So, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is performing under expectations? Well, for starters, you can “reduce his pay” by lowering his bid. Note: I’m using “he” just for simplicity sake. If a member of your sales team is underperforming, certainly you don’t want to keep paying him at his normal rate. Bring his pay down to a level that is acceptable to the performance he is delivering. Bring a keyword down in position if it’s not delivering in a high position.

What if you have already “reduced the pay” of an underperfomer? Then what? Well, ultimately you are going to have to fire him. There is no sense in keeping a sales person around if he has proven time and time again that he cannot deliver the results that are expected of him. So, fire him. Shut him down. Pause that stinker. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but in the long run you’ll be glad you did.

Now, on a happier note, what do you do with a member of your sales team who is kicking butt? What do you do with the guy who’s outperforming expectations? Well, one obvious thing to do is give him a raise. Push that keyword position a bit higher if you have room to grow the position. This doesn’t always translate into more sales, but you should certainly give the keyword the opportunity to shine if it’s proven in the past that it can deliver results.

What if he is already at the top of the pay scale? Then what? Then you might need to start looking beyond raising his pay. Now you need to start looking to him for “referrals.” Does he have any trustworthy friends who need a job? Does that keyword have a few variations that you haven’t considered? Dig deeper into the keyword and see if you can find a few of its “friends” to come join your team. You might be surprised at what you find.

Happy Holidays to all.

More about Jack
JumpFly PPC Account Executive

PPC Management -  Understanding Seasonality

First, take a look at your seasonality.  Not all markets have the same seasonality.  Some don’t have much seasonality at all. The timing and the length of your high season could be related to what you sell (i.e., bathing suits or snowboards) and where you sell it (air conditioning repair in Michigan).

Over the summer I received a call from a client who was upset because overall conversions were down.  They have a hotel in Mexico.  Is it really a surprise that they don’t book as many rooms in July as they do in January??  I live in Chicago and I can tell you that I’m thinking about a balmy vacation more in the dead of winter than I am during the 3 short months of warm weather we have here. 

You have to understand the seasonality of your marketplace.  When are your customers most likely to order your product or require your service?

Does this mean you just give up and go with the flow? No! Of course not, but you need to be much more creative in your ads and your offers when it is your down season.

You may also find, depending on what you sell, that you just need to adjust your focus.  This is why heating contractors also repair air conditioners – more year round business.  And why landscapers also offer snow plowing.  Instead of lying down and giving up or fighting what you can’t control, roll with it and figure out how to keep going.  When your typical customer is NOT looking for your product or service – what would they be looking for instead?  Be creative and expand your market to even out your revenue.

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When managing your Google Adwords campaigns, a good PPC Manager will match the bidding strategy to the client’s goals and budget.  

What is the best bidding strategy for you?

Many times, if your budget can withstand the initial cost, an assertive initial bidding strategy can pay off in the end. 

As you have seen in many of our posts, we rarely recommend that a client bid for positions 1 or 2.  There is a high premium on these positions and the traffic quality is usually worse that the remaining positions on the page.  However, without a doubt, the CTR (Click Through Rate) is the highest in these positions – which is good for your Google AdWords Quality Score.

Google takes into consideration many things in determining your Quality Score.  Things have changed in the last few weeks with the Quality Score, but one thing remains the same – Google still uses the Quality Score to determine your position and your cost.  With that in mind, a higher CTR improves your Quality Score and therefore improves the performance while decreasing the cost of your campaign. 

With an assertive bidding strategy out of the gate, aiming for positions 1-2, you will increase your CTR.  Once you have established a strong CTR, you can bring the bids down, landing you in a higher position at a lower cost than if you had come in softly.

This strategy isn’t for everyone and needs to be carefully monitored.  At position 1-2, the cost per conversion will be higher for the period of time you are bidding assertively.  But, if you can think of it as an investment in the campaign, it will likely pay off in the long run.

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Several of my clients have been notified that they will be included in the new Google AdWords BETA test called “Smart Positioning” which started October 1st.

