We are at the beginning of the month and you are setting your pay-per-click goals – or at least you should be! This may seem rudimentary but you need to make sure that from month-to-month you have core objectives and goals in mind when managing your PPC campaign. If you don’t have a clear, concise direction, then you may be wandering aimlessly.
At the end and beginning of each month you need to evaluate where you are with your PPC efforts, and where you want to be. And don’t just think about these ideas, write them down! You are much more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down and the steps that are required to achieve these goals. You should do the same with your PPC campaign.
For example, I want to increase conversions for one of my clients (this is my main goal for the month). However, I already know that I don’t have any extra budget to spend so to achieve this goal I need to lower my cost-per-click (to get more traffic) and lower my cost-per-conversion – basically get more mileage out of my budget. For May, these are the 2 major steps that I am going to take to get me to my goal (or at least close!):
- I hit my daily budgets everyday in Google & Yahoo. I am going to lower bids slightly in most of my ad groups in order to maximize my daily budgets, and generate more clicks. Sure, my ad position may decrease slightly but right now my ads are shut off by around 2pm each day because I’m paying too much per-click. This step will help increase traffic. And I won’t lower my bids aggressively, but incrementally throughout the month.
- I am going to create a new landing page with more benefit-orientated copy, and predominately display that we are offering free shipping this month. This will help increase my conversion rate, therefore lowering my cost-per-conversion and stretching my budget even further.
Sure, there are probably 5 other actions I am going take with this account this month, but I know my core goal (increase conversions without increasing my spend) and I have a plan in place to set me in the right direction. Think about your goals, what do you want to do?
- Increase clicks?
- Increase conversions?
- Decrease your cost-per-click?
- Increase revenue?
- Enhance your click-through rate?
Of course, you want to do all of these! But think about (and write down!) the core objective for your PPC campaign for the month and create a map to get you there. If you manage your campaign aimlessly, then you’ll get nowhere fast.
