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
-
Are there any recent studies of organic CTR vs. PPC CTR?
Pretty much the title. I am putting together a "game plan" for my CEO, where I would like to touch on the difference in CTR between SERP organic results and SERP PPC results. I've found a few blog posts that talks about PPC being responsible for 15% of all clicks, where 1-5 organic results are responsible for 68ish % and the rest being on 6-10 and page 2/3. However, I do not see any sources in these articles, which begs the question, where are these numbers taken from? Any suggestions? My own gut feeling (and SERP behaviour) tells me that these numbers might actually be super accurate, but since my business plan will most likely end up in the hands of our board of directors, I would very much like to back up my action points for growth, with actual sources. Thanks in advance.
Paid Search Marketing | | Nikolaj-Landrock1 -
Correlating Form Submissions to PPC vs Organic - COA
I currently don't use a landing page model. From either Adwords or Organic you reach our site, find the event product that appeals to you, and then fill out the form. I need a way to determine which of those form submissions came from Organic Vs Paid so I can calculate my cost of customer acquisition (COA). Via Google Analytics I can see that X amount of Organic were submitted and X of Paid. If I get 5 submissions in one day there isn't an efficient way to correlate the form submissions to the medium. Any suggestions on an attribute method that would help me sort out COA?
Paid Search Marketing | | fireflyevents0 -
PPC for Luxury Goods Website
Hi Mozzers, I am starting a PPC campaign for a website that sells high-end products. The search volume for the generics is very high but I think the conversion rate on those will be quite low given the price of the products. Does anyone have any experience in doing PPC for high-end retailers and what type of keyword I should be bidding on? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | KarlBantleman0 -
Google Shopping Campaigns
We have noticed a noticable (typo correction) drop in Adword sales since switching to the new Google Shopping Campaigns in Google Adwords. I have just posted a comment to a Fellow Mozzer on here, as this reflects in his question too. Has anyone else noticed this?
Paid Search Marketing | | BruceA0 -
Can I auto tag my unbounce campaign?
Hi Mozzers, We are running ads for a client and we're using unbounce for landing page creation. Google Adwords is the main ad platform we are using right now. When you click on the ad you land on a subdomain (subdomain.Sitename.com) and you can click on Apply which lands on the form Page of the client's site(www.sitename.com). The campaign has been auto tagged but haven't seen any data which is probably because of the subdomain unbounce page. Do you think there is a way to track unbounce via auto tagging or my only solution will be setting up manual tagging? Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Using the same landing page for seo and ppc
When does it make sense to create one landing page for both seo and ppc?
Paid Search Marketing | | melen0 -
Cost per click on PPC
What is the best way to get a good cpc estimate other than actually running the campaign? I have had several people asking for budgets and wasn't sure how to answer. Any suggestions?
Paid Search Marketing | | ClickIt0 -
PPC - Is this Budget suitable for me?
Hello, I have a question about a PPC(adwords) budget. If I want to invest 500$ / month , per year. Is that enough to reach more than 5.000 users(month) in my website? Keyword: TANGO Country: Br ( www.google.com.br ). I know I'm not giving a huge information about this question, but I just want to hear some toughts for a guy who has more experience in PPC than me. Any suggestion will be very appreciated, thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | augustos0