How To Do The Ppc Optimization Process?
Author: Lawren
Smith
PPC optimization is an ongoing process. There are
certain things you are going to do in a circular type pattern, meaning
you start back over every week refining your ppc campaign, performance,
and refining your results as well as testing eveything out.
Optimization requires setting it up and measuring it against your
business objectives. The following week you go back in and refine again.
Optimizing ppc campaigns is circular in its
nature; you are looking for what has changed. This is the essence of
ppc optimization. You are only looking for what has changed, at one
data range to another and one date range to the next. You are looking
for what has changed because the internet is always changing. In
addition, there are always new competitors entering the market. Such
changes also include new keyword trends that emerge. For instance,
about 25% of all search queries every day are brand new.
The internet is expanding. There is more meaning
implied in keywords which can shift at any given moment. For example,
say you have a campaign that you have had for a little while and one of
the keywords is "income". Initially, this seems pretty obvious; income
is income. But, when spring time comes along, suddenly, income is
related to taxes. Thus, most people doing search queries on income or
anything related to income, 80% of the results are going to have
something related to taxes. Thus, the meaning of the word "income" has
shifted to mean taxes. What this should tell you is, if you are not
watching your campaign performance, you will start to receive
unqualified traffic and your campaign will no longer be targeted. This
damages your ROI and profitability due the attraction of non-targeted
traffic to your site. You have to watch your campaigns so you can catch
any shifts.
Even Google's algorithm changes often. Everything
moves at a lightening pace. The reason you optimize and the reason you
do optimize as a process is because it allows you to stay on top of any
changes that take place. Plus, there is the added benefit that
optimization, if done correctly, improves your performance. You will
continue to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are
presented to you.First Step In PPC Optimization:
The first step to optimization is to continually
test new markets. Testing is included as part of the circular pattern
in optimization. Twenty five percent of all keyword queries are new.
Keywrod trends affect the outcome of everything. Thus, if you are not
watching to determine what the market is doing today, you are probably
missing new markets or new ways that people are searching for your
products or services. You may even be missing out on new opportunities
and locations of where markets are gathering in online social
communities and blogs. These are areas where you could be doing content
advertising.
There is always going to be a new opportunity and
the only way to continually get more market share and to get more
traffic, more leads, sales, and profits out of Google, is going to
require that you test new markets and expand out into these new markets.
In a brand new ppc campaign, you are doing a lot
of unknown things; such as, using keywords that you have done some
research on, but you are not sure whether they are going to work. For
example, you have a new website and you have no idea how the landing
page is going to convert; this is an unknown factor. This is why it is
essential that you are always testing these factors and unknowns to
find the knowns and continue with your progress.
A brand new Google campaign is going to require a
huge amount of testing, even if it uses branded keywords, because you
are still going to have to test all of the measurements we stated
above. You are going to test to see where the traffic spots are. You
are going to test to observe your competitors. You should be testing
the whole system.
The second step in optimizing ppc is going to
require that you monitor your campaigns on a daily basis. You
especially want to monitor you test campaigns. Test campaigns are going
to be the most prone to bleeding ad dollars. The reason being that if
they are brand new and you are testing, 90% of what you are doing, is
not going to work. This is because with keywords, which is true of any
kind of direct response marketing, which Google is, is similar to
direct mail. With direct mail, you are looking for a 3% conversion
rate. This is also very similar on keyword search. If you put a lot of
keywords in, some will drive traffic and sales, while others won't do
anything, some will not have any market, and no one is searching for
them. Others are going to be very competitive. This could lead to you
having to take your time in order to get market share. There are also
going to be keywords that will cost too much.Second Step In PPC
Optimization:
Step two is going to require you to be in your
campaigns every day, monitoring your campaigns and determining which
ones are working; especially in a test campaign. The newer the
campaign, the more frequently you should monitor it. When you are
monitoring your campaign, you are looking for action. You are looking
at your campaign to gain some insight so you can take some action.
Now, the question you may have is what type of
action is required? You can't do much on a daily basis except stop what
is bleeding your ad dollars. So, when you go into your campaign, you
are either pausing or killing the keywords and ad groups on a daily
basis in a test campaign that has 20 or 30 clicks. Usually, the
keywords or ad groups are experiencing terrible conversion rates, a
high cost per conversion and they are not producing a lot of leads.
