{"id":9753,"date":"2018-05-14T09:25:26","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T06:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/?p=9753"},"modified":"2021-06-28T17:55:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T14:55:03","slug":"profitable-ppc-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/profitable-ppc-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Manage a Profitable PPC Campaign (Lessons Learned After Spending $1 Million on Google Adwords)"},"content":{"rendered":"
The main goal of a PPC Campaign is to generate profit. If that goal is not achieved, then you should take the correct decision and stop your campaigns because you are simply losing your money.<\/p>\n
This is a very basic principle that every business owner should follow, whether it\u2019s PPC campaigns on AdWords, Facebook Paid ads, LinkedIn Ads or any other platform.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong, a PPC campaign can be profitable. In fact, it\u2019s one of the best ways to grow your business fast.<\/p>\n
The problem is that running profitable PPC campaigns, is not always so easy. If you fall into the trap believing that you can make money with PPC by just setting up a campaign and let it run on \u2018auto-pilot\u2019, then it\u2019s like throwing your money in a black hole.<\/p>\n
Proper PPC management<\/a><\/strong> needs to be planned correctly. The process begins before creating your campaigns on AdWords and continues as long as the campaigns are generating a positive ROI.<\/p>\n More than 1 Million Dollars Managed on AdWords the last 2 years<\/strong><\/p>\n As a certified Google AdWords Partner<\/strong><\/a>, we manage a number of PPC campaigns for our clients. The last two years, the total ad spend was more than 1 million USD.<\/p>\n Obviously, the return on investment was bigger than that, and this is the reason our clients increased their spending to those levels.<\/p>\n Our experience with AdWords goes back even more years and my goal with this post is to share with you the lessons learned and help you understand how to launch, setup and manage profitable PPC campaigns.<\/p>\n For those new to AdWords and PPC, let me just mention that Paid Search Advertising (PSA) is one of the components that make up SEM (Search Engine Marketing<\/a>). The other component is SEO (Search Engine Optimization<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Before we get into the details on how to improve the performance of your campaigns, let\u2019s clear out what do we mean by profitable PPC campaigns.<\/p>\n A profitable PPC campaign is the one that generates a positive Return on Investment (ROI)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Return On Investment (ROI) is usually calculated as:<\/p>\n ROI = (Revenue – Cost of goods sold) \/ Cost of goods sold.<\/em><\/p>\n In this case the cost of goods sold should include AdWords costs (i.e. ad spend and management fees).<\/p>\n For example, let’s say you have a product that costs $50 to produce, and sells for $100. You run a PPC Campaign on AdWords and sell 10 products per month.<\/p>\n Your total sales are $1000, your AdWords Costs are $250 (Ad spent and management fees).<\/p>\n Your ROI is ($1000-($500+$250)) \/ ($500+$250) = 33%.<\/p>\n In this case you are making profit from AdWords.<\/p>\n The point I want to make here is that when calculating the profitability of an AdWords campaign, you should not only take into account the Advertising and management fees but also other costs.<\/p>\n Likewise, you should also include in your calculations indirect benefits gained from running a Google campaign like sales or leads generated because of the exposure you have with AdWords.<\/p>\n Consider the example below. The total online sales were $250 but because of the indirect benefits offered by AdWords, the company generated an additional $200 in sales. This should also be included in your calculations in order to arrive at an accurate figure.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t overlook this step because if you don\u2019t have a valid way to calculate the true return from the investment made on PPC, it will be difficult to decide if this a profitable channel for your business.<\/p>\n Follow the 15 best practices below to increase your chances of succeeding with AdWords.<\/p>\n Planning is important when running PPC Campaigns. Before creating your campaigns in AdWords, you should create a plan with specific goals and milestones.<\/p>\n Your initial plan should include things like:<\/p>\n You can create your plan in an excel spreadsheet and then use the same spreadsheet to monitor the performance of the campaigns on a monthly basis.