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PPC Farming – Watering

May 5, 2010 By
watering

Now that you’ve prepped your soil, planted your seeds, and you’re starting to see some sprouts, we need to talk about proper watering.

As mentioned in the previous post on planting, watering = money. Setting your budget is enough to get the seeds to sprout, but to keep them growing you’ll need more consistency. This is where you keyword-level bids come into play.

Too Little Water Can Kill

Remember that house plant you forgot to water for weeks (maybe even months)? If your experience is what I’ve seen, then your plant was a goner. Likewise with your keyword bids. If you don’t set them high enough your ads don’t get triggered and your carefully planted seeds sprout and then promptly die. There are a couple of watering strategies you can use:

  • Full Stream – You want to dominate the space and top position is how you want to do it. Start with aggressive bids and make sure your QS is good. Keep the water coming as fast as your plants can handle it.
  • Slow & Steady – You’re not going for top position, but you’re looking to find the ROI-maximizing sweet spot. My experience is that top position on the right column of ads (usually 3-6ish) provides maximum bang for the buck when you have a limited budget.

Caution! You Can Over-Water

This may seem like an oxymoron to some, but too much watering can be just as fatal as too little watering. The problem with over-watering is that plants start to drown and develop fungal growths. With your PPC efforts this usually begins appearing as grumbling from the marketing exec about budget. They see how much money is going into PPC and want to send that money to another effort. I’ve seen companies over-water, feel the spend was unjustified and stop doing PPC for months. Make sure you have tracking installed. Make sure you know your cost/acquisition. Make sure it’s comparable or better than the cost/acquisition of other channels. That is how you keep the water flowing.

How else do you water your PPC crops?

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PPC Farming – Planting Part II

May 4, 2010 By
Seedling

Seedling
In our last post we discussed how PPC account setup is like planting your farm. However, a savvy farmer knows that you need a few key elements for your seeds to start growing (“germinate” in horticultural parlance).

Getting Your Seeds To Sprout

Every good gardener knows that you need 3 things to get from a dormant seed to a growing plant: Water, Heat & Sunlight.

  • Water – This is your budget. You can add keywords & write ads all day, but the clicks don’t start coming until you put in the billing info and set your budget (and PPC stops delivering when you stop watering). Every situation is unique and you may have some budgetary constraints. However, you want your budget to large enough to capture significant traffic (for valid testing and for conversions) while not breaking the bank. A good PPC manager can help you set an initial budget and advise you on opportunities as you go along.
  • Heat – This is your settings. At the campaign level consider whether you want to be on the content network or search partners, what devices your ads will be on, whether you should use day-parting, and changing over to rotated ads instead of optimized. The right settings will heat things up to get your account growing much quicker.
  • Sunlight – This is impressions. You’ve set the budget (watered) and heated up the soil (proper settings) but if your ads aren’t showing you won’t get results. First you’ll want to look at your bids (you just might not be bidding high enough to get on the first page), then your Quality Score (low QS can keeps your ads from showing), and don’t forget search volume. If you’re going for terms with really low volume, there just might not be many searches where you could show.
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