PPC Management the right way isn’t an easy task!

PPC management is like trying to juggle the contents of a cutlery drawer whilst blindfolded, so a methodical, systematic approach is needed to define a plan of attack, which serves as a framework to take the account forward.

Obviously that is a flexible PPC management plan depending how the PPC account responds as we may need to adapt and change to keep moving forward, but we develop a plan and work on it, measuring and adapting to changes as we go but when we get it right the results can come pretty fast.

The image below displays the key performance stats over a ten day period of PPC management and is taken from the Google AdWords account home page for a new client we took over the PPC management of recently. It was a fairly well structured account that was running at a profit with good quality scores as over 80% of keywords already had a quality score of seven with many more running above that. The client wanted to reduce the cost per sale without any loss of sales volume first, before then going on to dig deeper and gain new sales from longer tail, more targeted keywords combined with more targeted landing pages.

We have just started ppc management on this account and Gareth, our head of paid search, has been hard at work as it’s a high ticket sales item in a very competitive market with tight margins and this account is already running at high quality scores, so it’s not as straight forward as many accounts. In the grand scheme of things there’s so much more to do but initially several key changes along with lots of smaller ones have made a big improvement. Most of these focus on reducing the cpc and cost per sale by increasing the targeting and thus boosting the quality score to receive the knock on effects of lower cost per click and thus cheaper sales.

In the first ten days our PPC management changes have made quiet an impact on the account with the main results being a 29% savings in cost and a 34% boost in click through.

Let’s go through the results of the PPC management changes above :

A) Clicks is how many times a paid for AdWords advert was clicked in the 10 day period in 1-10th of April versus 1-10th May. There were 2,525 clicks in the April period compared to 2,440 in May, that’s just a 3.4% reduction in clicks, which is to say the site received just 85 less visitors (less isn’t always worse when you are paying for people to look at your site so we are happy with this figure).

B) Impressions is how many times an AdWords advert was displayed when searched for, the changes we made reduced the number of impressions by 10,055, this has a big effect on the Click Through Rate as we only lost 85 visitors by culling those 10,055 impressions, it’s safe to assume those 10,055 searches were not at the right phase in the buying process to click on the advert (assuming the adcopy is juicy enough to click!).

C) Click Through Ratio (CTR) is a reflection of how many people who saw an advert actually clicked it, many factors are involved in boosting CTR but the main two are targeting and the relevance of the adcopy to what the searcher is looking for, here we managed to take the CTR from 7.10% in April to 9.56% in May’s 10 day period, which may not sound like much but is a 34.60% increase and that’s huge growth percentage which will have positive knock on effects.

D) Average Cost Per Click, (CPC) Most PPC management companies focus on bid management, this is like treating a reoccurring infection with pills instead of getting to the root cause of the problem, our pay per click management approach is to focus on the quality score, the cost per click will then take care of itself more easily then, so bearing in mind we targeted the keywords harder, we saw almost a 30% reduction in impressions, with just over a 3% reduction in clicks, which combined gave a whopping 34.6% increase in CTR, this resulted in a decrease of 12.8% cost per click, so in real terms on average, each click was 12.8% cheaper for our client.

E) Conversion Rate is a big key performance indicator for most merchants and here we have seen an increase of 23.8% in the conversion rate, this client with sales from a few hundred to several thousand pounds, making almost one quarter more sales is great news, but then when combined with a 12.8% cost per click reduction it’s fabulous.

F) Cost Per Conversion (CPA) is a great KPI for most merchants where they know they average profit margin they can quickly see if they are in profit from one statistic alone and here our PPC management changes have reaped a great 29% saving with the cost per conversion falling from £105.27 to £74.72, which when coupled with the increased conversion rate means great savings and extra profit from more sales.

G) Cost, the spend on the first 10 days of each month was reduced by 15.7%, this isn’t a huge account as it only spends around £5000 per month but it’s one we can effectively apply our PPC Management skills on to save the client money, time and resources and yield some fantastic results for, whilst more than covering our costs in savings, new business and extra profit.

Conclusion, it’s very early days but already the benefits of having an experienced PPC management company take over the PPC management of their AdWords account are clearly visible, huge percentage increases have occurred in a very short timescale which all combine to generate extra profit for the merchant.

Contact us today for a no obligation FREE AdWords Health Check to see what savings could be made on your account with our PPC management techniques. You’ll get specific changes that need to be made with examples of predicted cost savings and full “how to” instructions should you wish to change things yourself.