<\/p>\n Our spreadsheet besides the initial plan includes a sheet for monitoring purposes and a sheet for each campaign that we write (among other things), ad ideas and a log of all changes made to the campaign and the effect on CPC (cost per click), CTR (click through rates) and conversions.<\/p>\n It is important to structure your account is a way that is easy to manage. If you have a couple of campaigns then that\u2019s not an issue but as you expand your reach and create more campaigns, the account needs to have a proper structure.<\/p>\n Best practices for account structure include:<\/strong><\/p>\n Create country specific campaigns \u2013 If you are running campaigns in more than one countries, it is recommended to have one campaign per country. This way you will be able to set separate budgets and have better control on targeting.<\/p>\n Create campaigns matching your site structure \/ products \u2013 This is basic but important. Your account structure should \u2018replicate\u2019 the structure of your website as much as possible.<\/p>\n Separate Campaigns for Display \/ Search \/ Remarketing \u2013 Each campaign should have a unique goal and it\u2019s recommended to use different campaigns for search traffic, display or display remarketing.<\/p>\n What do we mean by themed ad groups? That keywords in an ad group, ads and landing pages have the same theme i.e. they should be very specific.<\/p>\n To make it more clear:<\/p>\n If you have keywords that are not in the ad group ads, you should consider removing those keywords and creating a new ad group.<\/em><\/p>\n Themed ad groups increase relevancy, ad rank and lower costs.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t allocate the max of your daily budget from day 1. Start with a low budget and then increase that gradually depending on how your campaigns perform.<\/p>\n There are a number of advantages of following this approach:<\/p>\n When you start a new PPC campaign, you don\u2019t really know which keywords are the most valuable for your business.<\/p>\n You can perform keyword research when setting up a campaign but at this stage it\u2019s only predictions.<\/p>\n Only when you start the campaigns you can know for sure which keywords (or search queries) perform better than others.<\/p>\n A great way to do this is to start with modified broad match keywords.<\/p>\n When using modified broad match, you will end up with a big list of \u2018search terms\u2019 that have actually triggered one of your ads to be shown or clicked.<\/p>\n Run for your campaigns to gather enough data and then duplicate them (pausing the original ones) and change your keyword types based on these rules:<\/p>\n What is the benefit of doing this?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the biggest factor affecting the Cost Per Click (CPC), quality score and ad position is relevancy<\/em> of your keywords and ads.<\/p>\n By switching to phrase and exact match keywords and making sure that these keywords are also included in your Ad headings, you will dramatically reduce your costs while at the same time increase conversions.<\/p>\n Do not underestimate the power of negative keywords. Losing money on clicks that are not related to your products or services is a total waste of money.<\/p>\n Negative keywords are a very powerful tool to make sure that your ads are only shown for the keywords that matter for your business.<\/p>\n My advice is to review the search terms report on a weekly basis and add any irrelevant keywords as negatives using the modified broad match<\/em> type.<\/p>\n For example, if you are don\u2019t offer any products or services for free<\/em>, you can add the keyword +free<\/em> as a negative, to exclude all search terms that include the word free.<\/em><\/p>\n This is a more efficient way than adding all combinations as phrase or exact match.<\/p>\n Hint:<\/em><\/strong> To make it easier to manage your negatives, use negative keyword lists<\/a><\/strong> that can be shared between campaigns.<\/em><\/p>\n AdWords has a number of options when it comes to bidding strategies. Depending on your goals, you should choose the appropriate type.<\/p>\n This process can be a bit tricky and it will require patience and a lot of testing.<\/p>\nWhat is a profitable PPC Campaign?<\/h2>\n
15 Lessons Learned After Spending $1 Million on Google Adwords<\/h2>\n
1. Create a plan with goals and milestones<\/h3>\n
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2. Structure your account correctly<\/h3>\n
3. Create themed ad groups<\/h3>\n
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4. Start with a low budget and increase gradually<\/h3>\n
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5. Start with modified broad match keywords and then switch to phrase or exact match<\/h3>\n
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6. Use negative keywords to get rid of junk<\/h3>\n
7. Use the most appropriate bidding strategy<\/h3>\n