

SO anyone else have any suggestions??

 

[Dhavalk]

One of the important things to keep in mind is about the selection of keywords for a particular Ad campaign and secondly understanding the ratio of Clicks and Possible conversions into leads

 

[garyk]

In campaign settings set to rotate ads evenly and have 2 versions of your ad to split test.

If you can get him Steve Gibson (who hasnt been around recently - where are you Steve?) has done some brilliant whitepapers, I used one of his techniques and increased CTR, testimonial is here http://www.bothsidesoftheclick.co.uk/testimonials

Gary

 

[a1anm]

Start up with very specific keywords. For example if you selling cars don't use a keyword like "cars". Be specific with the makes/models of cars.

These keywords will be much cheaper and convert much better.

I'd also advise against using the Google suggested keywords as they are too general.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Start up with very specific keywords. For example if you selling cars don't use a keyword like "cars". Be specific with the makes/models of cars.

These keywords will be much cheaper and convert much better.

I'd also advise against using the Google suggested keywords as they are too general.

Ok so what DO you advise using?

 

[a1anm]

Ok so what DO you advise using?

Your own keywords that you think of by yourself. You can base this on Google Analytics ie. what keywords convert well.

Currently Google is suggesting that I can "Increase traffic by adding 393 potential new keywords". A quick scan of these keywords and I can see most of them aren't relevant to what I am selling eg. brands I don't even stock.

I'm not saying to avoid using keywords just because Google suggest them but don't just add them all thinking they will work because Google is recommending them.

 

[Dave.F]

If you are a local service target your ads locally

Set your ads to appear only to people searching in a particular city, region or country.

You can target customers within 10 miles of your front door or across the world.

 

[Jet Virtual]

Some good suggestions so far ...

Come on I know there are more out there

Don't be shy ...

 

[London Bookkeepers]

I'd make sure that you list some negative keywords for your campaign so you are not paying for irrelevant clicks.

 

[sashoy]

Yes, you should look at google trends and adwords key tool.
When I run an Adwords campaign I use 3 keywords at minimum so I can be sure that the user looks for what I offer. Sometimes, I use 6 words long keyphrase.
"How to sell my house" or "Instant Cash for my House" instead "Selling Houses" or "buying Houses".
For these later, you can not be sure what the searcher look for when doing his search.

 

[Digger]

Just a thought - would mispelt key words help? with the increase in small gadgets, miss hit keys are more common, along with the usual mispellings ( I'm thinking that this is probably/probabley standurd/standid/standard practice/practise

 

[Mick.H]

Before increasing your spend on Adwords, optimise the campaign and the landing page so you're paying as little as possible for each click.

An unoptimised campaign / landing page will cost you more in the long run.

I would also invest in an Adwords book, such as adwords for dummies so you can get an idea on the best ways to use the tools available.

Adwords for dummies is not a good book. It's pages of blarney without much meat and the meat it does give you is pretty much alredy summed up on this thread - make relevant landing pages.

And a lot of the info in the book is outdated, definitely not worth reading.

 

[Mick.H]

The trouble with ppc types is they seriously over estimate their worth. In a business world when we use services of other companies we want exactly that, a service, we don't want to sign half our company profits away to someone who types out a bit of ad text and sends it to a landing page.

 

[Mick.H]

My tip for local services would be to concentrate on exact match and leave all the other stuff out. The other stuff being NON RELEVANT CLICKS

 

[Jet Virtual]

My tip for local services would be to concentrate on exact match and leave all the other stuff out. The other stuff being NON RELEVANT CLICKS

I have a feeling Mick got burnt ...

Has anyone else got 'burnt' using a PPC Adwords Agency or doing PPC yourself?

 

[Lease4Less]

Burnt using a PPC agency - oh yes.

Burnt managing it in house - no.

By researching this properly, we have saved a fortune over the last 3 years.

Like anything, if you go in blind it will cost you a lot of money to get it right.

I would never relinquish control over something as important as my marketing to an outside agency again.

