It grinds my gears to see how often some basic rules of PPC are overlooked even by so-called PPC experts.
When I participated in a teleconference with some of the leading PPC experts in the world, two of them got into a scuffle over whether it made sense to buy exact match traffic at a premium cost per click or broad match traffic through Google.
But neither of them was making sense because both were ignoring the most important element: it is not how much you pay for traffic.
The only thing that matters is how much your traffic converts at.
Knowing your conversion costs for every keyword eliminates any discussion about whether broad or exact is better, and so on.
You should be taking advantage of advertising your keywords in all ways and in all places.
You should be measuring each way/keyword individually.
And you should be adjusting your bids based on the conversion cost.
Things like ad position rank or bid amount are completely irrelevant. You only need to track your cost per conversion.
Quit thinking that there is a perfect ad position. There is no such thing. It is different for every circumstance. Instead, realize that your goal is to bring in conversions. You probably already have an idea of what you are willing to pay for a conversion.
If a keyword is bringing in conversions at a higher spend amount than you want, then lower your bids to bring your cost per conversion down for this particular keyword.
If a keyword is bringing in conversions at a lesser spend amount than you want, then you can increase your bids to bring in more conversions.
It really is this simple. I have no idea why people get caught up trying to manage other things.
Your goal in PPC should be to bring in the most customers for the least cost. You only accomplish this when you learn to manage every keyword by its conversion rate and forget about things like ad position or bid amount.
Jeremiah Thompson
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