The goal of Smart Positioning is to place an ad in the most cost-effective position each time it is displayed on Google and the search network, with the end goal of achieving more clicks for the same total cost. Now, it is based on an auction model that does differ slightly from the current auction model, and this is one of the reasons why it is still a BETA feature that is only open to a limited number of accounts.

At first glance, Google AdWords Smart Positioning may seem very much like the position preference settings already found in the Google AdWords campaign settings, however there is a big difference. Smart Positioning calculates incremental CPCs to evaluate the effects on cost and click through rate that would be associated with a higher position for your ad. Once the system determines the incremental CPC for placing your ad in a higher position, it compares the incremental CPC to your maximum CPC bid. Your ad is then placed in the highest position possible, as long as both the actual CPC for that position and incremental CPC are less than your maximum CPC bid. Position Preference simply limits the positions where your ad is displayed without any evaluation as to traffic, incremental cost, and/or benefit.

If you choose to enable Smart Positioning in an existing Google AdWords campaign, Google suggests a one-time increase of your maximum CPC bids that is based on the historical performance of your campaign. New campaigns with Smart Positioning can be launched with whatever bid desired, however Google recommends setting a slightly higher bid than you would otherwise use. It sounds like the extra headroom helps the feature perform better.

Even though Smart Positioning does seem like a great way to test a more automated method to control and optimize bids, I am recommending that my eligible clients do so only on a limited basis. BETA tests are notorious for having difficulties and issues and I would never suggest jumping into this situation with a campaign that is already performing well. It would be best to create a new campaign with a limited budget designed specifically to test this feature in your account.

If you’re interested in learning more about Smart Position and how it may impact your Google AdWords Campaigns, contact a PPC Management specialist today.

With a new account, because there’s no history for Google to look at, it may cost more to have a higher position. Over time, as you accrue data, your CPC may go down, but that will depend on your Quality Score. The lower your Quality Score, the more you may have to pay to maintain a position. Sometimes it’s hard to get clients to understand that landing page quality and load times, as well as advertising on relevant keywords, can have a big impact on their bids and their position.

Google has been making the Quality Score more transparent, which is going to be helpful in talking to clients about these criteria. But first, a definition and a little history on the Google Quality Score. According to Google, “Your Quality Score reflects your keywords CTR and the relevance of your ad text and landing page. Keywords with high quality scores are more relevant for users, more effective for your ad campaigns, and have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs).”

Google first came out with a grade of Great, OK and Poor. Great was, well, great!; OK was middle of the road but not necessarily a bad place to be, and Poor, which usually meant your keywords would go Inactive (not showing at all) unless you bumped your maximum bid to a higher level, from $.50 upwards to $10.00. The problem with this system is that you had really no idea what was wrong because no additional information was given. Did Google hate the landing page, was the keyword considered irrelevant, was the load time on the page considered horrible, was the Google history on this keyword throughout their system so bad that wouldn’t serve these ads at all? We had no clue and no way to help our clients, other than experience and gut instinct.

Then Google added a little magnifying glass next to the Quality Score which allowed you to see a little more information – Keyword Relevance, Landing Page, and Landing Page Load Time. If Google felt that one of those items was lacking, they might tell you or they might not. It just depended. Plus I always felt there should be a Score of Good, somewhere in between Great and OK.

Last month, Google posted a message about changes coming to the Quality Score information, which would happen slowly through some Google customers. In the the next few days that change will be universal through all Google AdWords accounts. We’re seeing it now in the majority of our clients, and it’s very interesting. There’s three main changes that I see:

