September 10, 2013: Here’s a typical scenario: an advertiser is running a profitable search campaign, with good ROI, and healthy CTR and conversion rates, Suddenly – without any warning – ROI flattens or goes negative, along with CTR and conversion rates. “Hitting the accelerator” (by increasing spend) has no effect on these rates. You’ve “hit the wall” – so what can you do?
Before taking any kind of action, you need to find out what’s wrong. Unless you understand where your weaknesses lie, you risk fixing the wrong thing and worsening your situation.
1. Look Under the Hood
Have there been any changes to your infrastructure or hosting environment that may have influenced your landing page performance? Have the terms of your offers changed materially? Has your share of mobile users increased markedly (mobile users may find your site less usable than desktop ones)? Are there other internal variables that may be depressing user experience? Use your analysis to identify any other elements in your site that’s under your control which may not be performing optimally.
2. Understand Your Competitors
Analyze the competitive environment. Have competitors slipped into the auction without your knowledge? Who are these competitors? Are they deep-pocket brands running broad match campaigns? Or scrappy firms such as your own with limited PPC budgets? Are any of these competitors doing anything to drive demand through non-search and/or offline media? Learn as much as you can about your competitors before organizing a battle against them.
3. Organize Your Account
Look at your account structure. Are your campaigns and ad groups organized in a sufficiently granular fashion to identify which clicks generate the most and volume? Are you using every dial and lever at your disposal (including day-parting, geo, and demographic targeting)? If you are finding that it is difficult or impossible to compete with deep-pocketed competitors for big chunks of search traffic, practice “stealth tactics.” For example, you may find that there are high-converting segments for whom you can bid much more than your competitors in certain geographical areas. Unless your competitor actually has a presence (e.g. a branch office) in such an area, you may be able to steal traffic from him without him ever detecting what you’re doing. But none of these stealthy tactics will be available to you unless your account structure is set up correctly.
Of course, you probably shouldn’t wait until your campaign “hits the wall” to perform any of the steps outline above. In fact, right now — before the Holiday Shopping craziness begins in earnest — is an excellent time to make an analysis and take corrective steps.
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