Do you Think Bid Management is Simple? Think Again…

On the surface PPC bid management seems to be about reducing bids for keywords that do not hit your targets and increasing bids for those that do. The reality though is far more complex.

It is quite possible that the fundamental objective of your PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns is to drive the most relevant traffic to your site. It is also quite likely that you want these searchers to take certain actions on your site that add value to your marketing and sales efforts. These actions or conversions can be a sale/purchase, a whitepaper download, a form fill etc…

Needless to say each of these actions has a different level of importance to your business; therefore investing the same amount of your budget to acquire all these different conversions does not make sense. Meaning, having the same cost per conversion/cost per acquisition for all keywords that drive these conversions does not make business sense. Accordingly, the bid management for such keywords cannot be governed by a blanket bidding strategy.

As you develop your bidding strategy it is important to keep in mind that search engines have a major role to play in the bid price you pay and in turn your keyword ranking. Let’s take Google for example. Today Google determines the actual cost of your keywords with a series of complex calculations including Quality Score, Cost per Click (CPC), relevancy of your landing pages etc. only further making the bid price assignment more complex.

Combine this complexity with the sheer volume of keywords you need to manage. How confident are you of the CPCs you picked for your keywords? How well positioned are you to manage your keywords in today’s complex and dynamic search space? Attempting to even calculate an accurate keyword bid price manually can be a daunting task. But a sophisticated automated way of managing bids can help maximize your time as well as your marketing ROI.

Position²’s AutoBid Engine™

At Position2 we have developed a sophisticated AutoBid Engine™ to dramatically improve performance across our clientele. The AutoBid Engine™ is designed to accurately manage bids for individual keywords to achieve your ROI objectives. This is virtually impossible on manual and rule based bid management systems.

Reasons why you should consider Position²’s AutoBid Engine™:

• This proprietary tool is designed on a prediction model, one that can, based on your historic performance, forecast and recommend optimal bid prices down to an individual keyword level.
• Our technology is especially useful when your campaigns have multiple conversions, each of whose importance is different for your business. Using this tool you can custom define the weight for each conversion and let the system optimize your campaigns.
• The advanced algorithms emulate the search engine bid environment on a real-time basis and assess if your campaigns are performing at the optimal potential. Appropriate decisions are made based on the findings and your goals.
• The automated platform also allows campaign managers to expand keywords exponentially. It helps discover keywords fast and efficiently.

Your gains from the AutoBid Engine™:

• A customized tool for your business/industry to maximize results on your marketing investments per your ROI requirements.
• Increase in market share and profitability by predictably estimating and scaling up paid search campaigns to adapt to your marketing goals.
• Save time in managing complex campaigns with hassle-free integration of bidding and reporting engines.

Conclusion

Complexity with the search engine algorithms is here to stay and so is the uncertainty with users’ actions on your site, i.e. uncertainty about most of your keywords performance. A marketer who has found the right way to work with these forces is more likely to be successful in his/her PPC efforts compared to those who make decisions based on short term and on inadequate or unclear keyword data.

Your employees can be expected to make best decisions with the experience and knowledge they have. But to best utilize their expertise you need the right tools. Having Position²’s AutoBid Engine™ on your side means just that. With its unique algorithm it is designed to cater to every unique need of your business and to help you maximize returns from your PPC campaigns.

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Let’s continue our optimization process to improve PPC campaigns’ performance:

Go Vertical

Going vertical is an effective method to lower your cost per click (CPC) and to improve the overall traffic quality. The quality also tends to be better because of the increased propensity for the buyers to use vertical search engines in their purchase decision process. This gives a greater opportunity for those who are with limited budgets to more effectively spend their money online and to get higher ROI.

Keyword Research

While doing the keyword research we debate constantly on what to use with regards to long tail keywords or the head phrases and which would perform better and get more results. Head phrases are generic and broad keywords. The search volumes for these keywords are very high but cost is also quite high. Torso keywords are with 2 to 4 words keywords. The search volume for these keywords are low as compared to the head phrases, but the cost is also low. Long tail keywords are the keyword phrases which are more than 4 words. The cost and the search volume is very low.

While developing keywords for your search campaign make sure you are in the shoes of searcher. The keywords should be related to the target market and useful to the searcher while searching for your product or service.

Quality Score

Google and Yahoo use quality score to increase the quality of ads to improve the user experience. If the advertiser provides the consumer with the best experience possible, then the quality score for the advertiser should be good.  If the quality score is poor, you should check the keywords, ads and landing page and re-cluster the ad groups to improve your quality score.

CPL than CPC / Suggestion: CPL over CPC

The ultimate objective of your search campaign is to lower the cost per conversion. So bid high or bid aggressively on converting keywords and bid low for the other keywords in the campaign. Even when you bid high, you get conversions within your target cost per conversion.

Happy Optimization!

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

• Bid Management in a Complex and Dynamic Search Landscape (0)
• Quality Score myth buster (1)
• Key points for a well optimized PPC campaign (0)

In the PPC world, a Quality Score is a measure which tells you the relevance of your keyword to the users search query. Specifically, Quality Score is a score given to a particular keyword taking historical data of the keyword’s Click Through Rate, quality of the landing pages, relevance of the ad with the keyword and several other factors.

Why Quality Score is important for a PPC professional? Not because it gives a rating on a scale of ten but as a score which reduces your CPC when your Quality Score moves up, which affects your First Page Bid Estimates and your Ad Position.

Today I would be breaking 5 myths about Quality Score.

1. Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your Historical Quality Score data. We will not lose the historical performance of keywords, ads and landing pages, all these data is preserved, so feel free to restructure your account to optimize for higher conversion goals.
2. Quality Score does not suffer when your ads are paused or shown infrequently. Quality Score is determined by the performance of a keyword in combination with its ads. So pausing an ad or showing it infrequently does not affect, as these ads are not accruing any performance data. Showing your ads seasonally wouldn’t reduce your Quality Score.
3. A higher bid will not improve your Quality score. A higher bid will increase your Ad position but will not increase your Quality Score, as it is determined by a number of factors like CTR, Ad Relevancy and others.
4. Changing a keyword from broad to exact will not improve its Quality Score. For example a keyword like schools in broad match will show ads for variations of it like B schools, Animation schools etc. Even though your ad might show up in these instances, its performance will have no impact on Quality Score. The keyword’s Quality Score would only be affected by how your ad performed on the search term schools since it exactly matches the keyword. So changing a broad match to exact match will not affect its Quality Score.
5. Ad conversion rate does not affect your Quality Score. Setting an easy conversion event on your landing page to artificially boost conversion rates will not have any effect on Quality Scores of a keyword. So let the landing pages have the required set of fields to collect all the details of the prospective customer.

On the whole it becomes mandatory for a PPC professional to always look into Quality Score as a measure of how his keywords, ads and landing pages are working as whole but not as individual entities and make corrections to increase relevancy between these.

Contributed By Chetan Prakash

• Bid Management in a Complex and Dynamic Search Landscape (0)
• Improving Performance of PPC Campaigns (0)
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