PPC Ad Performance: Use It Or Lose It
By Anna Johnson on July 17th, 2008Interesting article by Kevin Gold in the Search Marketing Standard yesterday. He notes that whenever he stops actively managing his pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns… his conversions fall.
Kevin explains that whenever he lets his PPC ad campaigns run without actively adjusting bids, testing ad copy and optimizing landing page variables (e.g. headlines, opening body text, images, etc) his cost-per-click (CPC) and average bid position remain stable… but his conversions (based on whatever most desired action or “MDA” applies) tend to fall.
Kevin notes that after putting a lot of time and effort into achieving strong conversion rates of 8-10 percent in a given month… if he doesn’t keep on testing and tweaking in the following month, conversions will drop by 3-4 percent.
Although he’s not sure why this happens, he believes conversions may drop due to decreased brand awareness and increased competition. Lower offline brand awareness may detract from brand recognition and credibility that might otherwise be attributed to a listing. Increased competition may shift a PPC listing out of a strong bid position.
For small online businesses, a change in offline brand awareness may be irrelevant (there may be NO offline brand awareness to begin with!) but it seems plausible that a failure to actively manage one’s campaign could lead to a drop-off in conversions. Given that online shoppers tend to research products before they buy (83 percent of shoppers use online reviews when shopping according to Opinion Research Corporation), it’s likely that they will click on several competitors’ ads when looking for a given product or service.
So if your competitors are constantly testing and improving both their PPC campaigns and landing pages in order to attract the most qualified traffic and get them to buy, then THEY will keep on improving their conversions at YOUR expense.
Bottom line: passively running a PPC campaign is not an option, especially in highly competitive markets. Just as you must continue exercising in order to stay fit, you need to actively monitor and modify your PPC keywords, ads, bids, landing pages, etc in order for your marketing to stay competitive.
