Most people who use PPC advertising never get the results they should from it, because they don’t treat their campaign seriously. If you want to get your PPC campaigns to be truly productive for you, you need to start spending a little more time on them than the initial setup period.
To begin with, no matter what you personally feel about a keyword, your ad copy or even your website, do not be stubborn about changing it. If it is not doing the job it was designed to do, then you need to tweak it and constantly change it. No campaign is ever completely finished, there is always a way to improve it. I have three sorts of campaigns – campaigns in testing, campaigns in advanced testing and cancelled campaigns. All new campaigns are in advanced testing phase to begin with. I will tweak things around and analyse results for a while after that and then it can go one of two ways.
If it fails to pay for itself it is cancelled.
If it makes a profit of 25% or more it goes into testing mode. This means I will revisit it every so often and make sure it continues to perform, but in general won’t spend a lot of time ‘tweaking’, as it can run it’s course and continue to bring in funds. Sometimes they get more attention if I think I can squeeze another 5 or 10 percent profit out of it.
If it breaks even but doesn’t make a reasonable profit it stays live, but gets constantly tweaked in an effort to see if we can find a better way of running it. Some people use a lower or higher rate to determine if a campaign is successful. I guess if you spend $1000 a day on PPC that a 10% return is going to get you $100 a day return. If you don’t fancy the $30k bill at the end of every month to get a $3000 return you will set your standard higher.
The key to success in a system like this is that you know what keyword is paying, which landing page is working, what ad copy is getting clicks and what isn’t. These stats can come from Google, but you should also have tracking on your site which lets you know where visitors are coming in from and which sales copy is working.
Get your tracking right and you will be in a very strong position to get the most productive results from your PPC advertising campaign. Neglect to set it up and you will never know why your campaigns aren’t working and why you are losing money on Google Adwords.
