Seeking Critique on PPC Campaign Gameplan
-
Background:
We're a home service business with potential for recurring clients. In the past, I've run PPC campaigns for a much larger company, and was profitable, but the business model was vastly different. The campaign also took place during their busy season, allowing flexibility I won't receive here.
Campaign Details:
- AdWords only
- SERPs only (not partner network)
- Desktop users only
Data Available:
Lots of past data was incomplete, prompting my best estimates and judgment calls. For past leads data, I'm using Google as lead source (organic + local pack rankings), generated specifically from our quote form.
Since our quote form doesn't render on Mobile/Tablet, I omitted those visits from our Analytics data, and only target Desktop in the campaign.
I wound up with the following statistics:
Organic (any web search), Desktop visitors who viewed our quote form page:
- Number of overall pageviews
- Number of overall leads generated from our quote form
- Number of overall leads which converted to sales
And for our sales/numbers end of things:
- % our clients choose targeted package
- Revenue of initial sale on that package
- Profit generated from sale on that package
Using these numbers, I calculated the % of clickers likely to bounce, complete the form, convert to clients, etc. Using our sales records, I calculated revenue/profit expected from each. And with that, I calculated the highest CPC to break even (unacceptable, obviously), as well as the projected ROI from lower, more reasonable CPCs.
Notes:
- We're a home service business. Not all homes are created equal. Through data, I found our clients average home size and the average estimate for that home.
- Due to incomplete records, I can't know which Google _clients _are specific to our quote form. Some likely called through the local pack or manually dialed and said "Google" if our staff asked. To combat this, I found the % of Google _leads _who completed the quote form vs. phone call, email and applied it to clients for a reliable estimate (our system removes the quote form identifier upon lead to client conversion).
- I'm not factoring in the % of clients who become recurring customers as I don't have this data. Given that it's much higher than 0%, I think this allows a LOT of breathing room on my estimates. Many of our clients have stayed with us for years. If only a small number convert to long-term status, the current ROI shoots WAY up.
- Similar to above, I'm also not factoring in the % of clients who don't choose the initial package, but instead choose a lesser package. Again, I think this provides breathing room.
Any PPC campaign will have a plethora of variables, especially intangible issues (damages, refunds, etc). I feel I have the important things down, but I'm far from an expert. I'd love to receive any advice or things I'm overlooking.
Thanks.
-
Thanks for that. This is definitely something for us to consider. We're pretty high up organically in the local pack already, but running a mobile-only call campaign would definitely interest us. Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your help.
1. Why is an AdWords campaign more effective with those additional marketing campaigns in place? Beyond the quality score/ad rank going up, is there an additional direct benefit with those marketing facets occurring?
FWIW, we are in top 3 in a large city for many of the biggest KW's. Our local SEO is very strong, many of our organic hits are people typing in our brand name, we have 2 locations, etc. We don't do much by way of articles/videos/social as we haven't seen much benefit in those. Our social is mainly to promote whatever campaigns we're running for whatever reason.
2. For sure. Thank you.
-
Looks like you've given it a lot of thought and have a process in place to determine CPC bid. Couple other things to keep in mind:
-
AdWords is most effective when the other digital marketing components are in place -- strong SEO including local SEO, growing brand awareness, marketing automation tools and content marketing campaign and assets such as video, articles, etc. and of course, social media engagement. See marketing.grader.com from HubSpot.
-
Key addtional figures to track/monitor are Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and CTR (which obviously includes the quality score as well as the bid).
These are some of the conversation points that come up often with clients. Wishing you success.
-
-
I'd also recommend setting up an Adwords call-only campaign, targeted specifically at mobile. This way if the site isn't hitting the local pack on broader terms, you can still get in front of potential leads while you work on making the form mobile-friendly. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453991?hl=en
-
Hi Alan,
1. We are. We lagged before because we couldn't facilitate the amount of leads then. We're in a better place now.
2. We'll do mobile later once we have organic stats to the loaded mobile pages. Since our pages display much differently on mobile (as do ads within SERPs), I'd rather jump into that with a bit of foresight as to how our users interact. I suspect the data will be quite different.
3. Yes, definitely. I have a comprehensive spreadsheet with the numbers above that I'll be plugging into the ad numbers as we go along. Will be on my toes comparing my estimates to a decent sample size of real campaign estimates to adjust and tweak.
5. I don't really think we're in need of that just yet unless my numbers are so wildly off that I'm completely screwed, hehe.
More looking for critique on how I derived my numbers and if I'm missing any glaring metrics to compose a plan as far as bidding, reasonable performance expectation, etc. I am acutely aware that I can't just set a bid and leave the computer for a month.
