Tips to Reduce Cost-Per-Lead

9 Tips to Reduce Cost-Per-Lead

I’d like to offer some quick tips for reducing CPL, as well as offer some more mid and longer-term strategies you can employ when a high CPL is becoming a problem.

1. Conduct an ad review: Sometimes it’s best to go back to best practices in account management to reduce your CPL. Run an ad performance report and analyze each ad text and landing page performance. If I find that a landing page isn’t performing well, but maybe the ad message has a high click-through rate, I’ll match up that ad text with a better performing landing page to generate more conversions for a lower CPL. Also, remember to make sure that your keywords are in your ad text and on your landing page – improving ad relevance will help boost your Quality Score which will likely reduce your cost-per-click in the future.

2. Lower keyword bids: This is self explanatory – if the keyword is converting, but at a CPL twice your goal and is sitting in a high position (1 – 3), knock the bid down and save yourself some money. But remember – if you have a lower-volume account and you (or your client) are more concerned with generating conversions than with a higher CPL, this might not be the best route for you. You can also lower bids on keywords that are spending without converting but sitting in high average positions to reduce your cost. Also, remember to test your account in different average positions to find the “sweet spot” for your account – you don’t always have to be in position 1 to get the best results.

3. Do a historical review: Find out where your “problem” CPL campaigns are, then drill down to the high CPL ad groups, then to the keywords – maybe there are keywords that used to convert for low CPLs that don’t now. There are a number of reasons for this – maybe competition has increased, maybe you’ve made changes to that campaign that have caused your Quality Score to drop so you’re having to pay more for your bid(s), maybe you’ve been testing out different landing pages and some aren’t generating as many conversions, and the list goes on. Something I like to do is run a Search Query Report and look for terms that have converted for CPL at or below my goal and add them into the account if they’re not already there to help bring down CPL. I’d also recommend using this historical data to pause keywords and ad groups that have spent without converting for a longer period of time, or elements that have converted, but maybe at CPLs well above your goal.

4. Check performance by network: Try segmenting your campaigns by network and check each campaign’s performance. If Search Partners hasn’t been performing well for a campaign, opt out of it!

5. Check performance by device: If you’re restricted for one reason or another in utilizing mobile landing pages in your account and therefore have your campaigns opted into all devices, segment your campaigns by device and evaluate performance for each. I recently had this situation arise in an account, and breaking out separate mobile campaigns (and pausing them until I receive mobile landing pages) has made a huge difference for this account. When I broke out the campaigns by device, I saw that in most cases, mobile was eating up money without generating conversions, or generating them for CPLs way above my goal.

6. Try a Remarketing campaign: If you’ve got the budget to advertise on the Display Network, or maybe you already are but haven’t tried Remarketing, I couldn’t recommend it more. I currently have a Remarketing campaign that is the fourth-highest converting campaign this month with the lowest CPL of any active campaign in the account – currently sitting more than $10.00 below CPL goal.

7. Add negatives: If you haven’t run a SQR in awhile, this is one of the first things you should do. Adding in negative keywords will help increase qualified traffic and cut out unqualified traffic. I also recommend conducting a negative keyword audit at least once a year – review the negatives you’ve included to be sure you aren’t restricting potentially qualified traffic. This is especially important if you’re inheriting an account from someone else or if there are multiple people working on your account.

8. Look into day parting: Run a report to see account performance by hour of day and day of week – there might be times of the day where you can lower bids for certain campaigns, or pause some account elements altogether that may have historically spent without converting or historically converted with very high CPLs.

9. Analyze Geographic performance: Run a report from the dimensions tab and analyze campaign performance according to geographic area. This is especially valuable if you have your campaigns split out according to geo-targeting. You might find areas you can exclude that have historically spent without converting or have been converting at a CPL too high above your goal.

Using adCenter PPC Tools Effectively

After the announcement last week of The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, I thought it would be helpful to take a look at the adCenter tools that are available, and how you can use them to help grow and optimize your accounts.

Microsoft adCenter Desktop Tool
As an avid user of the Adwords Editor, I was delighted when Microsoft launched their adCenter desktop tool. Sure, I knew it wouldn’t be as robust or user friendly, but at least it was something! Over the past year I’ve stumbled upon a few things that I hope will help streamline the use of the desktop tool, and make it a little more effective for editing and optimizing your campaigns.

