How long does it ramp up a PPC campaign?
-
I was speaking to a SEO the other day. He is going to be working on an ecommerce site soon. I was suggesting that he might want to augment his SEO efforts with PPC in order to be able to show some results in the near term, as it would most likely take some time for his SEO work to be showing results.
His response was that while he hasn't utilized them as much, he's found that it can take 3-6 months to get a PPC campaign to really make money. I'm just curious if you guys feel that this is an accurate statement?
-
If your website has no issues and your product is good. You should start making money after 1 month. The biggest problem is not to waste money. Learning curve costs money. plan it carefully arithmetic is your best friend.
Regards Igor
-
Hi Brett,
EGOL is correct...PPC is really competitive, especially for high volume / expensive products. John is correct that Re-marketing, PLA and branded keywords are the most profitable. I also recommend going after competitors names / product name. PPC is the only way to rank for competitors terms, and since competitors keywords are targeting people looking to buy your type of product, they will convert well.
PPC takes time and money to determine the best keywords for you...it will also take some time/money to establish high Quality Scores, which are essential to the long term success of a PPC campaign. However I always recommend my clients start with PPC because you can rank at the top of page 1 today; and SEO can take months to get to the top of page 1. Even when you rank on page 1 organically, having multiple ads in the SERP will increase your overall clicks (1+1=2.25) i.e. 1 PPC ad + 1 SEO ad = more clicks than you would achieve with just 1 organic ad.
I also recommend using a high quality PPC manager who has the knowledge, experience and ppc tools to make your ppc campaigns profitable quickly. There is a learning curve with PPC, as with SEO, or any other marketing niche. Its better to use a ppc manager who is already over the learning curve. You should also look for a manager that uses Marin Software to manage their campaigns...Marin's bidding algorithm optimizes keyword bids better than any person can. A person can't optimize millions of keyword bids daily...that's what computers / PPC software is for.
If you would consider working with a PPC manager, please private message me. I offer a free AdWords review, no strings attached. To demonstrate my PPC skills, I will give you a handful of actionable ideas that will improve your ppc campaigns. If you think I am worthy of managing your PPC campaigns, we can start a marketing relationship. If not, you will have a handful of PPC strategies that will improve your campaigns.
Have a great day
Branden
-
Hi Brett,
I would suggest starting off with a very focused PPC campaign aimed at a few products and review the performance. As EGOL has mentioned, you will have to watch your competitors very closely to ensure that they are not offering better deals than you for the same keywords. This should help bring in funds as the SEO campaign is ramping up. We have also seen a correlation with PPC traffic improving organic traffic for our clients.
Cheers,
SEO5
-
EGOL as usual is spot on. If you're interested in going forward, here are a few good types of campaigns to get started with that are generally high ROI:
- Remarketing (generally for display advertising, and now for search!). This will allow you to show ads to people who visit your site, or add things to their shopping cart and don't check out. You can link your Adwords account to Google Analytics to use your goals and events from there to make this even easier (see here). Since they've been on your site before, you know there's some extra interest in your products.
- Product Listing Ads. Many merchants see a good return on these if you can optimize your merchant feeds properly. These are the ads that appear when you search for a specific product, with the tiny pictures on the search results page.
- Brand advertising. For example, if your company Acme sells trail running shoes, if someone searches for "Acme trail running shoes", they're going to see ads above your organic listings, and you'll lose some clicks to them. You can pretty easily get your ad to the top of the pile because your quality score will usually be a perfect 10 for these keywords.
-
When I start a PPC campaign I include keywords that I hope will target the right people, I write multiple ads that I hope will attract clicks, and I make landing pages that I hope will convert.
As the campaign runs I am able to eliminate keywords that do not convert, eliminate ads that don't attract clicks and eliminate or modify landing pages that do not convert. Every time you eliminate something the performance of your campaign should improve - if you made a wise decision. Your profit should improve and your quality score should improve and that can bring your bid prices down - if you know what you are doing.
It is something like sighting-in a gun. You shoot, see where you hit, adjust the sights, shoot again, and keep at it until the gun is zeroed in.
