There’s a lot to learn about paid search advertising.
That’s the ugly truth. It’s really important to understand that, as with all things, you have a learning curve with paid search advertising and the first thing to grasp is the concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Key Performance Indicators
Irrespective which marketing channel you are using, PPC and AdWords needs to support clear goals and objectives. As an example, if you are a charity, your goal might be “to increase donations” and your objective “to increase traffic to the donations page”.
To be successful with paid search advertising, you need to be selecting and tracking KPIs carefully.
The Econsultancy Best Practice Guide defines three types of KPI; volume, value and quality.
- Volume KPIs
- These relate to the quantity (total amount) of traffic being driven to your website or through various functions of your website (e.g. newsletter signups), as well as the quality (makeup) of that traffic (new or known visitors, mobile or desktop etc.).
- Value KPIs
- These concern financial value, e.g. average order value or donation, or for bricks-and-mortar businesses, attributed in-store revenue.
- Quality KPIs
- These are the remainder, which measure how well your site serves its visitors. Even though changes may not have been made to your website, if you target a more relevant audience, metrics such as conversion rate will improve.
Budgets
According to the Econsultancy Best Practice Guide, PPC and AdWord budgets are split into four main areas.
1. Budgeting Strategy
This is the high-level view. How much can you afford to devote to paid search advertising overall? How does it compare to your other acquisition and retention channels?
2. Positioning Strategy
You might decide to target high positions in paid search listings for specific keywords, e.g. for branding awareness.
Each campaign’s keyword and keyword group are subject to different competition and pricing, though, so taking a more analytical approach ought to maximise return on investment (ROI).
3. Bidding Strategy
Bidding strategy is influenced by budgeting and positioning strategy. It’s about optimising as much as possible for returns, i.e. balancing the cost per click (CPC) with the total spend and conversion.
It bears mentioning that AdWords can automatically optimise for CPC, while Google Conversion Optimiser can be used to optimise cost per acquisition (CPA).
If you’re into larger campaigns, bid management tools can be used, too.
4. Bid adjustments
Bid adjustments comprise the last of these four aspects of budgeting. They allow keyword bids to change automatically, dependent on factors such as time of day, location and device.
- You can often use day-parting (changing bid level by time of day) to increase bidding when the conversion rate is at its highest.
- The location of physical bricks-and-mortar stores could be one factor that impacts bid adjustments by location.
- Beware of focusing on desktop computers (though these may have the majority of conversions) at the expense of mobile, where users in the research phase can be targeted. Google even offers estimations of cross-device conversions within AdWords reporting.
DIY or outsource?
New to paid search advertising? You’re probably deciding between DIY or outsourcing to an agency.
Both have their pros and cons.
In-house
- Lower hourly rate
- Better integration
- Greater transparency
- More direct company knowledge
Agency
- Easier to scale up/down or stop
- More skills, experience and access to tools
- Closer relationships with search engines
- Less risk due to change (e.g. staff turnover)
Of course, there are many more considerations, including more advanced tactics. For more information, download the Econsultancy PPC Best Practice Guide, or check out their PPC Bid Management Buyer’s Guide.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