When using the desktop tool, there are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind:

• Your entire account will be downloaded when exporting. Unlike the Editor, you are not able to choose specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or views to download. You get the whole enchilada every time. However, when uploading, it is not necessary to have every row of your account in your spreadsheet, nor do you have to have every column accounted for. You do however, need to have enough information included so the level you are editing can be identified. For example, if you are editing your keyword status and bids, you need to include the campaign and ad group columns along with the keyword columns that contain your changes. When in doubt, more information is better.
• Your CSV import file can’t be more than 10,000 rows. Though a rep gave me this threshold, I haven’t seen an official limit documented. I have, however, had more success uploading when I kept my file between 5,000-8,000 rows. I also prefer to break up my account by campaigns, and upload them separately when possible, but that’s just a personal preference.
• You can edit multiple rows at once. Like the editor, you can select multiple selections at once within the tool. This is helpful, because you can quickly change things like the CPC, status, or match type for multiple rows in one step (assuming you want them all to the same).
• There are multiple account views. When viewing the various sections of your account, you have multiple choices about the data you are looking at. You can see the entire account, pending changes, errors, etc. However, as you change between the levels of your account (campaign, ad group, ads, keywords) the view doesn’t hold. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s something to keep in mind so you ensure that you are always looking at an accurate view.
• Your CSV Import file layout matters. When importing, I’ve found that I have fewer errors when I start with an export file instead of the template you can get online. As I mentioned above, you do not have to have all of the columns or rows from the export file, but you do need to make sure that headers you are using are in the same order, and are called the same thing in order for your import to be successful.

In addition to editing your campaigns offline, the desktop tool can help you with your keyword research, and you can automatically add the relevant results to your ad groups, or add them as campaign or ad group negatives. There are four tools that you can use, but it’s important to keep in mind that the data in these tools is based on US Traffic Only, and the only metric you will see is last month’s impressions.

1. Similar keywords: enter a word or phrase, and it will come up with (you guessed it!) similar keywords.
2. Extracted keywords: enter a website, and it will give you a list of keywords that are the most prominent and/or relevant from that site. This tool can be very helpful for competitive reviews.
3. Frequent keywords: this tool gives you keywords that have a lot of impressions, but they are EXTREMELY broad (think Google and Yahoo), so they probably won’t be very relevant to your business.
4. Category Keywords: This tool gives you keywords that generate impressions within categories created by MSN. For example, in the Animals category, the term “dogs” was returned. Again, the results from this tool are more than likely too broad to be of any real use to you.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
We all understand that quality keyword research is what helps not only get our campaigns off to a great start, but that it is vital for their ongoing success as search evolves. I’ve been able to use this Excel plug-in to create new keyword lists, have more insight into the Bing content network, and identify search trends. It’s very easy to use, and it’s incredibly fast considering the amount of information that is returned. As with the desktop tool, there are a few things that I’ve found while using the tool that you might want to keep in mind:

• Make sure that Excel 2007 is installed on your computer.
• The data that is returned comes from Live.com index and adCenter. It’s important to keep in mind that Bing accounts for less than 10% of the traffic share right now, so you can’t assume the data is applicable to your Google or Yahoo! accounts. Instead, use the information as a guideline to understand the relative search volume, relevance, and pricing for one keyword over another, and combine it with other research efforts.
• If you’re all of a sudden unable to access the toolbar after using it for a while, change the time on your computer/server. We found that by changing the time by about five minutes we were able to once again verify our account, and regain access.
• Once the plug-in is installed you can access the three tool sections through your Excel toolbar.

The Keyword Research section gives you access to a variety of tools that allow you to perform the following tasks:

• Identify keyword categories to help your campaigns and ad groups stay organized.
• Recognize trends by spotting traffic spikes. This tool can help you analyze seasonal trends, and help you prepare for upcoming shifts in traffic.
• Find high volume keywords across different business verticals to help with competitive research.
• Gather demographic and location information on searchers.
• Forecast keyword volume for the month to help you manage your spend.
• Analyze content network statistics so you can identify high volume keywords and potential relevant domains.

The Pricing section contains tools that help you:

• Access pricing estimates for the search and content networks.
• Create benchmarks based on key performance indicators (KPIs) for various verticals that have been pre-determined within the tool.

The Content section, while currently only for the US, gives you tools to:

• Identify most frequently seen keywords within various verticals.
• Analyze pricing estimates by vertical for both the search and content networks.
• Gather content network pricing and impression estimates.

