Writing Profitable Adwords PPC campaigns
I have recently set up PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns for a few of my websites and thought I should share some of my findings.
PPC campaigns allow you to place adverts for you ecommerce site at a number of locations around the web. It may be next to search results from Google, or embedded into other webmasters pages.
Creating a new campaign
The first thing you would need to do is to set up an adwords account.
Click the 'Campaigns' tab and find the button 'new campaign'. Campaigns allow you to keep a group of adverts together and apply global settings to all of them.
The first option in creating a new campaign is to set the target countries. For most of my sites I am only interested to advertising to people in the U.K so I select this country as my option. If you are not selling a physical product you may wish to advertise to the whole world.
The next option is 'networks, devices and extensions'. This allows you to have ads displayed in search, content, and mobile devices. I have heard the search ads produce better results so only use this type at the moment.
The 'Bidding and budget' options allow you to set all your ad prices indvidually, or automatically, and set a daily budget. I currently have a very low daily budget because I'm just testing things out.
Lastly you can set a schedule for you ads. Here you can set an end date for displaying them, and set what times of the day they are shown. If you have current data showing most people buy your products after work, you could set your ads to only display then.
Writing PPC Adverts
Once you have successfully created a campaign you are ready to start writing some PPC adverts. Click on your campaign and then the 'New ad group' button. The 'Ad group name' box allows you to name all ads, this won't appear to customers, but helps keep track of the ads in the Adwords panel.
Next is the actual text used for display in the advert. There are many ways to go about this, I will just suggest what I think works.
Now is probably a good time to talk about CTR (Click Through Rate). The number of impressions (how many people have viewed the advert) divided by the number of people who click on an advert results in the CTR.
The basic system Google uses for determining what rank your adverts will achieve in comparison to your competitiors is determine by CTR x Bid Amount. This means if you write a very appealing advert which gets lots of people to click on it, you may rank higher in the ad list than someone who is bidding more than you.
Another thing which effects your ranking is the adverts 'Quality Score'. This is a score based on the keyword relevance the advert has to the landing page, the speed the landing page loads, and the landing page quality.
This is one reason it's a very bad idea to create one advert for all your products. Much better results are obtained if a seperate advert is created for each product you sell.
With all this in mind, it makes sense to include the product name you are trying to sell within the advert a couple of times if possible. My standard format is something like this:
Headline : Lovely Big Widgets
Description Line 1: Buy Fantastic Quality Blue Widgets
Description Line 2 : £99.99 with Free Delivery to U.K
The display URL allows your site URL to be shown on the advert. The destination URL is the URL where the customer will be taken when clicking on the advert.
I have heard mixed opinions about including the price in the advert. Some people believe you should leave it out, as this encourages more clicks. Some think if people know the price before clicking they are more likely to convert to a sale. This method saves money on ads, but may achieve a lower CTR.
Choosing PPC keywords
PPC keywords are what trigger you adverts being shown in the various mediums. It is important to make sure all keywords are relevant to the advert and landing page. Finding well performing keywords can be a long process. I believe the key to profitable adwords campaigns is adding every single keyword and phrase you can think of to begin with.
Firstly set the adgroup group default bids (Max. CPC) to 0.01, we can change this later. Then in the keywords box at every phrase you can imagine someone might use to search for your product i.e:
widgets, buying widgets, where to buy widgets, buy widgets, widgets u.k, big widgets, blue widgets, new widgets, widgets u.k, widgets manchester, etc.
I usually use a broad match type, but you could experiment with specific matches too. Using would only display adverts for people searching that exact phrase.
If you sell items that have many uses, e.g 'boxes' you may need to add negative keywords. If you only sell jewellery boxes, you don't want to pay for clicks from people looking for cardboard boxes. So 'cardboard boxes' and any other types you could think of would be added to the negative keywords.
Once you have added all keywords 'Save ad group', the ad will then appear in your campaign in the left window.
Give to advert 10 minutes to gather data, then click on it in the left window, and hot the 'Keywords' tab. The important thing for now is the 'Status' column. Hovering over the speech bubble shows the staus of the advert. If 'showing ads now' says Yes, the ads are being shown, you can check this using the adwords preview tool, and typing in your keyword. Using this tool means you don't incure reduced CTR by viewing the adverts in the normal way.
It is unlikely many adverts will show for such a low price unless the keyword is very uncompetitive. Most of the keywords will probably show 'Below first page bid, first page bid estimate £x.xx'. Here you can decide how much you are prepared to spend on each advert. You may wish to ignore very competitive keywords with high bid amounts. Use the 'Max CPC' column to adjust the bids on all your ads.
I thinks it's best to start low, and see how the ad performs. The bid amount can allows be changes at a later date.
Monitoring performance of PPC adverts
The aim of most PPC campaigns is to make sales. Getting lots of clicks with no sales is like throwing money down the drain. To monitor performance it is vital to set up analytics to shown where sales are coming from. In Google Analytics it is possible to set up 'Goals'. This allows an order success page to be monitored, and show what keywords and traffic sources have lead to the sale.
From this data a ROI (Return On Investment) can be calculated :
ROI = <(Profit - Costs)/Costs)>*100
The costs should include all PPC costs, as well as other costs associated with selling the product, including you time.
Adverts producing a good ROI can be either left alone, or the bid amount could be increased to give more exposure. Other similar Adverts could be produced with the hope of emulating results. Some evidence suggests that adverts listed top in results do not perform well due to misclicks by users, so you may want to avoid this position by reducing bids where neccessary.
Adverts with Bad ROI should be deleted or re-written. In all cases it is worth giving ads at least a couple of weeks for some stable data to be produced.
Posted by Tom on Thu 3rd Sep 2009
