Have you Optimized Your Paid Search Campaign Lately? - Bid Management
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Bid management is the act of monitoring your keyword bids and adjusting maximum bid amounts for the purpose of maintaining your ads' position in the search results and/or lowering the cost of your campaign. It’s easy to become obsessed with managing your bids to the point of forgetting all the other components of your campaign. It’s also easy to completely neglect the bid management portion of your campaign only to discover you’ve spent $2,000 more than you intended to over the last month.
There are numerous articles about bid management available, so rather than restate in myopic detail exactly how to manage your bids on Google and Overture, I’ll leave you with some high-level suggestions.
You don’t need to be in the number one or two position to get great results from your PPC ads. These coveted spots are often much more expensive than positions further down the page. Although it is true that the top three positions will be distributed throughout Google and Overture’s partner sites, so what? If your ad is getting clicked on in the number six or seven spot and those people are converting, then you’re in business.
I’ve also seen many of Google and Overture’s partner sites displaying ads in the fourth or fifth position or even further down. Yahoo!, for example, will display Overture results on the second and third search results pages (Yahoo! owns Overture, so it has a stake in showing as many Overture ads as possible in its search results). Move your ads down and see what happens. If sales flat line for a week, then you can move those ads right back up, but you’ll never know unless you try and you just might be pleasantly surprised.
You should start low when it comes to bidding and move up as necessary. While it’s true that Google won’t show your ad as often if you bid lower than other advertisers, you may also be surprised at how much traffic you get for just $0.30/click compared with $1.27 for the same term. Also, ads that show up lower in the search results can provide a higher return in terms of sales than the number one or number two ads. People just aren’t ready to buy from the first store they see, particularly when there are ten stores to check out. Move your ad around to see what gets you the best response in terms of clicks and sales. To track sales, you’ll need to put some conversion tracking in place.
Tracking conversions
The final piece of the puzzle is conversion tracking. Anyone can look at impressions to clicks, but the true measure of a successful campaign is clicks to sales. Both Google and Overture offer free conversion tracking tools which are highly effective at determining what keywords are driving actual business to your site.
These tools involve pasting a bit of code onto the appropriate landing and/or shopping cart pages of your site. They allow you to see both the conversion rate and the cost per conversion per term. This is obviously very powerful information to have when you are trying to get the most for your ad budget. Google and Overture both allow you to see the amount of money that each term earns. Obviously this information is very persuasive when explaining to your senior manager or your client why they should carve out money in next year’s budget for PPC advertising.
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