Newpath web has helped countless businesses manage their Google AdWords accounts. As PPC service providers, we’ve worked with clients who’re experienced and adept at the platform but simply don’t have the time to manage it themselves, to first-time users who are curious to see what it can do for their business.
Regardless of the business type or their experience, we get a lot of similar questions regarding various aspects of their campaign. We figured it was high-time to answer a few of these and give any potential clients a heads up before signing on.
Q. When does my AdWords budget run out?
PPC stands for pay per click, meaning that you are paying to distribute your ad on Google’s search platform. So, they make you set a daily budget, and we’ve seen anywhere from $10 a day to $500 a day. But people always want to know, “when does it run out?”
Well, Google has a pretty nifty trick, where it uses all relevant information to make a judgement about the expected interest in your ad (looking at average search volumes for all associated keywords). It uses this analysis to spread your budget out across the entire day, meaning that you don’t miss motivated users later in the day.
However, we can turn this feature off if requested. While it might increase impressions, and certainly chew through your daily budget, it may cause you to miss quite substantial leads generated in late afternoon and evening periods.
Q. Do I necessarily want those evening users, though?
That’s an excellent question. One thing that the AdWords platform is terrific in assisting with is the optimisation of your showing periods. In the beginning, unless directed otherwise, ads are set to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We only do this for the first month, just to get a baseline on potential user interaction.
Once we get into the second month, we look at AdWords performance and make suggestions towards more narrowly defining the broadcasting of your ads. One example could be to limit exposure between 11 pm, and 4 am each night, except for Friday’s. We’ll make this suggestion based on information that might be telling us that while there are impressions, none lead to clicks and indeed none result in conversions.
Again, we consider your advice on this as well. If you have experience running an AdWords campaign and believe that you’re best times for advertising are between 4 pm and 4 am, then we’ll go with that. Of course, we reserve the right to make recommendations, potentially expanding the viewing times a little each way to see if we can pull more motivated customers. As a PPC service provider, we work with you to develop the ideal circumstances for your AdWords campaign.
Q. How much am I spending on these ads, like, on an individual level?
Do you mean, the individual bid for each display? With PPC, it’s essentially an automated bidding process to determine who gets first, second, third, fourth and fifth (and beyond) spots in the search engine. Now, multiple variables go into this decision, but one of the big ones is your maximum bid value. If you are fighting over an incredibly popular keyword, with lots of competition, your max bid value is going to be higher than a long-tail keyword with only ten average monthly searches.
Google offers advice on setting max bids, and like before, in the initial period, we follow their advice. However, we review the performance of each keyword and the ads associated with it. If we feel that there is a benefit in increasing the bid, we will, in the form of percentage increases in the ceiling value. If a keyword has a max option for $2.35 per impression, but offers dramatic conversion, far beyond any other keyword, we might look to increase the bid by 20-30%. This increase would take the bid up to $3.06. Remember, the $2.35 suggestion came from Google, as a rough estimate of how much it would take to deliver improved positioning. By increasing this value, we have potential to produce fantastic results for that keyword.
Part of our PPC management is looking at possible max bids and adjusting as we go. No digital marketing platform is ever static and is constantly evolving. These variations mean that we need to be able to move bids to reflect the ever changing landscape There might be new entrants, or there might be organisations leaving the platform; it requires daily monitoring to ensure that we deliver the best possible campaign for you and your business.
Q. What’s this quality score you’re always going on about?
I haven’t actually said anything about it thus far, but I’m glad you brought it up. Remember when I said, literally, like, three paragraphs ago when I stated that there were “multiple variables (that) go into this decision (about where your ad ends up)”? I’ve also written another article about this! Regardless, one of those variables is AdWords Quality Scores.
Aimed at determining the relative quality of the ad that the customer sees, the quality score takes into account the use of your targeted keywords both in the ad copy as well as on the landing page the ad takes you to. Do you want to target coffee? Then why is your ad all about newspapers and your landing page about puppies? That ad would have an abysmal quality score.
Obviously, as your PPC service provider, we carefully map each keyword to a particular ad and then include keyword mention in the headlines and body copy of each ad. Beyond that, we need your help to optimise landing pages to deliver excellent quality scores. And it’s critical for one succinct reason: quality scores impact the cost of the ad.
If a score of 5 is the median, anything above that saves you money, with each score saving more the higher it goes. Conversely, anything lower than 5 penalises you, costing more the lower it goes. So work with us to improve scores and save your hard-earned pennies, and more importantly, attract more customers and get more conversions.
Work With Us
We really stand by our AdWords campaigns and believe that they represent terrific value for businesses, at least in the short-term. As PPC service providers, we want to work with you to optimise the whole campaign, and we have years of success in getting it done. If I’ve piqued your interest, hit up our PPC services page, or give us a call on 1300 761 806 to find out more.