Effectively Using adCenter PPC Tools
Overall I think Microsoft has come a long way in helping advertisers better manage their campaigns, and I look forward to seeing how the merger will further enhance these tools. At the end of the day it is our responsibility as advertisers to understand what our data represents, and know how to use it to effectively grow and optimize our campaigns. No matter what tools you use to streamline your account changes, or conduct keyword research, take a few extra minutes to try and understand what you are looking at, and what, if any, shortcomings the data might have. Combining data from multiple reliable sources will always help ensure that you are making the best decision possible.

Source: PPC HERO

PPC Matrics: A matter to understand for all PPC Managers.

One of the best thing with PPC advertising is the completeness of data. It is the only advertising medium that can give you an accurate data on how many paerson see your ads.

All the data is available with account managers but is really important to know what data to look at and what metrics really matters.

Below given are some of the metric used in PPC accounts and how to calculate them & what does they tell you:

Click-through Rate (CTR)

How to Calculate It: Clicks divided by impressions
What It Tells You: What percentage of the time an ad display leads a user to your site; which types of ads are most relevant and most stand out to searchers on a SERP
What It Doesn’t Tell You: Whether your ad actually left an impression (no pun intended, I swear) on the user who clicked or did not click; whether your clicks were the result of well-crafted ad language, or simply due to aggressive bidding
Best Used For Evaluating: Quality of your ad text
Who It’s Most Useful For: A new or re-focused website focused on bringing in new traffic; Sites primarily interested in exposure

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

How to Calculate It: Total spend divided by total conversions
What It Tells You: Your average cost for each conversion; how much you are spending for each sale, lead, or site registration
What It Doesn’t Tell You: Depending on the conversion, whether the acquisitions are actually improving or can be expected to improve your bottom line; whether you’re bringing in new customers, or simply generating repeat conversions from site loyalists
Best Used For Evaluating: Effectiveness of your bidding strategies
Who It’s Most Useful For: Site owners operating on a limited budget, seeking to exploit only the most efficient of keywords

Conversion rate (CVR)

How to Calculate It: Total conversions divided by total clicks
What It Tells You: The frequency with which ad clicks are leading to a desired user action
What It Doesn’t Tell You: Whether mid-to-low ad position is effectively leaving your site under-exposed
Best Used For Evaluating: Quality of your selected landing pages
Who It’s Most Useful For: Business-to-business sites seeking to bring in a large number of prospective clients at the start of a long sales funnel

Average Sale (Avg. Sale?)

How To Calculate It: Revenue divided by total sales
What It Tells You: Which keywords are bringing in big-ticket purchases; which ad language is most conducive to bringing in high-spending customers
What It Doesn’t Tell You: Whether the high-ticket sales correspond to high profit-margin items; how much you’re spending for these high-revenue purchases
Best Used For Evaluating: Whether or not your ad text speaks to the potential large-revenue consumer
Who it’s Most Useful For: Experienced e-commerce site owners seeking to tweak ad language or landing page selection to drive campaigns to peak performance

Return on Investment (ROI)

How To Calculate It: Net revenue divided by net advertising spend
What It Tells You: How much benefit you are getting for the money you are spending.

What It Doesn’t Tell You: Whether this ratio is the best way to evaluate your campaign’s success, or whether you are over-focusing on a ratio rather than on the bottom line

Best Used For Evaluating:Quality of your selected landing pages.

Who It’s Most Useful For: When calculated properly (taking into account every aspect of campaign revenue and potential revenue), ROI is relevant to all website owners

There’s no perfect metric with which you can analyze campaign success. As this list indicates, the most important metrics really can vary on a client-by-client, or an industry-by-industry basis. In addition, it is important to realize that all of your media campaigns – paid search, direct mail, outdoor, radio, social networking – interact with each other and, as a result, you can never be sure what keyword or ad language truly drove which purchase.

The nice thing about pay-per-click marketing, though, is that you have an idea. That’s a start.

Source:PPC Hero

New Google Adwords Interface

Google adwords launches a new interface beta for adwords advertisers. It has a good visuals and a nice navigation between campaigns and ad groups. A persone like me who is habitual of using the old interface must find it difficult to adopt it easily but I must say for new advertisers it is a gift from Google. New interface looks similar to graphing system used in Google Analytics. Some snap shots of new interface are given below.

It is also some what similar to Yahoo Sponcered Search interface. The update to this interface does not effect the way your Ads are running. Your biddings, Quailty Score, Budgeting will all remain same and similar in new interface. New interface in beta also gives you the opportunity to participate in surveys about the new interface.

The best things you can any time swith back and forth between new and old/ traditional interface.