1. There are no more “Inactive Bids.” There’s now a message that says “Bid is below first page bid estimate” with a dollar amount that shows what Google recommends the bid be at to show on the first page. I totally loved the bid estimates for some of my clients’ terms. Granted they’re not the most targeted keywords, usually due to the insistance of a client that they need to be advertising on terms that they have no landing page or information on their website about, but $49 to be on the first page seems a bit excessive, in my book, especially when their average position for this term month-to-date is 4.0, but we’ll see what happens.
2. The data in the Quality Score column can change based on the range of time you look at. Google now calculates the Quality Score at the time of each search query. There’s a message in the Keyword Status column that says “Ads rarely show due to low quality score” when I look at the Today date range, but it just says Active when I look at past data. It’ll be interesting to see if that message changes based on the amount of data Google has to look at.
3. The Quality Score grades of Great/OK/Poor actually have a little more meaning. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best and 1 being horrendous, Great is from 8 to 10, OK is from 5 to 7 and Poor is 1 to 4. It tends to be more helpful on the Poor and OK grades, in that if you have a 1/10 rating, you know you’re really, really Poor, as opposed to almost OK if you’re at a 4/10.

This information will help us make better decisions on what to do with certain keywords, particularly poorly performing keywords. And I think it will come in most handy because I’ll be able to give my clients more information about a search term and how it’s doing or why a bid is so high. And hopefully they’ll understand how important landing pages that are relevant to the search terms and ads that we create really are. There’s a synergy between the three that sometimes clients have a hard time understanding, and this additional transparency from Google on the Quality Score can help me have hard data numbers that may clarify this for them. It could also cause more “data analysis paralysis” as I blogged about last time, but only time will tell.

Data is good, data is important, data is what you should be looking at to make decisions based on what’s best for what’s going on in your account. But there are some things to keep in mind when you’re looking at your PPC data.

1. Nothing stays constant over short periods: a keyword that performs well one month may tank the next month and rebound the following month. Looking at too small of a time frame of data can really hurt you in the long run. Make sure you look at the keyword and its history over time.

2. Make sure to have enough data to make a good decision: having enough data is easy when you’re talking about search terms that gets hundreds of clicks a day. But what do you do when a search term might get only 10 or 15 clicks per month? You give it time. And unfortunately, there’s no hard or fast number of clicks or amount of time that you need to give to a search term to see if it works.

3. Look for trends but don’t spend so much time looking that you lose your mind: you know that old adage, “When you can’t see the forest through the trees?” That’s particularly true with PPC. Sometimes, if you spend so much time immersed in the data analysis, you can’t view your PPC campaign objectively, which makes it harder to make decisions.

4. View your account objectively: No matter how strongly you believe that a keyword should work, if the data proves otherwise, lower the bid or turn it off. For example, you’d think that for a company that sells golf shoes, the keyword “golf shoes” would be a great term. Actually, it’s not. People who search “golf shoes” tend to be in the research phase of their search, not the buying phase. So “golf shoes” spends a whole lot of money, but converts only rarely. This also includes the area of “ego bidding,” which is bidding high on keywords just so you can be number 1 for that term, regardless of the payoff.

5. Make sure you can track conversions: if you are an ecommerce site, looking for lead generation, selling services, no matter what you are doing, with very little exception, you MUST have conversion tracking in place. Conversion tracking, especially for ecommerce companies, is incredibly important. If you sell online and you’re average order is $47, and I can’t tell how much it costs for you to get that conversion, then I can’t tell what words are producers and which are money suckers. Conversion tracking lets me get you the best ROI possible – if a search term spends a lot but rarely converts, I can put that money someplace where it will payoff. I’ve had a clients how have told me that search terms don’t or won’t work without even trying them, just because they “know.” How do they know? Even if you’re a service company, you need conversion tracking – if you’re average service is $200, and it costs you $150 to get that lead, is that cost effective?

6. Test, test and retest: if something doesn’t work once, it doesn’t mean it won’t ever work again. It might work if you used a different landing page, or tried a lower position or tried site targeting.

All these items above rely on data analysis to know what works and what doesn’t, but remember, don’t get so caught up in the analysis that you forget to step back and look at the account as a whole.

Something New in the Data:  Google now separates data Search from Content.  Read the Google Blog for more information.

However, conversion is an entirely separate issue.  Do not assume that just because a keyword converts at a certain rate at one ad position that it will only convert better if you bid it to a higher position.  In fact, that is probably not going to be the case.  And once again, we need to look at the intent of the search to understand why.

