Raised PPC Budgets - spend has gone up, clicks have gone down?

[howlusa]

I recently took over our PPC campaign from our agency. At the end of the month (April) before they handed it over to me, they raised all of our bids. Since then, the spend has gone up and the clicks have gone down. Why???

[john4math]

They raised your bids, so your CPCs will be higher, so you're spending more.  If you're hitting your budgets now, it makes sense that you're seeing less clicks, since you're probably going through your budget with fewer but more expensive clicks.

Sounds like you have some bid tuning ahead of you!

[Jantaro]

There could be seasonal factors as well. For example ad costs tend to increase before Mother's Day. Check to see if your ad position has changed, i.e. if your ad is showing higher or lower compared to previous weeks or months.

[danatanseo]

Are you maxing out your budget every day? Both Jan and John have good points. There could simply be less search volume and more bidders in the pool right now too. I would suggest some definite bid-pruning. Check to see if any split-tested ads had higher CTR and lower CPC and perhaps shut down the ads that aren't performing as well.

Did they change any keywords? I'd check...but you've probably already thought of this.

The last thing I would definitely do, if you aren't already, is do some deep analysis of your Google Analytics to find out how and when people are converting. Take notes and set up dayparting. It's not that hard to do and it can save you a ton of money while not decreasing sales. If you need help setting it up let me know and I'm happy to point you in the right direction (but, like I said, you might already have this in place...still, never hurts to re-evaluate it now and again).

Hope that helps!

[howlusa]

I found that the problem is coming from the display ads. The CPC has gone way up, but the CPM is the same. We are bidding by CPM. I have 3 ad groups in each, each at the same Max CPM, $3. So should I raise the Max CPM for the Ad Groups with lower CPCs and and lower the Max CPM for the Ad Groups with lower CPCs?

Thanks!

[john4math]

Is there a specific reason you're bidding by CPM?  Are you simply going for branding, or are you trying to drive leads?  If you're a brand advertiser, it would make sense to optimize for impressions, but most people are looking for leads to their website, in which case it makes more sense to use CPC bidding.

An example of a brand advertiser would be Coke.  They don't really care if you click on their banners, they just want you to think of a coke next time you're at a gas station.

[howlusa]

We're a bar chain. So I guess it's like Coke, we don't have too many conversions happening on our site, but when people come into our bar. But I just don't like that we have a higher CPC than before we raised our budgets. I thought that we would be getting more clicks as well as more impressions

[JasmineA]

If you raised your budget, but have CPM bidding still on, then you will just be paying more for display advertising. Possibly better places, but not really. I don't think it works like that.

You should be bidding CPC on display because then you are only charged when someone clicks on your banner ad (text or image) and comes to your site. The majority of people don't actually click on banner ads and instead visit the site via direct traffic.