Optimizing PPC Campaign Performance

Posted on 27. Feb, 2010 by admin in Online Training

The final metric that everyone wants to optimize for, regarding ppc campaign performance, that will put the most dollars, most revenue, most return on investment, is your lead quality.

Again, lead quality is probably the last metric that you can optimize for the simple reason that your quality is something that is determined over time and is determined by the actions taken within your sales funnel.

So, when it comes to sales driven marketing, what you will find is that it is an ongoing process. It requires feedback from the sales funnel to be truly effective. It is not as if you can just monitor quality on conversion rates alone within the campaign.

Your conversion rates are a key indicator of what is happening in your sales funnel. It is also an indicator of interests levels. But, conversion rates are not the end all be all. If you are trying to improve lead quality, a lot of this happens outside of the Google campaign and within your sales funnel. Here is when you are talking to people and getting feedback and tracking what is selling and where the profitability lies.

The one thing to keep in mind is that a campaign with a high CTR and a high conversion rate is reflective of a high interest in your offer. These will be the measures that you will always continually optimize at the campaign level. A person with a high level of interest, both in the ad and the landing page, from the keyword, ad group, or campaign, are always converting both in the click and lead rates. This definitely indicates that you have a really high potential, within the campaign, for sales conversions.

But, you have to be looking at the quality outside of the campaign. This is going to be the percentage of the leads generated that actually create true sales opportunities; meaning which ones are sales ready? Which ones want to talk to a sales person, sign up with a sales person, or actually buy a product.

How many of those leads convert on the backend? How many of them, not only make an initial purchase, but also make repeat visits and repeat purchases? All of this is going to be determined by optimizing within the campaign.

How do you optimize for improved profitability? This is a process outside of the campaigns and it does require a level of analytics. This is the most advanced Google marketing out there, but it is the Google marketing that produces the largest results in regards to profitability. If you want to improve the quality of your campaigns while engaged in your performance metrics, you can be looking at a lot of different elements.

The main element is keyword quality. Once you have determined that you have a high quality keyword, everything is going to happen on the back-end. This is outside of the Google funnel and inside the sales funnel which leads to the interaction of what is happening within the sales funnel. But, if you are over in your account and you want to make some good decisions in regards to profitability and lead quality, ask yourself these kinds of questions:

Is the keyword specific enough?: This is an important question because if it isn’t, this could be a good indicator that you are catering more towards the browsing behavior and not the buying behavior. Your keyword is not specific enough to convert into a sale.

Does it clearly define my product or service?: Is it an order taking keyword? Does my keyword query show there is specific demand for my products and services? Look at this. Does your keyword query clearly define exactly what you do? More importantly, are the people searching for this keyword, even though it defines what you do, interested in your offer. To determine this, look at your competitors business models, their landing pages, and their ad copy and see what offers drive your market. This is not going to be determined by what is going on in your campaign, but has a lot to do with the offer. Certain offers people are more responsive in certain keyword categories. Which leads to the third question you should ask yourself.

Are people searching really interested in what I am offering? This includes the way your whole thing; such as, pricing to timing, to how your offer is put together. Then ask yourself the following question.

Are people searching looking for exactly what I have. This means are they looking for the exact type of business solution, is your product or service the solution to their problems? Maybe you need to make the structure of your offer clearer. Does you landing page make your offer clearer? If you landing page is making it incredibly clear that you have what they are looking for, but they are still not responding, they may not be looking for exactly what you have.

Another question to ask yourself is “Is this keyword attracting the right audience?” There is a right and a wrong audience. Depending on the price point of your product, which is one thing you will need to check is can your prospects afford your product or service. Also, check to be sure that it is not a low quality audience. Low quality audience does not mean a low quality person, it just means that they don’t have everything that they need to move forward with you in the sales funnel. They can’t become a sales opportunity because they can’t afford your product.

If you can answer those questions honestly, you will gain real insight into your keyword, ad group, and market quality. Your answers to these questions are going to help you determine whether the campaign performance metric is going to perform at a quality level. Is there a high likelihood, based on your campaign performance, that those leads are going to produce sales?