CPC Tactics Tips

Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot. As this marketing medium has matured, good ROI has become increasingly
difficult to achieve. This post will focus on some tactics to keep your campaigns afloat in these competitive and changing times.

1. SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s quality score now look at on-page text and load time to determine relevancy, and therefore your final click price and ad position. By applying basic on-page SEO tactics and web usability best practices to your landing pages, you can save a bundle and improve your ad position.
2. Turn Off Auto-Matching: Apparently, Google doesn’t think PPC marketers are good enough at picking keywords, so they want to do it for us. They’ve done quite a good job at spinning this one, but don’t fall for it. With auto-matching, Google will automatically show your ads for queries that they think are related to words you already bid on.
3. Set Cost Per Conversion Goals by Product Category: How much are you willing to pay a customer? Looking at your gross and net operating margins, set a goal on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer through Pay per click. Then stick with it, and adjust or cut your ad groups in order to meet this goal. Taking this a step further, determine how much you can afford to pay for each product category. For example, you can obviously pay more to acquire a PPC sale for a 70% margin product vs. a 30% one.
4. Calculate Your Lifetime Customer Value: In addition to understanding your customer acquisition cost, it’s crucial to know the long term value of customers you acquire through PPC. For example, on average how many times will your typical customer buy per year? Sometimes marketers are willing to take a hit on the first sale if they know the customer will generate many future sales. Recently, I analyzed an Adwords campaign, and broke it down by LTV for each adgroup. The results were surprising. I discovered that many groups were performing well up-front (low cost per conversion), but weren’t ever generating future orders. In contrast, some groups were generating poor up-front results, but great LTV.
5. Recognize Cross-Channel & Untrackable Conversions: Because ROI tracking is so easy, we sometimes think its infallible. Realize that customers who click on your ads will often convert through other channels such as through your call-center, store, or catalog. In addition, its nearly impossible to track sales from customers who use multiple PCs (home, office, laptop). For example, a customer may find your website from work, but make their first purchase at home after typing in your URL directly.
6. Dis-Allow Trademark Bidding for Affiliates: If you utilize affiliate marketing, take a close look at your pay per click bidding policy for affiliates. If you’re not careful, affiliates will bid on your brand name terms, (keywords that you likely already rank organically for). This type of affiliate theft adds unnecessary marketing costs, since you’re now paying affiliates for a sale you would have likely received without them.
7. Use Appropriate Data Samples for Decisions: One mistake I see frequently is making decisions to cut or increase PPC spending based on an inadequate amount of data. Before making a drastic decision, make sure you view several months worth click and conversion activity. I frequently come across ad groups that perform well one month, and terrible the next.
8. Turn Off the Content Network: In my experience, the content network is extremely difficult to generate acceptable ROI with. Even if you’ve had success with the content network, be sure to separate it from your keyword campaigns, as mixing them will blur the ROI between the two.
9. Test Your Ad Copy, But Not Too Much: A/B testing your ads is so easy, there’s no reason not to do it. However, don’t stress about changes that are too small to track. Changing insignificant words in your ad copy may show slight changes in click-through rates, but the results are likely random.
10. Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking to a different destination.