| By: Brennan Heyde | Published On: 12/26/2007 |
Part III: Test, Track, Repeat
This is part III of a three part series on Pay Per Click (PPC). You can read part I and part II here.
Congratulations. You have now run your first PPC campaign. Once your $500 budget is all used up it is time to take a look at the data to see which groups and keywords performed best. Because you have conversion tracking, Adwords will tell you all the information you need to know.
Go through and find the best converting keywords. (The ones which generated the most sales) Look and see how much you spent on clicks for those keywords vs. how much profit they generated for your site. Go through each ad group and look for underperforming keywords. This means keywords which cost a lot and don’t convert into sales. These are keywords which you want to remove from your campaign. Don’t remove a keyword just because it didn’t produce any sales. Remove keywords only if it is costing you a lot of money AND not producing sales. There is no harm in letting a keyword run, which doesn’t cost you a lot per click.
Look at all the keywords with the best click-through rates, and compare them to others. How targeted are the ads? Why did these have the best click-through rates? These are things you need to analyze.
Use all the data you collected over the past week to optimize your campaign. Your goal is to remove keywords which don’t convert into sales and find the ones which do. Refine your ad groups and ads. See what worked, and try to copy that on your other ads. Maybe using the actual phone brand in your ads increases click-through. This would be a good modification to make. Also look at your landing pages. How optimized are they for the ads? Which landing pages performed best?
Also get into detailed tracking. What time of day did keywords produce the best conversions? Say for example you get better conversions between the hours of 1pm and 5pm. If this is the case, use Adwords time targeting feature to only have your ads run during this time of day. This will allow for you to increase your Cost per Click because your ads are only running for a short period everyday…and it is the time of day which generates the most sales. The same thing goes with day of the week. Maybe your conversion rates over the weekend are very low and you are losing money. Then set up your campaign so your ads only run during the week. Again this will increase your click-through rate and overall conversions.
Once you have analyzed every piece of data and optimized your campaign, start round 2 of testing. Let it run for a week and wait for the results. Get the new data then test, track and repeat.
By the 3 round of testing, you should have a very optimized group of keywords. Hopefully by this point, you now have optimized your campaign enough to where you are making a profit on your monthly Adwords costs.
If for some reason you are still losing money then keep testing. Write new ads, optimize your landing pages, change you Cost per Click. There is no real formula to success. You just have to keep testing until you find something which works. Eventually you will find it.
Once you have a campaign which works, expand to the other search engines. Try Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing. Never just stick to Adwords. A lot of times an unsuccessful campaign in Adwords will be profitable in Yahoo and Microsoft, because the competition is much less. Take advantage of this and watch you ROI skyrocket.
Here are some helpful key tips to remember:
- Test, track, and repeat.
- Always be optimizing your campaign
- Don’t use “Content Targeting”
- Make sure to turn on conversion tracking
- Do your research in the beginning – It will pay off
- Split your keywords up into small target groups
- Use multiple ad variations
- Optimize your landing pages for better conversions
- Test your campaign is all 3 of the major Search Engines.
About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce. Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.
