I have read around the place that a fairly common strategy to start out new campaigns is to have high Max bids then slowly drop your bid prices once you establish a decent CTR. I was just wondering what sort of timeframe do you apply this strategy over and does this only apply in certain cases and is there anything extra I should know about applying a strategy like this?
Some say don't touch it for 3 months, others say 3 weeks, some say 1 week. The key is don't lower things too fast. It takes google a while to get enough data on your campaign to turn the calculations over to your data instead of running with the historical data on the keyword you're bidding on. So you need to give it at least a couple days to establish itself. In a perfect world you don't even need to lower the bids as they will come down automatically.
As you get clicks and establish an avg CPC you can begin lowering. Sometimes withing the first day if there is enough volume. But dont jump the gun and lower to fast or too much. get maybe 50 clicks and then lower to a couple pennies under the average CPC. then let more clicks come in till your avg cpc lowers below your max CPC and continue the process till your in a position you like.
When lower Max bids, should I be lowering my max bids per keyword, or adgroup, or whole campaign? Like for example I have an adgroup within a campaign that over the last 3 days has received a CTR of 13%+ based on 400 impressions and at the moment I'm paying an average of $1.68 with a max bid on most keywords of $2.00, and an average position of 2.0 for the adgroup. How would you guys proceed? Also what position is generally considered ideal? Also how much could I reasonably expect CPC to drop with time? Note: I'm running this campaign for my father's business and he, like most offline businessmen, wants to rank #1 for everything and is fairly traffic/branding focused rather than ROI focused, as much as I try to convince him otherwise. Thanks again guys.
If he doesn't care about roi, then why bother tinkering with the bids in the first place? If it's just for your amusement, then what roi are you getting at the current bids?
It's not that he doesn't care about ROI, he wants to pay as little as possible for advertising, he just doesn't want to have to do it at the expense of decreased sales volume. As in he'd rather be paying premiums and being positioned 1-3 getting 10 leads, rather than being positions 7 - 10, getting 5 leads but having a 10% of the advertising costs... if that makes sense. As for ROI, this is one of the big problems at the moment, it is hard to tell considering we haven't been running the campaign for long and because my father is running a traditional offline business we also have very limited processes for tracking specific PPC campaigns it in place because the PPC campaigns are going to a landing page where we are trying to get people to call us or submit email inquiries rather than sell anything online. My dad is operating in an industry where a sale often means $1000+ profit, so paying $100 for 100 people to visit his site isn't a big expense if one of them ends up leading to a sale... if you know what I mean. Anyway, reducing costs and improving ROI is always important - that's why I'm inquiring about reducing CPC to increase leads.
I recommend you add Google Analytics to your site. Make sure the email on the page triggers a thank you page. Set up that page as a goal -and you will see what keywords, bids and positions triggers the most emails. You should also set up a separate phone number for the landing page. That way you will be able to measure phone response too. Just look at your phone bill and see how many calls you get on that number. Make sure you log any changes to the campaign to directly tie the calls to the changes. Next, track how many calls / emails it takes to get a sale - and how much the average sale is. Use that info to put a dollar value on a goal conversion. Analytics will give you ROI on each keyword, action, link, page...... Regarding what to pay and where to be - everyone always starts on top and pays too much. If your ads are good enough, you should be able to get lots of clicks in the 6 to 8 spot - even further down for very broad keywords. The other side of the coin is that this is very cheap advertising for branding. Paying a few thousand a year or a month to be on the top of the page is much cheaper than TV, radio or print.
Yeah I will definitely be recommending to my dad that we look to setup some better systems of tracking results. On the topic of where you want to rank, I was wondering why does google sometimes display ads above the SERPs and other times only display the ads to the right...? Do you have to be paying over $X to get positioned above SERPs, or with time as the avg CPC drops will you still a general drift lower in the positioning? Also back to my original question: When should I lower Max bids? should I be lowering my max bids per keyword? or adgroup? or whole campaign? Like for example I have an adgroup within a campaign that over the last 3 days has received a CTR of 13%+ based on 400 impressions and at the moment I'm paying an average of $1.68 with a max bid on most keywords of $2.00, and an average position of 2.0 for the adgroup. How would you guys proceed? Also what position/s is generally considered ideal in regards to still getting a good chunk of traffic and receiving a significant CPC reduction? Also how much could I reasonably expect CPC to drop with time? Thanks
Google moves the ads around to test effectiveness. Sometimes they are on top - 1 to 3 or on the side. You have no say in the matter. If you just started using adwords, you are paying 75% too much. There is a steep learning curve to optimizing keywords (negative, broad, phrase and exact), ad groups and ads. More keywords - especially geographic and long tail will lower cost. Better ads with lots of keywords (even dynamically inserted) will lower costs. Tighter ad groups will lower costs. All that matters is that you keep testing and tweeking to lower cost, raise effectiveness and ROI. BTW, half of the battle is to deter clicks that are of poor quality. Anybody can get lots of clicks.