Always strive to provide the maximum exposure to your product while paying the minimum for each view
Don’t ever let your ads get turned off because of budgets
Your ads need to run 24 hours per day
Don’t ever pause campaigns in order to lower costs
Your costs are effectively managed by lowering bids for individual keywords
To illustrate this as clearly as possible, imagine your product is a magic broom. This broom will sweep floors without human effort. Pretty cool, huh? This should be an easy product to sell. You go online and start a Google PPC account.
The first mistake you make is using a budget to control your spend. This is a mistake because there is more demand for your product than you realize. In fact, you are getting so many clicks that your ad stops showing by 2 PM. So from 2 PM till midnight, your ad is not shown at all.
You will always get more signups when your ads are shown to more people, even when the ads are shown lower on the page.
It is better to show your ads 24 hours per day, and you can do this while still spending $50 a day if that is your budget. Just lower your bids so you are spending less for each click. If you have no need to spend within a certain range, simply increase your daily budgets.
Ultimately you need to remember this rule: If your ads are getting turned off because your budget was reached, you are mismanaging your account. And you are paying more per click than you would otherwise be paying if you reduced your bid amounts and maintained those ads for a full 24 hours.
Lowering your bids will cause 4 things to happen:
1. Your daily spend will drop
2. Your ads will get shown lower on the page
3. Your cost per acquisition will drop
And the fourth thing that will happen is really cool: You will find yourself getting customers for the same cost!
How long it takes for your daily spend and targeted acquisition cost to be within your desired amount depends on how aggressively you lower your bids.
A fool’s way to reduce spending is to pause weaker campaigns. The ultimate goal for PPC is always to obtain the most customers for the lowest cost per acquisition. The only way you can achieve this goal is by providing maximum exposure while managing each exposure so it will bring in customers at your acceptable cost rate.
In other words, you must manage every campaign in your account at its lowest level: the keyword. The campaign may be weak but perhaps it still has some strong keywords. Turn off the entire campaign and you say goodbye to those potential customers. Instead, why not lower the bids for individual keywords? To manage a campaign effectively, every keyword should be managed individually.
Never pause campaigns. Only pause individual keywords. And the only time you pause a keyword is when you have lowered the bid to the absolute minimum and you still find customer acquisitions coming in too high for that particular keyword.
To recap: if you have a budget and that budget is reached, then:
1. You will be limiting the exposure to your ad
because
2. You are paying too much per click
To combat this, you must:
1. Manage your campaigns at their lowest level: keywords
2. Strategically lower your bids until you reach your desired daily spend rate (always lower the worst performing keywords first!)
To further reduce your cost per acquisition, make sure you are bidding on every keyword you can find and for every engine. Anyone who just uses either Google or Yahoo instead of both is automatically paying a much higher customer acquisition fee then they should.
To see why, just do the math: If you are bidding on a keyword that gets 1000 impressions a day with Google, it’s likely to receive approximately the same with Yahoo.
For this example, let’s say they are identical. So currently you are paying $1 per click to rank fourth with Google for 1000 exposures. This costs you $50 per day.
Now you decide to cut your Google spend in half so you can use the other $25 for Yahoo. First you lower your Google bids. You find out you can stay in the seventh position in Google and still get nearly as many signups as you were getting in the fourth position. Now you take your other $25 and spend it on Yahoo.
By lowering your bid and page ranking, your signups with Google dropped slightly, but doubling your ad exposure to a new group of clients at Yahoo caused your overall conversions to go way up.
Now you are spending the same amount of money but gaining more customers! Isn’t that the goal of PPC advertising? Why do we forget this by sometimes doing things that work against our goal?
Always strive to provide maximum exposure for your product while paying the minimum for each view. Be sure to do everything you can to maximize your exposure, and remember to manage at the lowest level: keywords.
Jeremiah Thompson
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