 

[Jet Virtual]

Burnt using a PPC agency - oh yes.

Burnt managing it in house - no.

By researching this properly, we have saved a fortune over the last 3 years.

Like anything, if you go in blind it will cost you a lot of money to get it right.

I would never relinquish control over something as important as my marketing to an outside agency again.

This is great feedback but can you give us some examples of how you have made PPC work for you?

 

[webgeek]

I would never relinquish control over something as important as my marketing to an outside agency again.

Accounts are important and that's why I let the Chartered Accountants handle it, despite knowing if I was in a pinch I could do it myself.

IT is important and that's why I host with some of the larger and more reputable global companies who have experts looking after things 24x7, yet knowing I could host it in my closet on any spare box I've got laying around with about any linux distro on it.

I could run asterisk and have my VOIP in that same cupboard, but instead I use a VOIP specialist provider who have the infrastructure and experience to do it better than I could hope to.

When I needed cancer surgery, I could have used a kitchen knife and bit of rubbing alcohol, but opted for the hospital and oncologist.

Just because something is important, it's not a reason to do it yourself. It's a reason to use an expert.

Rather than trying to do everything yourself, sometimes it's better to become good at selecting experts, rather than trying to outperform the experts.

 

[garyk]

Ok so what DO you advise using?

Well I know what I do. I'll do a search for a keyword in google and pull the URLs from the SERPs and then start feeding the website *urls* into the keyword tool rather than entering keywords, that throws up alot of keywords you would not even consider.

Also use keywordspy.com on keywords/urls to see what ads your competition are running and for how long.

Gary

 

[Homer J Simpson]

keywordspy.com looks pretty good but a bit pricey for one man bands. Must be a great tool for SEO/PPC companies out there.

How do they get their data though, Surely Google, Yahoo & MSN/Bing don't tell them who is bidding how much for what ads?

I'll sign up for the trial and will tweak my PPC campaign and see how far it gets me.

 

[Alan]

@webgeek, I am with you, too many small businesses just don't get the principals of division of labour (e.g. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith)

It think it is the fear of losing control that creates this irrational behaviour of wanting to manage everything directly.

 

[webgeek]

It think it is the fear of losing control that creates this irrational behaviour of wanting to manage everything directly.

There's a lot of wonderful entrepreneurs who can do things as well as their staff (or outsourcers), but just can't let go. That letting go is what catapults mom and pop operations into becoming enterprises.

Putting down the red pen and biting that tongue, letting juniors get on with it, is one way to let them grow and develop while allowing the business owner to develop the business, or guide its growth.

I had the pleasure of working for a great salesman about 20 years ago. The first day I remember him pointing out how he enjoys letting the painters paint, the gardeners work in the garden and he focuses on selling. It made a lasting impression on me.

 

[Alan]

Although i do have sympathy, if you are running a small business it can be a massive leap of faith, especially handing over to outsourcers. If you have had a bad experience, perhaps been oversold, or didn't due enough due dilligence, then your are often reluctant to hand over again.

 

[cts1975]

The problem with PPC is you can achieve 'results' within a few hours. So a company may out source this and see themselves at the top of Google within hours and hand over control and budget based on this - maybe this can lead to people getting their fingers burnt?

Back to the original post.
For me dynamic keyword insertion has been really good for CTR.

I also put high performing phrases into their own exclusive adgroup.

I then test long tail phrases over a period of say 2 weeks and then drop them, or create similar or longer phrases based on the performing ones and test them.

Somebody mentioned putting competitors domain names in to G keyword tool - this works for us.

For our industry negative keywords can sometimes be more important than than positive. I happily spend time adding negative keywords.

The old chestnut 'a call to action' also improves our CTR e.g book online now.

 

[WebProfitsConsulting]

I've been using adwords since it was first launched and clicks were 1 cent each, so I've seen a number of changes, good and bad. Currently managing about £25K a month in adwords spend, which gives you a huge amount of scope to learn what works and what doesn't. Here are a few things that absolutely work:

1. Bid on your company name even if you're number one in Google. This seems counter-intuitive, but I can tell you with over 90% confidence that conversions that come from these clicks will be, by far your lowest cost conversions, particularly if you're company name/brand is reasonably well known and searched for. In my experience these clicks are less than 10p each but convert like crazy.