Quite possibly, they may have a terrible CTR that you should pay
attention to where certain keywords are getting a lot of impressions,
but not a lot of clicks. Later, you will need to work on your ad copy,
but you could be experiencing a situation where, although you have been
optimizing your campaign and you still are not able to get your metrics
up. In a situation like this, you have no choice but to shut it down.
But, most times on a test campaign, you just want
to look at the conversion data daily and plug all of the wholes that
are bleeding ad dollars on the keywords and campaigns that are not
converting to leads and sales opportunities in your pipeline.
Third Step In PPC Optimization:
So, now when you move past, testing, monitoring,
and plugging the holes, the third step in optimizing ppc campaigns is
to evaluate what is working and what is not once a week. This is when
we return to the performance metrics. To get the performance metrics
that are meaningful, you need a significant amount of data. This step
can not be completed off a couple of clicks, impressions, or
conversions. The more data you have, the more concise you insights are,
the more likely that the known is no longer an educated guess.
You can get performance data daily if you have a
very high traffic campaign, ad group or keyword. Improving the
performance data is a daily activity. But if you are looking at overall
improvements, which include landing pages, ad copy revisions, and are
improving the metrics rapidly, you need to do this once a week. Again,
on high traffic terms, when you trying to burn in a position or do
something else aggressively, you should be monitoring your performance
on a daily basis. It is only if the data provides you enough insight
that helps you to know what to do next.
Your entire account should be optimized once a
week. At the account level, you should be looking for all the key
performance indicators mentioned in this article. Of course, you first
step should be reviewing you key metrics once a week. This includes
improving your CTR, conversion rates, and finding new keywords and new
markets. These actions should be done every week. The keywords that are
converting to the most leads are the ones you should use to find new
keywords and new markets.
Once a month, you should be looking at your Return
On Investment (ROI). This is key because your ROI determines your
business success. When monitoring your ROI, you are looking for ways to
make more profits. The third ste is a different process. Like your
performance indicators, this step requires that you have a lot of data.
It has to be conclusive data. Once you see that a campaign has
converted to 20 or 30 leads per day, then you have some pretty
conclusive data that the campaign is a lead generator. We refer to this
step as profit mining. You mine out the top performing keywords by re
restructuring your campaigns to separate you highest converting
keywords and placing those high performing keywords into their own
campaign, thus allowing you to optimize them to get the most out of
them.
Just for the keywords and ad groups that have
proven to produce leads, you want to remove the terms, keywords, and ad
groups, text ads, and capture pages and place everything into a
separate campaign. Once you move them into a separate campaign, you can
then increase the budget and increase the amount of time you spend
optimizing. This allows you to invest your time in the right place, but
more importantly, you can put your money into a campaign that is a lead
generator or money maker. These campaigns, which are known to convert,
are labeled and assigned a much higher budget. By increasing your
budget on you top performing keywords and ad groups, you are increasing
the ability to generate more leads and more money because you have
already optimized the key metrics for traffic, cost, and quality. These
are also campaigns where you understand their behavior. The campaigns
could be a buying behavior or converting behavior and with such
behaviors, you want to maximize how much money you spend in that
campaign. You want as many conversions as possible. Again, this is a
step that should be done once a month.
In essence, by doing this, you are creating
different high performing campaigns that are separated based on their
behavior. For example, you could have a high converting campaign for
leads Another one for sales and sales ready leads, who are leads that
are calling you and following up with you. You could have several
campaigns in the sales funnel for your introductory sale or low price
sale and your top tier sales, which have the highest profit margin.
This way you are tracking which of your campaigns
are producing the most results and this is done by separting those key
performers into their own campaigns where they can be optimized and
maximized. This is a big part of the overall ppc optimization process.
After this step, you then want to track these high
producing campaigns at least once a month. As you can see, the ppc
optimization process does not happen in one day or one week, or one
month. This is why optimization is often referred to as a system of
testing, monitoring, and evaluating. Improving your campaigns is a
circular pattern over days, weeks, months and then returning to step
one where you compare the two date ranges and look for gains or losses,
so you can continue to determine the appropriate actions to either stay
on track or get back on track.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/
how-to-do-the-ppc-optimization-process-1935647.html
About the Author
This article was written by Lawren Smith. Her
interest is in helping peoplereach their goals and dreams by making the
right decisions in their home business. Click here to learn about PPC
or visit Optimization