When is the best time to lower cpc bids based on your experieces/knowledge. How many clicks or impressions would you wait. I'm still pretty new to adwords, just launched my campaign a few days ago, but I've been doing a lot of reading. From what I know so far, the bid amount should decrease as your ads gain popularity, but if your doing manual bidding, when would you know its safe to lower the bid. Thanks, Blue
One thing to remember is, "If it's not broke, don't try and fix it". In other words, take a keyword - if it's producing a profit I wouldn't be in a rush to lower the CPC. The only time to drop it, is if it's costing you too much. Right, when you do wish to drop it, be sure to only drop it a bit, nothing significant. I drop it around 10-15% maximum of the current bid. Example: Current bid is 0.30, so I'll drop it around 0.03-0.04 worth to say 0.27 or 0.26. You then need to give it at least a week (sometimes more) for Google to recalculate and you'll soon find out if you have any positional change. In my experience, it's better to bid big at the beginning and then monitor that keyword and the Ads in the Adgroup. Some Ads may be putting you in profit, whilst others are putting you at a loss. Therefore, removing an Ad and changing, is a better option than dropping the Max Bid. As you only launced your campaign a few days ago, I wouldn't be dropping bids yet. Can I ask what your Quality Score is for the keyword(s) in question?
I have read of the theory that you can lower you bids a little each time you QS goes up as your bids are `worth` more. But that said, I wouldnt be too keen to try it!
Rank = Max Bid * Quality Score. In theory, it shouldn't matter how much you drop your bid, but I've found if you drop it too much, you lose position and seem to drop Quality Score when you're in lower positions. Therefore dropping the bid slightly, keeps you almost as high (or as high) as you were before the bid change. In other words, I'm not convinced that Google's working out of their normalised by position with CTR is as accurate as they make people believe. I've found that bidding high and then only dropping it 10-15% if the keyword isn't proving profitable, is the best way to go. If you can't afford to bid high on the keyword (high enough to be in the top few positions), then I'd look for other keywords. You'll spend more at first, but if you're Split Testing, you'll soon know which Ads Google prefer and if that happens to be your best performing Ad, then all the better and your Quality Score will be higher. Remember - it's not just keywords that Google give QS to, they do the same with Ads as well.
Uh, At the moment i've got around 127 keywords with 75% ranking 6/7, some 5's and a minority of 4's and 3's. I haven't got anything above 7 yet...
Position 6/7? i'll be quite frank with you, those are unlikely to convert, i've been working on PPC for a long time and i've found very few markets which convert on a position below 5 (taking into account 2-3 will be featured PPC ads on top!) I have a rule of thumb, trial, evaluate & roll out. Test your campaign at different hours of the day using market research, when you get more sales / visits. Bump to a higher average position using day/time parting, that way you maximise your impression share, improve your account QS and gain a true insight into the potential of your campaign, else all youre doing is wasting money. Also gives you the heads up on the keywords to be utilising for SEO, don't ever get carried away with PPC, make sure you are synergising with SEO from your learning of what works and what the real traffic drivers are for your brand on PPC.