In general when a visitor clicks on an Ad that is positioned further down in the results page – sometimes even page 2 or page 3 – they are highly targeted and interested in what you are offering.  The key is to find the “sweet spot” where the CTR (which will be lower at a lower position) combined with the Conversion rate brings you the best ROI.

Of course there are always exceptions to every finding, but the higher positions tend to bring less targeted traffic for several reasons.

1. The searcher is testing out their query – Did they type it in correctly? Are the results even close to what they are looking for?
2. The searcher is just beginning their research process and will click on the first couple of ads just to get some high level information.  They may come back and buy later but they are not in the “buy” stage quite yet.

What is the best way to find out your Optimal Ad Position? Test! Every industry is different. Every keyword is different .  You will find out the most about your ad position and your conversion if you have installed Google Analytics on your website.  Google has some good information on their adwords blog on using the two tools together to optimize your position.

You can lower some bids.  Let’s say your average CPC is $1.00 a click, so you are getting an average of 50 clicks a day for your $50/budget.  However, this $50 is spent by noon, so your ads are nowhere to be found later in the day.  Let’s also say your positioning is anywhere in the 1-6 positions, so you have a good solid presence when your ads do show.  Now let’s say some of your click-thru rates are pretty solid, some above 5% or even higher.  You could lower some of the bids down on those keywords and often see a very minimal movement downward in position, but reap the benefits of a lower CPC.  If you get your average cpc down to 75 cents, for example, you will now get 66-67 clicks a day for your budget, whereas before you pulled your bids down you were only getting 50 clicks a day.  Even if your positions are lower, your ads will be showing longer throughout the day, increasing the chances that your ad will get noticed and bring traffic to your website.

Don’t be afraid to try some lower positions, especially if your are constantly hitting your budget threshold.  You may be surprised at the volume of increased traffic your campaign sees just by moving down a single spot because the lower CPC is allowing more totals clicks to come in.

Now don’t get me wrong. Number 1 can be a good place to be. But counter to popular belief, it can get you less business, not more, besides being potentially more costly and hard to maintain in a competitive marketplace.

I have one client who wants to be in number one on some very generic terms, no matter what the cost. What usually happens is this: I get a call to boost the bids to get in the number 1 position on their special terms. I raise them, they land in number 1, they spend almost two or three times what they spent for position three or four, get the same or even less conversions, and then I get a call that we spent too much money and I have to reduce the bids. Two months later, I get the call to boost the bids again, and the scenario repeats. Every time I get the call, I remind them that we’ve been down this road before, and every time they tell me to do it anyway.

I have another client who only has ego bidding issues on only one search term. This particular client is in a very specialized industry with a very specific product in a very competitive marketplace. With them, the ego bidding is driven by the board of directors. If one of the board searches on this key term and they aren’t in number 1, I hear about it immediately. It doesn’t matter that their cost per conversion could be over $200, or that CPC is over $10. As long as they are in position 1, they are happy and they deem PPC successful.

I’m not opposed to trying out the number one spot, but only if a client has conversion tracking (or some other way of tracking that keyword), so we can see without a doubt whether it gets them more business or just spends more money.

Yahoo uses conversion tracking cookies in a similar fashion to Google. When a potential customer clicks your Yahoo! Search Marketing ad, a cookie is stored on the user’s computer. If that customer does indeed make a purchase on your site, then the keyword that was used in their search is credited with a conversion. However, there is a fundamental difference in how Yahoo tracks that conversion as compared to Google. Yahoo will attribute that conversion to have occurred on the actual day that the sale occurred, even if the initial click occurred days, or even weeks, in the past. This is markedly different from Google because Google will track the conversion back to the day of the initial click.

You may actually see a conversion tracked in Yahoo on a keyword for a particular day, even though that keyword shows no clicks even being received that day. That is because the initial click actually occurred in the days prior to the actual sale being made.

Keep this important factor in mind when making Yahoo bid management decisions, especially on newer keywords, and especially if you know you have a longer sales cycle for your products. You could be reducing bids on keywords that look like they are not producing sales, when in fact they might in the near future.