-
Some suggestions: 1 - Get your quote form to appear on mobile; 2 - Create a separate campaign for mobile and track just that data; 3 - test and test and do more testing. Identify the best combination of Settings, Ads and Keywords; 4 - allow enough time; 5 - this may not be the best forum -- consider hiring a PPC consultant to assist if you have the budget. Hope that's helpful. - Alan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Our PPC UTM URLs Aren't Registering In GA Properly
Hi, We recently ran a few ads on Facebook and Reddit for a campaign of ours. Each of the URLs were properly attributed UTM links. Some of them register properly in campaigns, but the vast majority aren't. I can only find the attribution by checking All Traffic and displaying the landing page and the source/medium. Our Facebook Ad Manager reports MANY more clicks than our Campaign section in GA is for the campaign name. Here's the URL I receive for the landing page: /?url=http://www.ourwebsiteurl.com/our-landing-page?utm_source=facebook.com&dm_redirected=true Is Facebook writing over our UTM with their own so all I receive is that it came from Facebook? The URL we used was complete with utm_source, utm_campaign and utm_medium, yet these aren't fully reported. Any ideas?
Paid Search Marketing | | kirmeliux0 -
Session and conversion data missing from AdWords campaigns in Analytics
Hi all, For a client of ours, we're not seeing session & conversion data for AdWords campaigns in Analytics. We are seeing click & cost data. Adwords and Analytics are linked and autotagging is enabled. The site where we're experiencing this problem is www.maxifleur-plantes-artificielles.fr. It's a Magento-based store with the Web Cooking Universal Analytics extension installed. The bulk of AdWords traffic is landing on the page www.maxifleur-plantes-artificielles.fr/plantes-artificielles, which has no active redirects that could remove the ?gclid parameter for as far as I can tell. Yet, click IDs that I manually tested won't show up in the reports either. Mid April, all traffic aside from direct traffic just disappeared from the reports. Google's Tag Assistant gives a lot of errors, but in the source code the snippet looks just fine and we don't have problems with other web shops that use the aforementioned extension. Suggestions as to what could be the problem are most welcome. Thanks! Bas
Paid Search Marketing | | Evoworks0 -
PPC sessions being counted as organic in GA
I am coming across a very frustrating phenomenon in one of my PPC campaign reporting. In short: I believe that GA is counting some of my PPC sessions as organic (not provided). Has anybody come across this before? I believe they are being counted as organic because of the following: the website is brand new and does not rank for anything but their branded terms the few keywords showing up in GA are the terms we target our PPC towards the amount of sessions of Paid Search (in channels) and AdWords sessions don't match up (The number of actual PPC clicks is substantially higher than the Paid Search sessions) PPC clicks and sessions don't even match up in the AdWords part of GA GWT shows 0% CTR for any non branded terms Tell me I am crazy, but I really don't think I am. I just don't have the hard evidence to back it up. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Paid Search Marketing | | Rebecca.Holloway0 -
How to find a good PPC firm
Hi guys, I'm completely new to PPC. I want to hire a firm to help drive PPC traffic to credit card landing pages. Our starting budget is limited ($2,000/month for everything) but can grow to about $5,000 if we see results. My questions are: Where can I find a list of good PPC firms that fits my vertical (credit cards) and budget? What are the key questions I should ask a PPC firm before I hire them? Is there a "Beginner's Guide to PPC" type of whitepaper, ebook, article, or course I can take to educate myself? Thanks in advance!
Paid Search Marketing | | Brand_Psychic0 -
PPC Landing Pages and Rel Canonical
Hi Mozzers! Our company has hundreds of PPC landing pages which are essentially request a quote forms. We also have a request a quote form on our website that is for regular traffic. Currently we just added the "noindex" meta tag to all our PPC landing pages, but I think we can improve this. Should we remove the "noindex" tag, and instead add a rel canonical link pointing to our "main" request a quote form? Thoughts?
Paid Search Marketing | | Travis-W0 -
How do you assess PPC ROI?
I thought this would be pretty straightforward, but I'm trying to put together my first PPC ROI spreadsheet and it's turning out to be much more complicated than I had anticipated. Would anyone be willing to tell me what you look at to determine the return you're getting on PPC -- and if you're using AdWords and Analytics, what screens/reports you rely on? It seems to be more complex than simply comparing Paid Search Revenue to spend ... but I could be overcomplicating things.
Paid Search Marketing | | CMC-SD0 -
Google PPC - coupon balances
So, I know that you can't simply transfer a coupon credit in Google AdWords to another account. My question, if anyone knows, is there a way to do this using My Client Center? We manage multiple accounts, and have another coming on board that has a pre-existing coupon credit. We were going to set up a new account (which we would handle billing for and just invoice) for the client. But, that would leave them unable to use a coupon code. If it's managed under MCC, is there a way to work around this?
Paid Search Marketing | | DeliaAssociates0 -
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