PPC Worth it in sectors with high competition?

[MattZS]

I've been looking into PPC mainly google adsense and was wondering if its worth it in sectors with high competition.

From what I can see you could blow a large amount of money on a campaign and there is no guarantee for returns. How much is a good starting budget, obviously I would want to invest enough to see if PPC works for us however not so much that its money wasted.

 

[zigojacko]

Well you'd need to cap your spend based on what the average conversion for you is worth to you. Do you refer to display advertising on websites?

If you try it yourself without knowing what you're doing, it's almost certain to result in you blowing a large amount of money with little/no return.

We can't really answer your question on what to invest to see if it works for you without knowing more about your website/products/business.

 

[MattZS]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. I didn't want to go into to much detail about what we do as I thought it might be considered as advertising.

In short we're an embroidery company who mainly deal in work wear. Typically we supply garments, convert our customers logo into a stitch file and embroider them.

As for advertising we have been trying to increase our SERP in google although our main success has come from email mail shots. We invested in data and sent out some promotional emails which seems to be working well for us.

I'm now looking into other ways to market ourselves hence the interest in PPC. I've also though about getting some PVC banners made and placing them on local industrial estates in order to generate more business.

I've read horror story's about people spending thousands and getting no results which makes me doubt PPC however on the other hand it has to have success if so many people invest into it.

Website wise, we have one that gives customers all the information about us with an online catalogue. We also just set up an ecommerce site using Opencart however im not 100% happy with it (mainly because I made it!) so haven't really advertised it other than a link from our main page.

 

[zigojacko]

You'd probably benefit from getting an account set up with an incredibly tight group of keywords on a particular product/range that you sell with a small budget just to get a feel for how many people are searching specifically for this product/range, what kind of cost per click you can expect to be paying initially and an idea of click-through rate.

The web pages you're directing any visitors to though may also need consideration of course as well. This will play a role in how your ads perform plus of course, there is little point in spending money on clicks if your landing page isn't equipped to convert them.

 

[MattZS]

Thats a good point, if a customer currently landed on our home page I they would need to navigate to a separate section in order to place an order which might make them bounce. Maybe I will focus on getting the eCommerce store refined and then promote a 'clothing bundle' of some sort directing the PPC landing page to the product page on the store.

 

[amitmax]

You can use ad extension feature of Google adwords and land your visitor directly on relevant landing page.

As you are talking about competition, yes there are various sector having a very high competition. You can modify your keywords according to your budget.

 

[jdluckhurst]

PPC can be a very useful tool whilst you take the time to to improve your rankings for organic search although yes you can waste a lot of money if you don't know what you are doing.

PPC is also useful for understanding which search terms are the highest converting and which ones are usually ignored by searchers.

 

[MattZS]

Whats the best way of finding the best key words. IE the ones people google the most in my sector. I already have some organic ranking key words however they don't bring in many clicks at all. 'embroidered clothing' and 'embroidered clothing uk' seem to bring us the most clicks but still its a low rate.

 

[Uzair Kharawala]

From what I can see you could blow a large amount of money on a campaign and there is no guarantee for returns. How much is a good starting budget, obviously I would want to invest enough to see if PPC works for us however not so much that its money wasted.

Only those who don't follow the right process / system will blow away the funds and max out their credit cards! Before you start any campaign, focus on your goal:

• Do you want more leads
• Do you want more customers (online transactions)
• Do you more visitors to your site
• Or just more branding & increased awareness

Then set up your landing page with a special offer or call to action. Don't send traffic to your HOME page.

Here's what I recommend:

1. Test Stage
Set and start your campaigns, put a budget of no more than £10 per day. Run it for a week and get the data. If you've got enough impressions / clicks then goto 2. Otherwise run the campaign until you get about 100 clicks (this is my personal opinion).

2. Optimise Stage
Pause / delete all the low converting keywords and run the good keywords. Improving the CTR will increase your Quality Score, lower your costs and give you the Top 3 ad rank (which you want).

3. Scale the Campaign
You only scale your campaign once you know that your conversion rate is giving you positive ROI.

Plus what ZigoJacko said.

Hope this helps.

 

[Paul Baldwin]

Every time I look at the cost of some of the more generic insurance related keywords I wince...

 

[Uzair Kharawala]

Paul,
The thing is that the CPC is relative to your product/service and if your campaign is set correctly and is profitable, then the amount is irrelevant. If you are happy with a £10 CPA (cost per acquisition) and you know that you are making a net profit of say £15. Then I would imagine that you will want to pay £10 CPA to Google as many times as possible

 

[Scceelly.com]

Whats the best way of finding the best key words. IE the ones people google the most in my sector. I already have some organic ranking key words however they don't bring in many clicks at all. 'embroidered clothing' and 'embroidered clothing uk' seem to bring us the most clicks but still its a low rate.

When we create keywords (I am PPC AM) we try to come up with as many possible combinations of searches as possible and set them in phrase. Campaign design usually goes through 3 stages review so if one person misses some obvious combos, the other one will pick it up. If this isnt enough, try adding generic terms in broad match modifier for better control.

The competition you mentioned, is it competition for clicks or general competition in your business sector?

 

[MattZS]

Some brilliant advice here guys, defiantly a lot to think about. I was referring to general competition in our business sector. Its not so hard converting customers for embroidery however its difficult to attract business for screen printing as many large companies such as vistaprint will beat us on rankings everytime.