2. Make sure you have conversion tracking switched on, and that you're religiously tracking conversions, if possible daily. Once you know what's converting look at opportunities to increase ad exposure by increasing your bid to grab greater impression share and improved CTR. Do not increase your bids on keywords until you know what is working....you're wasting your money.

3. There's a relatively new bid type called modified match. It's pure genius! It has the precision of exact match with the reach of broad match for bringing more targeted traffic to your landing pages.

4. Make sure you always have two ad's running in each adgroup. After about 30 clicks each decide which is delivering the better CTR and conversion rate; pause (never delete...goog intell here for future) the lower performing one and create a new ad based on the higher performing ad. Rinse and repeat after 30 clicks on the new ad. Do this constantly to improve your CTR which will ultimately improve your quality score and thereby reducing your CPC.

5. Dynamic keyword insertion can dramatically increase your CTR if you do it right, and target appropriately.

6. Start a re-marketing campaign. It can be as 'cheap as chips' and deliver a fantastic ROI. I must admit I've only really got into re-marketing over the past 9 months or so, but when you hit the sweet spot it really delivers big. The tracking data is not great, but a combination of feedback from the business owner and data from adwords and analytics can give you some idea of what works and what doesn't. Make sure you create ad's for all the different sizes to maximise the opportunity to have your ad shown.

7. If you don't have a mobile optimised site, ensure your ad-group settings reflect this by ensuring you're not delivering clicks to mobile visitors (as a side-issue get yourself a mobile site, my analytics data suggests 30-45% of visitors are now coming from mobile devices....and it's only going to grow). Full browser tablets and PCs should be your chosen settings. Google will default to delivering ad's to all devices so you need to amend this manually. This could save you big money immediately.

8. Linked to 7, check your conversion rates on different devices by running a report that segments by device. You might find that you have higher conversion on certain campaigns on a certain group of devices ie PC vs Tablets vs mobile

9. Run a report segmenting your data by the source of the clicks. You need to know whether your conversion is higher from those that come from 'Google search partners' or directly from Google. You can then use this information to make better informed decisions on the way your campaigns and ad groups are structured.

10. Never run mobile and PC campaigns within the same ad group. The performance dynamics are very different. For example I know from my own data across multiple industries and countries that mobile ads get a higher CTR than PC ad's. This is logical given the large number of distractions on a large PC screen that are competing with the google ad's, compared to the first thing you see on a mobile screen being the ad's. The other thing that is very different is the cost of mobile keywords. They are currently about 2/3 cheaper than the same keyword on a standard PC setup. Not sure how long this will last, but for now my advice is to 'milk-it' and send cheap traffic to your mobile website, whether it be to capture leads or to convert these clicks into store visits or phone calls.

11. Make sure you're using all 4 of the different keyword match-types to find the combination that delivers conversions for you. Each have their place and whilst 'exact' match may well be cheaper than 'broad' you could be losing out on high converting traffic by restricting yourself.

Right got to go now, but will be back with some more tips soon.

Hope the above helps.

 

[Alan]

I totally forgot, but that post reminds me , we put together an interactive 'e-book' on adwords account tune up - linked from our blog here http://www.roibot.co.uk/get-the-most-from-adwords/

We were giving it away in return for a facebook like, you can get to that facebook page here directly http://www.facebook.com/roibot/app_331189580287918

but if you don't want to be bothered with facebook do that go straight there http://www.goalscape.com/lp/connect.php?id=6B428BB4-4161-D46E-F587-36D95122B18E


Hope it helps you all

 

[WebProfitsConsulting]

Just carrying on with a few more tips from my experience with adwords:

12. Use the automated tools to quickly identify areas of opportunity to both save money on non-converting keywords and increase conversion by pushing converting keywords. The automated tools are now highly sophisticated and you can build quite complex queries to identify opportunities that are sometimes not obvious, especially in big accounts, with multiple campaigns on the go.