If your campaign is targeting a niche with vigorous activity you will get lots of data quickly. But if your campaign targets a sleepy little niche with very few searchers, it can take weeks or months to accumulate enough data to eliminate poorly performing keywords, ads, landing pages, etc.
Making money on PPC can be very difficult. You can be competing with people who can obtain product at cut rate prices, ship their packages at a discount and have highly efficient fulfillment teams and very smart ad managers. If you are not tracking your conversion rate and keeping a close eye on your profits and costs you can loose more money than you make at PPC. I am willing to bet that a lot of my competitors are loosing money at PPC and don't know it.
It is really hard for a small business to make money at PPC. You have to be super smart and super efficent and get all of your expenses down to rock bottom. Try it and find out. I bet you are surprised at how easy it is to blow a lot of money.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Huge Drop in Shopping Campaigns clicks
Anyone else experiencing a huge drop in impressions/clicks? we noticed on Friday a sudden drop with impressions/clicks on multiple shopping campaigns which have been running very successfully for a number of years, we have checked merchant centre for any errors or warnings, also checked our feed everything looks OK apart from the extreme sudden drop. All our search campaigns are performing as normal, our natural rankings are also perfectly normal, just affecting shopping campaigns, we cannot figure out why. Anyone else seen any extreme changes with shopping campaigns recently? We are based in the UK
Paid Search Marketing | | Haz0 -
PPC: how to get rid of an ad appearing on a keyword we don't want?
Hi, Our ad on Google Ads is appearing for a search we don't want. it isn't in our search keywords and when i try and ad it to our negative ones, we get the error " You cannot exclude keywords that are targeted " which i assume means that google thinks we are bidding on it? We have a selection of broad phrase matches so i can only think that this is where it's coming from? Do you have any tips on tracking down which keyword is generating this ad and how we can turn it off? (we don't want to pay for clicks on this search if possible!) Btw - i have turned off each keyword in turn to test it = nothing. have then paused the whole campaign = gets rid of the ad (but this is our most successful campaign so i can't just turn it off). Any advice super super welcome. thank you!
Paid Search Marketing | | Fubra1 -
Will pausing my AdWords PPC campaigns impact my organic rankings?
Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search; less than 5% comes from AdWords PPC (all other sources account for about 1-2%). My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero. It's negative if you include opportunity costs. My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer? This is really two questions. First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings? Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?
Paid Search Marketing | | ahirai2 -
PPC Keyword list
Hi Im embarking on a PPC campaign targeting one single product that we sell. I am compiling a key word list just now and was just wondering if there is a maximum number of keywords i should be looking to target for this? Thanks in advance
Paid Search Marketing | | TheZenAgency0 -
Number of reviews in PPC advert
Hi all Got an email from a client asking about this, Ive not come across this one before. The client has a Google + account with about 2500 reviews on their website on. They have linked this into their adwords so these show on their ppc. However, on the ppc ad it says only 650 reviews. Quite a difference!! Anyone know why this would be the case? Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | GrumpyCarl0 -
WordPress PPC Landing Pages
We are looking for a solution that will allow us to create attractive and effective PPC landing pages with WordPress. We need to be able to easily create multiple pages with no navigation. Any Suggestions?
Paid Search Marketing | | CsmBill1 -
Index or Noindex PPC Landing Pages?
Hi all, We have thousands of PPC landing pages for our products. Usually, these pages are very similar and may differ only slightly for the keyword in question. The landing pages are sitting in a sub-domain of our site. From SEO perspective, assuming we don't want to get hit by Panda, Penguin and other animals Google stuffed into its ranking algorithm...Is it a good idea not to index these landing pages at all (i.e. add meta robots - noindex, nofollow to these pages)? What say you? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | ShivaS0 -
PPC Keyword Ranking
The SEOmoz PRO tool shows how keywords rank in the organic part of the SERPs. Does anyone know if there is another tool out there that shows the same thing for ranking in the ads section of the SERPs? Also, does anyone know the winning lottery numbers (any lottery will do, I'm not fussy!). Thanks Neil
Paid Search Marketing | | mccormackmorrison0