How can Google Adwords PPC help my business?: business skills

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Amy Wilson is product manager of Sycrusa, a new technology for Search marketers that uses a series of algorithms to detect best practice errors and opportunities. Here she explains how Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertising can be used to help your business.

There is lots of information on the Internet about the best ways to run Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) and I have the difficult task of trying to grab your attention with something new to say on the topic.

If you spend a upwards of a few grand month, chances are you are with an agency. They will be telling you they do lots of magical things, every day, to make your AdWords work harder for you. They probably send you a plethora of reports backing up that very claim.

However if you are still growing your PPC spend you probably exist in a murky quagmire of knowing that being based on minimum spend most agencies aren’t cost effective for you. You are taking the DIY approach even though the task daunts you as much as doing your own tax return!

A grand upwards a month is a lot to spend on optimizing your PPC, and chances are you have a few savvy grads or some administrative staff keen to broaden their horizons, and it is easy to learn the ropes, and quickly configure a campaign in-house.

However, the more you grow your PPC account, the more it will start to resemble a leaky bucket; with your hard earned cash the money slipping through holes.

It will be easy to increase your coverage (and therefore spending), but you will find there are lots of ways you can accidentally waste your money. Users with small budgets will also struggle to optimize properly as budgets are gobbled by greedy Google.

Trying to get as much bang for your buck is where best practice comes in.

There are many types of best practice (your tools for plugging the holey bucket). 

However in my experience optimizing can be a bit like using your fingers to plug the holes; you will run out of fingers as there is only so much optimizing you can do in a day.

If you are a hey big spender your agency will probably profess to have an army of grads using all their fingers and toes to keep your bucket full to the brim. 

However for the more frugally business minded amongst us you have to pick the most influential best practices that work for you and stick to it.

Best practice helps with that difficult trade off between volume and return on investment (ROI).

If you are a small business with low search spend your biggest challenge will be coverage. The Best Practice is to remain “on” all day so your ads appear whenever someone is making searches relevant to you. In practice this can be very difficult, especially with high volume terms.

Here are my best practice suggestions for “on all day”:

Average position

The below graph shows click through rate (CTR) which is the number of clicks per impression served vs average position (the rank of the ad).

Graph from Search Engine Journal

This shows a clear relationship between rank and CTR – no surprises here –people are more likely to click the ads higher up. The only problem with this is that it exhausts your budget more quickly than say serving in positions 3-5.

Lower positions are a great way to test what is generating you sales. If you are in a very limited budget don’t test everything in high positions – boost them up as they start performing.

Ad Sheduling

Ok so its not really “on all day” and it may sound obvious to you; but generally people don’t buy things at 3am. AdWords budgets start at midnight and end at midnight. If you run out of budget your AdWords will switch off whether at 8am or 8pm. This could mean you actually miss the majority of search traffic:

This graph from Atlas shows that internet activity peaks between 1pm & 7pm. This is why you need Ad-Scheduling: You can start serving your ads later in the day to ensure that you are switched on during the peak.

You can also use Ad-Scheduling to automatically increase or decrease bids during the hours of the day, or days of the week that you know users are more likely to purchase.

Ad-Scheduling can be configured at campaign level:

Geo-targeting

Another way to make your budget go further is geo-targeting. You can use regional areas for a proxy for the market you are trying to reach (old/young, rich/poor etc). Targeting a city to make earnings is a great way to roll out your PPC from one region to the next. Geo-targeting settings are also set at campaign level. You can use Analytics to see where your most loyal customers are geographically located:

Negative keywords

This may seem like another obvious instruction – but don’t buy traffic you don’t need. Use negative keywords to block out keywords you don’t want. Make sure you use the right kind of negative keywords and don’t inadvertently block too much traffic.

Here is an example of keywords that could be blocked by their corresponding negative keywords:

So you have managed to serve all day (or at least longer than before). This will probably correspond with decreasing acquisition costs as you are reaching a wider audience closer to the peak in daily internet traffic. You need to make that click work harder for you…

Broken or irrelevant landing pages

Once you have paid for the click – make sure it takes the user to the most relevant part of your website depending on what they searched. Google advise you send them 1-2 clicks away from their conversion. This means trying not to send too many people to the homepage.

Additionally if you change your product pages often, make sure you have a way to check the corresponding URLs in AdWords are updated. You don’t want to pay to send traffic to an error page!

Ad Copy

Try to make the most of the Google character limits and Ad Extensions. Make sure you implement the correct punctuation to use Headline Extension ads. Don’t damage your brand – check your ads carefully to make sure they don’t contain spelling, grammar or pricing errors.

Finally.. if you want a tool that makes some of these tasks for plugging the holey bucket a lot less labour intensive I suggest you check out Syracusa.

It is an arsenal of tools to help fix your PPC, here are just some of them:

See last week's post on SEO for small businesses and don't forget to come back for our next post on setting prices.