Busting common PPC myths

Higher bidding doesn’t mean higher position

Few clients are obsessed about showing their ads on top of the spot with or without knowing whether top spot is really good or not. They prefer to bid higher on their favorite keywords, to achieve top positions. Higher bidding helps at a certain standard to acquire a top spot, but the objective is to win top spot without paying extra.

For increasing quality score that helps to increase average position without bidding higher, it is necessary to optimize all campaign parameters. Read more about 36o degree campaign optimization in our previous blog “Turning your PPC investment into success Story”.

Higher position doesn’t mean higher conversions

This is co-related to previous one. Staying in top position doesn’t mean that you would get maximum leads. The average position shown by Google is the average position when your ads are shown every time when someone searches.

If you really want to know which position works best for you, you need to do deep analysis on daily bases. Like for which keywords/key-phrases your ads were visible, avg. position of your ads, which ads were visible and so on, which is almost impossible to do.

Doing this, you may get an idea about the things that are working well in your campaign and the conditions in which you can achieve maximum conversions with different combination of ads, keywords and avg position.

But, being obsessed about top spot isn’t a good idea for increasing conversion as staying on top can lead to more CPC which may or may not result in better ROI.

At the end of the month or week, create a report that represents the chart of average position Vs conversions driven by your keywords and ads and see the average position beneficial for your business.

Deleting keywords and Ads based on data

In the normal scenario, people use to analyze the data based on the conversion they see in the web analytics tool. On weekly or daily bases, you may try to figure out the keywords that drive you more clicks and high conversions compare to amount you paid and same way for ads.

Well, if you are aware of different conversion models and have knowledge on how web analytic tools collects data, it’s fine to do it. Else, first you need to get aware of conversion models your analytic tool considers and significant of each.

So, before deleting any keywords or ads based on the data your analytic shows, you should try to find out whether those specific ads and keywords have played intermediate role in driving final conversions.

In other words, you need to figure out whether those ads and keywords have click through or view through conversions. If you are using Google analytic, you would be able to see by customizing columns in your advertising report under acquisition. Learn more about view through conversions and its implementation here.

If you would like to know more about conversion models and its implementation, read our previous post Tracking it correctly: Calls, Events, Click to Calls, Leads and Much More.

It’s a key to gain short term success

If you are thinking like, let’s invest in a few months and see what it can drive, you are never going to experience the full potential of PPC because you can’t get all the things done perfectly on a trial basis.

May be its true on a competitive basis when you compare it with SEO and Social Media. To get the best out of PPC, you need to think of long term with continuous analysis of what worked best and what did not.

So, spying on your competitors keywords and ads doesn’t get your desire result on experimental bases. One has to think of his own strategy and factors that differentiate your business offering from others.

Giving control over to Google Adword hasn’t always turned out to be a positive experience

Here, I want to point out few things where you give control of your campaign to Google, trusting that it will do the best for your business without doing any manual analysis.

Both promise to increase your conversions based on past 30 days conversions received in your account.  In enhanced CPC, you are supposed to set the max CPC bid you may pay to receive conversions while in conversion optimizer, you are supposed to set max CPA bid (cost per acquisition).

If you want conversion optimizer and enhanced CPC to work properly, you need to implement each and every conversion that defines profit to your business as this system depends on past 30 days conversions.

The objective is to reduce the cost per click and acquire more conversions. But in both cases, I have observed, it doesn’t make any difference or in worst condition, you may observe that overall spending becomes too high without seeing any significant increase in conversions.

If it works for you, that’s great, but if you haven’t tried before, you better prepare to do daily analysis and what keywords and ads are receiving clicks after enabling these two options.