ppc increase profit

One of the main success measurements of a Google Adwords campaigns is the conversion optimization.

What is a conversion?

Every site has a goal, whether it is branding or selling a product. A visitor that fulfills this goal is a ‘converted user’. Documenting and analyzing these goals is called a ‘conversion tracking’. Improving the campaign, based on that analyzed data, is called a ‘conversion optimization’.

Conversion optimization is a great way to improve your PPC campaign!

Why isn’t conversion optimization perfect?

Conversion optimization tracks only part of the purchase funnel. We can track it up to a lead, but a lead continues the funnel process to purchase a product or even more, the visitor’s coming back after a month to purchase another product. Many leads do not convert to a purchase level. Tracking conversions gives us only partial information about the visitor.

From conversion optimization to profit optimization

Optimizing up to a conversion level can bring many conversions for a good price per conversion, but many of these conversions will not lead to sales, so marketers are actually wasting money on these conversions. Other conversions might cost more, but these visitors actually purchase a product, so these are profitable conversions. Optimizing your campaign according to profit is called profit optimization.

Optimizing your campaign according to profits enables you to improve your profits and your ROI (Return on Investment), rather than improving your conversions. KorAnga, via its technological partner, Kenshoo (www.kenshoo.com) – global leader in online marketing optimisation technology, delivers all the necessary functionalities to enable efficient marketing implementations with profit maximization processes.

From online to offline

What happens if many of your purchases occur over the phone and outside your site? This too is traceable. In order to trace your offline purchases, you need to use an advanced PPC marketing system, such as Kenshoo Search used by KorAnga. Such a system integrates your CRM (Customer Relations Management system) interface with your PPC campaigns running on Google, Yahoo!, Bing and even on Facebook.

Such integrations will ensure tracking every purchase done on your site, whether it is online or offline. The purchase will be tracked to its origins (search term/keyword/referring URL/referring site/ad group/campaign etc.) Kenshoo search system can integrate with phone call tracking systems, to trace direct calls done from your campaigns with no further online interaction.

Summary

Tracking conversions via your PPC campaign is a great success factor. But it is not the ultimate one. As your site’s goal is to help your company make a profit, the tracking and optimization should be done in the profit and ROI level rather than the conversion/lead level. KorAnga ensures an efficient budget marketing allocation, and you can get more details at: info@koranga.com

Earlier this week Google Israel hosted it’s forth year celebration convention in Israel. Google invited over 1300 Google adwords advertisers to attend lectures and have Google adwords experts review their campaigns. Among those Google adwords experts were 2 Koranga representatives.

It was a great honor to be acknowledged by Google as an expert, and even a bigger honor to be personally invited by Google Israel to help their advertisers.

The Google adwords advertisers who came to the convention varied between high-tech in house campaign managers and cupboard carpenters who manage their own campaigns. It was quite challenging to help each advertiser optimize their campaign. Sadly there was not enough time to invest in every advertiser and we could only help with basic optimization tips.

In order to optimize the campaigns, we created a checklist which might help you optimize your own campaign.

Before you go on with this checklist you should go over the Google Adwords University presentations

PPC campaign optimization checklist:

The client:

- Know your client – who is your client? How old is he? Is he male or female? What is his income? Where can you find him on the internet? What are his surfing habits?

- Know your product – what are your products benefits? What is its unique selling proposition (USP)? How does it apply to your client?

- Campaign goals – what are your campaign goals? Is it to receive more conversions? Lower the Cost Per Action? Etc.

- Internet site – Is your internet site user friendly? Does it match your goals? Does it have a clear call to action? Is it designed correctly?

The account:

- Good and bad – What are the good elements in your adwords account? What are the bad ones?

- Account preferences – Are your Google adwords account preferences correct? Is your geo/network targeting correct? Does your account budget match your cost?

The campaign level:

- Campaign structure – How is the campaign structured? Is it by geographic location? Is it by subject?

- Content network – Is there a content network campaign? Is there a placement campaign? Do the content/placement campaigns have a variety of ads and banners? Are the content & placement campaigns separate from the search campaigns and from each other?

- Campaign settings – Are the campaign settings appropriate?

- Daily budget – Is the daily budget exhausted on a daily basis? At What time of the day?>

Ad group level:

- Ad group structure – What is the rationale behind the ad group structure?

- Number of keywords in each ad group – Is there a maximum of 50 keywords in each ad group?

- Relevancy – Is there a connection between the keyword, ad content and landing page content.

- Ads – Do the ads have a clear call to action? Do the ads use dynamic keywords? Does each ad group have at least 2 ads? Are the ads optimized?

Keyword level:

- Keyword performance report – Are there words which are not displayed because of low budget? Are there relevant keywords with low ranking? Do the words have a good quality score?

- Search Query report – Find new keyword opportunities, find new negative keywords.

Conversion & tracking:

- Conversions – Do you measure conversion? Do you use conversion optimizer?

- Google Analytics – Is your adwords account connected to your Google analytics account?

