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What To Expect From A Brand New PPC Campaign
By Christine Parfitt
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-03-08
There are reasons why a brand new pay per click campaign will take time to start performing at an optimum level.
1. There is no click through history so Google assigns a predictive quality score rather than one based on historical performance. You will start with a low quality score which will mean a period of "buying in" (with a relatively high bid price) to get a good ad position. Expect that experienced advertisers in competition for your keywords are probably paying less if they have earned a higher quality score.
2. If you have keywords set up using the broad match option, you will probably get a lower volume of ad impressions at first than you will when the campaign has been running for some time.
Your keywords will not consistently be broad matched until your quality score improves.
3. When a campaign is new there is no data to analyse and draw conclusions from to improve the campaign performance. Nothing has been tested yet so you don't know the best ad position, the best time of day to run ads, the most effective ad copy and how well the landing page converts.
Over time a systematic programme of testing each of these variables will give valuable information on what works the best. Experience with other campaigns gives a head start to knowing what to try first, but nothing beats the actual data from a campaign that has been running for some time.
4. Targeting is one of the key principles of PPC advertising and the narrower the targeting the better. If someone searches for "vintage heuer watch" then an ad title "vintage heuer watch" and targeted ad copy will get more clicks than a generic "ladies watches" ad.
It's essential to organise the campaign into targeted ad groups so that the ads can then in turn be properly targeted. This can be done effectively right from the beginning but when the campaign has been running for a while there will be some keywords that will be worth putting into a new ad group to further improve performance. You can't always predict which keywords in advance.
What does this mean for new advertisers / new campaigns? * Perseverance will pay off. Google rewards good advertisers by giving them higher ad positions for a lower cost. This creates opportunities for those who know what they are doing and who put the work required into an ongoing cycle of testing and targeting.
* Be careful not to jump to conclusions too early and start making changes that may be counter productive in the longer term. I expanded on this here. Comments
About the Author:
Christine Parfitt is a search marketing strategist and the founder of Semfire, a search marketing company based in Australia. She specialises in paid search and shares news and best practices at Semfire Search Engine Marketing Blog.
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