Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

There is a debate among PPC management experts about whether it is better to set your ads to rotate evenly or whether you should let Google show the “winning” ad more often.

The Case for Rotating Evenly
If you are going to truly Split Test your ads, you must show them evenly and randomly to a wide range of visitors.  The ability to rotate two ads with only one small difference allows you to run a true Split Test.

Additionally, Google’s optimize feature works on CTR and not your conversion rate.  So you could have an ad that is “winning” the split test on CTR but not converting nearly as well as the other ad.  Since Google’s optimization doesn’t consider the conversion rate, the true winner starts showing less and less.

The Case for Optimizing to Performance
When you rotate your ads evenly, you could be adversely affecting your business.  Showing an ad that does not pull Visitors to Your Site – even for a little while – is causing missed traffic and missed opportunity.

Google’s Optimize feature allows you to automatically show a winning ad more often to your visitor.  This increases overall CTR which we know increases the performance while decreasing the cost of a campaign.

So what is one to do?  You need to look at your business goals and decide between the two based on both your goals and your time available to monitor ad group progress.

One option we use quite often is to start out a new campaign using rotate while we closely monitor the performance over a short period of time.  Once we are sure we have strong, pulling ads, we turn it over to optimize to be sure those ads are doing their job.  Most of our customers want to focus on the most targeted traffic at the lowest cost which is achieved through the optimize feature.

Yes, it’s only August but it certainly is not too early to start thinking about your holiday PPC management. This year has definitely been slow, so it will be nice to put some Ho Ho Ho in your PPC campaigns.

Don’t assume that your current finely tuned bids and positions are going to get you the business you want for the holiday buying season. Take a look at last year’s holiday data if you were running campaigns last holiday and compare where your bids and positions were then in relation to where they are now. There is often room, and often a need, to get a bit more aggressive during the peak buying season.

Check your old ad copy. Did you have a special ad running during the holiday that drove good conversions? You may want to re-visit those ads and run the same kind of holiday special with an even more aggressive call to action. If you didn’t do anything special last holiday season for your ad copy, you may want to consider trying some holiday-flavored ad copy this year. One word of caution, though. If you are trying out some new ad copy, I highly recommend PAUSING your existing ad copy instead of re-writing it and losing all of its click-thru history. Then, once the holiday season is over, you can resume your existing ad copy with its history preserved.

Here are last years Holiday tips from Google AdWords.

Santa Clause is coming. Are you ready?

Should you put the price of your product in your pay per click advertising ads? I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard “we’ve got the lowest prices on the internet” from business owners. I also cannot tell you how many times a 30 second check of their competitors’ websites reveals that these same business owners do NOT have the lowest prices on the web. Sometimes they are not even close. When this is the case, a simple check allows anyone to see that you do not have the lowest prices on the web, then you probably do not want to promote your product pricing on the web. I am still amazed how often I see huge variances in prices on the exact same products amongst different web businesses.

However, if your prices are very similar to your competitors, you may want to try some pricing in your ad copy. You could very well bring in a higher converting crowd by letting them know upfront what their cost is going to be. You may get a lower CTR on the ad because the price might scare some folks off, but those people probably would not turn into buyers anyway, so you could say you have successfully screened out some of the “tire kickers.”

Now if your pricing is clearly the lowest on the net, then by all means you should consider shouting it to the heavens and letting everybody know it. So many buyers are price sensitive these days that your lower price proclamation may be your saving grace. Your competitors might take notice and could try to undercut you, so that is definitely a risk you take, but if you truly believe that they cannot last as long as you can at your price point, then let them try and take you on.

Tough economic times sometimes require bold moves.  To learn more about using your pricing within your ad copy, read what Google has to say in their blog on ad copywriting tips.