by Doubleclick

Search engine providers now offer incredibly sophisticated tools to manage and optimize search advertising campaigns. The ease of implementation and degree of control over campaigns available outstrips those of any other medium and puts you in a strong position to maximize your ROI from your PPC campaigns.

Bid strategy

As each keyword bid by a competitor (as well as other factors in Google) creates a different position in the listings, due to the “auction” mechanic used to determine cost per click, each keyword has its own range of costs from number one down to the last bidder. These market prices need to be identified and grouped to establish the expected cost per click (CPC).

According to campaign objectives and budget, you can decide what CPC you are willing to pay for each keyword and bid accordingly. If aiming for a set cost per acquisition then the bid is determined by the click-through and conversion ratio and thus what you can afford to pay for each lead. If you are looking for brand awareness and positioning you may chose to bid high in an effort to consistently appear in the top three positions in the paid listings.

Automated bidding tools

Bid management is the process of continually monitoring and making changes to the bid price (CPC) of each of your keywords to ensure you achieve your desired position and subsequently hit the goal of your campaign/ programme, whether that be a branding goal, a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) target, a revenue share target, or a combination of these.

For those running search campaigns in-house, the continual monitoring and updating of bids can be time consuming, especially if you are managing numerous campaigns in parallel, across a number of search engine publishers. This is where automated bidding tools come to the rescue.

There are a number of third party bid tools in the market. They all offer different strategies or 'rules' that you can implement. For example: capping the bid price to meet a pre-determined cost per acquisition. More advanced bid tools will allow you to set primary and secondary goals so you can achieve multiple objectives. Once the primary rule is met then it starts optimising towards the secondary goal. If the secondary goal is no longer being achieved then it reverts to the primary rule again, and so forth - for example, your primary goal may be to achieve a strict CPA, further to which you’d like to optimise towards position 1, but you don’t care about position unless you’re achieving your target CPA.

Remember auto-bid management is not the be all and end all. If you want to maintain complete control you should manage your bids manually or hire a specialist agency to do this for you - especially if your search campaigns are growing in size.

Editorial copy

Your search listing copy plays an important role in achieving click-through on your keywords. By configuring ads correctly, resources within some PPC services can help identify the best performing ad-copy by click-through rate, information which you can then use to optimize the text accordingly. Ad copy is also factored into the Google relevancy measures as is the content found on ad landing pages. Therefore, it is important to keep the ad text and landing page content as relevant as possible to the keywords you are targeting that may result in an ad being displayed.

Targeting

To further improve your ROI, many paid search providers now offer targeting tools to their advertisers such as day parting and negative keyword submission:

Negative Keywords:

Overlooking negative words can lead to many wasted clicks. For example, consider the high search volume keyword ‘mobile’. A mobile home company would want to submit ‘phone’ as a negative keyword to ensure their ad is not exposed to thousands of ‘mobile phone’ searchers each day; a potentially costly mistake to make.

Day Parting:

Your click analysis could reveal that a greater percentage of clicks convert during certain times of the day, on certain days of the week or of the month. Rather than simply setting a daily expenditure limit, you can instead restrict display times for your listings. B2B websites often find that restricting exposure to working hours improves their ROI whilst B2C websites can find the opposite.