When you pay Google $10k for traffic or clicks to your website, you expect something in return right? In fact, for that kind of money, you expect an increase of revenue or else why invest the money.
Over 95% of the market measures their success with the average cost per conversion (the so-called CPA model). The problem is, most online retailers carry hundreds of products and a conversion does not carry the same value across the board.
So what kind of return do you expect?
The CPA model is terribly incomplete. In the end you want an increase in revenue and profit right? How can you quantify the value of a ‘conversion’ if you have hundreds of products at different prices? Remember, keywords are NOT products! You need to know the value of each keyword based on the collective revenue it generates, whether the shopper buys one product or multiple products. PPC for eCommerce means Bidding for Revenue AND Profit.
What if you knew that for every dollar you spend on AdWords you could earn five dollars back? If you knew that the NEXT click = 2X PROFIT, would you bid MORE? Of course you would.
It’s All About The Outcome
The outcome you want from your advertising changes everything. Why? Because when the desired outcome changes, everything you do to influence that outcome changes too.
There are 3 buckets of activities that influence your performance from Google AdWords:
(1) Increase PRESENCE
- Keyword coverage - you miss 100% of the clicks when your ad doesn’t show up for prospect keywords
- Are you participating in all the relevant keyword auctions that match the products you have to sell? This defines your market size.
- What profitable PPC keywords are you missing? Your best keywords might not be what you think and you need to find these gold nuggets.
(2) Effectively COMPETE
When you’re bidding for a target keyword, the more certain you are about the outcome, the more aggressive or passive you can be; this is why knowing the outcome is so important.
- Increase Your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) - whichever ad fills the consumers need the best wins. Period.
- Bid Higher - when it comes to bidding, the more popular the targeted keywords, the more competitive they’ll be. If a keyword is more profitable, then you can commit more of your budget to getting the top spot. Your competitors are most likely ‘digging for gold’ elsewhere and will be spending their budgets ineffectively.
- Effectively Use Ad Extensions - this is a feature that displays extra information on a business such as address, phone number, extra webpage links, or coupons. Changes ou make here could entice ap prospect to click.
- Improve Your Quality Score - the higher your quality score, the higher your ad ranks without needing to pay more. It is also Google’s way of saying your ad meets your potential customer’s needs.
- Effective Ad copy - You’re allotted 25 characters for the ad title and 70 for the description, this is precious real estate and makes all the difference.
(3) Continually OPTIMIZE
The ability to optimize comes from the very large data flow that comes from the keywords that drive your presence, the ads that create the clicks and the financial outcome that results. The amount of data available is your friend because it helps you reduce risk and create leverage behind your budget, but because of the sheer volume of data it can only effectively be managed by software.
- Bid for Revenue - Using adwords’ value tracking capabilities, you can attach a monetary value to each product and track your ROI accordingly. You’d be surprised how many online retailers don’t use this invaluable function
- Bid for Profit - using your product data feed, only Finch can tell you how much profit each keyword generates.
- Bid by match type - for each keyword there is a match type associated with it, which basically determines how broad or narrow a user's search query will match to the keyword in your AdWords
- Bid on the sales funnel - you know your own sales funnel better than anyone else and should structure your adwords campaign accordingly
Remarketing
- Implement profiles - set up the right profile, which excludes visits from your internal IP, so you can see how much actual traffic your site is generating from outside of your business or organization.
- Bid progressively - this is where lead-scoring comes into play and affects how aggressive you can be with remarketing. If a visitor came to your site and left immediately, then they still need a lot of warming up. But lets say a prospect left at the checkout page, then you can be more aggressive with remarketing ads.
For example, when Kitchenware Direct, Australia’s premier cookware and kitchenware online store, partnered with Finch they saw their revenue climb by 9% using PLAs (Product Listing Ads) that Google released February 2013 in Australia. They also decreased their adspend by 64%.
About Finch
After working together for almost 10 years to build up one of the first SaaS eCommerce platforms that captured over $1B in online sales for their clients, Finch founders Eric and Bjorn grew increasingly frustrated by not being able to find partners that could deliver predictable, consistent, and profitable paid search advertising solutions for their clients. Paid search represents the largest online advertising channel for most businesses today.
It seemed the bigger the upfront promise, the bigger the upfront fees that partners would charge – only there were no repercussions when the partner failed to meet their promise. In an industry filled with aggressive upfront promises, upfront fees, monthly minimum payments, and two-year contracts, they found that the average client relationship lasted about 8 months. Clearly the wrong balance existed in the vendor-client relationships with the client taking all the risk and the vendor locking in their own revenues regardless of performance. This is where Finch found its start.
Finchbot is Finch’s revolutionary system that automatically analyzes and monitors keywords. Finchbot is Intelligent Automation that continually learns and improves the performance of your campaigns 24/7/365, never taking a day off. The combination of PPC model, systems, data analysis and algorithms is proven to work as shown by over their over 300 customers. They focus on bidding smarter not more because Finchbot can intelligently analyze keywords and make decisions based on their effectiveness, relevance, and importance.
Get Started
To get started with Finch, take advantage of a complimentary audit where you can observe your campaign’s past cost and conversion history, as well as see where improvements need to be made. This auditing process should take no more than five minutes and will provide valuable data to ensure your campaign is performing to maximize your profit.
