PPC PT2: Further Adventure
This is the second in what I expect will be recurring series about managing your PPC campaigns.
Networks: I have continued to prune our list of automatic placements in Networks with pretty good results. Over all, I have reduced our spend by about 1/3 saving us thousands of dollars a year. I have discovered that this is an on going chore but now that I have the worst offenders out of the way I should be able to reduce this to no more than 15 minutes of review and updating a week.
In the Networks though I have discovered some gems and am now managing my bids for these in an effort to get more targetted views. By bidding slightly more for these sites I am increasing my daily impressions but the audiences are more relevant for us than on funnyjunk.com.
Audiences: Interest Categories: This took about half a day to fine tune for all of our campaigns but it is worth the effort. Audiences help you further refine ads appearing on the Google Content Network (AdSense). I am not fully up to speed on how Audiences and Networks interact, but I believe I have told Google to limit my ads to appearing on pages with audiences in certain segments (Retail, Web Design, eCommerce, etc.). This has been a huge help in decreasing our impressions in the content network. I have also increased our payments for these audiences.
Audiences:Remarketing: Have you have visited a web site then noticed their ads seem to follow you around the Internet? Well, you are not being paranoid. This little gem is tucked under Audiences and I am pretty excited about the potential it has. You need to get your web team to add a little bit of Google code to the header of your web pages and increase your bids for this remarketing list. This will increase the position and frequency of your ads for people who have visited your site. Repetition builds familiarity and familiarity increases trust which is key to conversion. You can set how many days you want to track these customers so if you have a long buying cycle, consider up to 90 days so you stay in front of them as they research.
Quick Update: I just did a week over week comparison in Google Analytics to confirm that fewer clicks as actually a good thing: Visits were down 14% as expected. Page Views were up 12%, pages per visit up 30% & time on site up 24%. The bounce rate also dropped by 6%. I believe that these numbers actually underestimate the impact because I was tweaking the campaigns on and off all week. So a bit of fine tuning saves us money and increases the engagement of our visitors.
Tags: ctr, google adwords, ppc