After reviewing this PPC campaign optimization checklist, you should ask yourself: how can I improve the campaigns so it will reach my goals? Of course you should set viable goals and not imaginary ones. You should review the whole flow of your marketing efforts from the campaign level via the user behavior on your site until the conversion.

A few months ago, in one of our long and exhausting meeting sessions inside the company, I came to a friend with what I have thought to be a great idea. An idea that would help Yahoo! search marketing attract new clients easily and cause more agencies to allocate budgets to Yahoo!. The basic idea was based on 5 assumptions:

1. Almost no company runs an account in Yahoo search marketing exclusively.
2. Most of the small\medium companies in the market won’t open an account in Yahoo! search marketing because of the low traffic in the engine and the very complicated and non user friendly interface of their ad management system.
3. Most of the account managers in SMB’s won’t learn the Yahoo! search marketing system specifically and hence they will not end up managing accounts on Yahoo!.
4. The only way to make a reasonable SMB open an account in Yahoo! search marketing – is to make it super easy to move the account and track it.
5. For agencies that run multiple accounts it is beneficial to learn the Yahoo system, run multi channel accounts and transfer campaigns from channel to channel.

The idea was to offer Yahoo search marketing team a smart way to run an affiliate program in which they will offer every agency that copies account from Google to Yahoo! search marketing – a small percent of the managed budget as a commission. This commission will encourage agencies to manage their clients’ accounts also in Yahoo!, despite the low traffic volumes and the complicated management system.

The challenge of moving accounts from Google to Yahoo! seemed solvable back then. The Yahoo! search marketing team used to help account manager personally with transferring the accounts using spreadsheet files (.xls) and helped users to adapt to it in accordance with the search marketing rules and guidelines. The problem was the fact that the search marketing team is difficult to reach by phone or by e-mail, this made it much harder to do.

It seems like someone on the Yahoo! search management team recently got this idea, and the rational behind it, so they enabled users to import entire account files from Google AdWords to the Yahoo! search marketing platform in only a few clicks (and from other competing SEM platforms as well).

As I see it, if Yahoo! offers agencies an incentive to import account from Google to Yahoo!, and only a small portion will eventually make the transfer, they will increase the online budget that agencies run on the Yahoo! search marketing significantly.

An appropriate affiliate type program for agencies would be all that is needed to doubling the number of in Yahoo!. The CPC rates on Yahoo!, in most search areas, are still relatively low, so there is a clear benefit of the clients also.

A detailed word document that describes a simple yet cleaver way to manage an affiliate program such as this still lays on the bottom of my hard disk (I don’t see how I can make money from this more complicated than smart program anyway). But I hope that someone there in Yahoo! thought about this one before me and one day they will establish a program of this kind, that will be for a benefit for them, us, the agencies and the ultimately the clients that will enjoy the expansion of their campaigns

When I talked about it with a co-worker from a big company that develops management and monitoring systems for online campaigns – he said that there is a big legal issue with that. This guy is probably right, the terms and conditions of AdWords contain some paragraphs that refer to intellectual property etc. It looks like whenever Google sees that some of their budget transfer out from AdWords to Yahoo! search marketing they will do something to prevent it. But now it seems like the numbers are too small for the Google Empire to even deal with this and activate their army of lawyers.

When we start a new PPC campaign we have little to no idea what keywords, ads or placements will have a good conversion rate and produce the desired positive ROI, at least beyond our initial setup that is. The goal is to find what works and what doesn’t as fast as we can. When we do find what doesn’t work it is obvious that it is quickly removed from our campaign. We pause or delete keywords that perform poorly, rewrite ads with low click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates and exclude placements if they are content targeted. But what should you do with the stuff that works?

There is no doubt that we will want to preserve any element that is doing well on our campaign, and sometimes even give a boost with a few more cents per click. However, before we go ahead and do that we should apply a little methodology that is called Peel & Stick. Like the prevalent Copy and Paste, Peeling and Sticking is taking elements that work well on our campaign and creating a highly targeted ad group specifically for each of those elements.

For example: Let us say that we are running a search campaign for ‘widgets’ and you have an ad group – “Green Widgets” which has 7 keywords:

green widgets for sale

cheap green widgets

inexpensive green widgets

green widgets USA

green widgets online

buy green widgets

affordable green widgets

After a few days we see that the KeyPhrase “inexpensive green widgets” is doing extremely well, it has a high CTR, and made you 5 sales already. The next step should be to peel that keyword out from that ad group and stick, or create, a new ad group “inexpensive green widgets” dedicated for that KeyPhrase.

The benefits of peeling and sticking are:

• Easier to manage your campaign
• Increase the quality score of these keywords
• Write highly targeted ads for these keywords
• Have a better control over the bids of these keywords

If we run a content campaign or ad group we can also apply this Peel and Stick method, but instead of creating a separate ad group for the keyword, we create one especially for that placement, on Google AdWords we can even drill down to target a specific URL.