13. Login to your account at least once a week and check on what's converting (you've got conversion tracking switched on right....without it you're flying blind and frankly wasting your money). Then make all your adjustments based on maximising conversions for the upcoming week. Get obsessive about conversions....it pays the bills.

14. Use negative keywords at both ad group and campaign level to eliminate the keywords that will never convert, but might be triggering you're ad's particularly if you're using broad, modified and phrase match.

15. In your keyword account settings uncheck 'close variants' you don't want google deciding what is a close variant, you want to control it yourself, and introduce keywords in a controlled manner.

16. Utilise ad-extensions to the max. They can dramatically increase your CTR and therefore your QS, reducing your CPC. In my experience the sitelinks extension is by far the best performer particularly for ecommerce operations with multiple products. I've seen upto a 30% increase in CTR just by enabling the sitelinks and being in the top 3 slots on the SERPs. I'm less enamoured by the phone extension except for on mobile ad's where it seems to perform pretty well. Be sure you understand the data generated in relation to sitelinks, as it can be a bit confusing at first.

17. When you're bidding in the top 3 slots make sure you're taking advantage of the extended headline feature by enabling your ad's to show this. This will again increase your CTR.

18. If you're a 'physical' business with a store and specific opening hours make sure your ad scheduling is set to reflect your availability. You don't want to waste money by having calls/visitors to your site when they can't make contact because of availability issues.

19. Are you using competitor research to improve you're own performance? You should have a good handle on what your competitors are bidding on. Quite a few tools out there to help you with this. The best ones are paid tools. If you want a view on your competitors keywords pm me the URL and I'll send you on a excel data dump.

20. If you have disapproved keywords in your account they need to be edited until approved. Disapproved keywords will hurt your account history, and 'cost' you directly through cpc and in less direct ways such as ad position.

21. What is the quality score for your keywords? A solid account should have 30% or so keywords with a QS of 7 or above.

Let me pause there for now, back with more when time allows.

Hope the above helps....if it does please send some 'thanks' this way!

 

[WebProfitsConsulting]

ROIbot,

Forgot to say, that's an awesome tool you've shared in goalscape.

Thanks!

 

[kevin555]

Great thread - always looking to re-tune adwords and this has helped provide some ideas.

 

[realitybytes]

I'd personally like to say, don't get bullied by 1st page bid estimates. Check your actual positions and average positions first. There are plenty of keywords in my account that have a quality score of 6/10 or 7/10 - I'm bidding £2.00 and actually getting a 2.3 average position but it still showing £4.50 as an estimated 1st page bid. I feel a lot of people just adjust to what the first page bid flags up for without actually checking your positions.

 

[Websitehandyman]

The is no "one fits all" solution to using Adwords.

A established company who wants to increase sales will have very different tactics to a new company just looking to get sales from anywhere. Then the are companies who use Adwords in a very niche and these will be monitoring and balancing the costs directly against their single product or service income.

A new company should have a fixed budget for a period and try to work their PPC within that budget and period. Over say 3 months you should have a good idea of the cost v benifit ratio. But also you must take into account seasonable aspects and be quick to target new products and their keywords. You should also be awear of negative words as these save you money.

A established company should first look at their customers. They should be perhaps targeting areas of their business that is not performing as well as expect. Supplementing the income stream rather then spending money in areas they don't need to and reducing profit margins by doing so.

Niche markets will look at their costs and start from the basis of how much they can sell their product and service at. They'll start high on Adwords using a blast method and aim to lower their Adwords costs without affecting their convertible rate. This is the direct operate to what starters should do but sadly also the way a lot of them do start off using Adwords.

On site factors are very important from the outset for the first two types but no so for their Niche till they look to reduce costs. But the key to all is knowing your customers and your products and finding the keywords that not only bring those together but also get around they rules and balances Google have put in place to make you spend more then you want to or should need to to reach your goals.