How long does it ramp up a PPC campaign?

[brettgus]

I was speaking to a SEO the other day.  He is going to be working on an ecommerce site soon.  I was suggesting that he might want to augment his SEO efforts with PPC in order to be able to show some results in the near term, as it would most likely take some time for his SEO work to be showing results.

His response was that while he hasn't utilized them as much, he's found that it can take 3-6 months to get a PPC campaign to really make money.  I'm just curious if you guys feel that this is an accurate statement?

[EGOL]

When I start a PPC campaign I include keywords that I hope will target the right people, I write multiple ads that I hope will attract clicks, and I make landing pages that I hope will convert.

As the campaign runs I am able to eliminate keywords that do not convert, eliminate ads that don't attract clicks and eliminate or modify landing pages that do not convert.  Every time you eliminate something the performance of your campaign should improve - if you made a wise decision.  Your profit should improve and your quality score should improve and that can bring your bid prices down - if you know what you are doing.

It is something like sighting-in a gun.  You shoot, see where you hit, adjust the sights, shoot again, and keep at it until the gun is zeroed in.

If your campaign is targeting a niche with vigorous activity you will get lots of data quickly.  But if your campaign targets a sleepy little niche with very few searchers, it can take weeks or months to accumulate enough data to eliminate poorly performing keywords, ads, landing pages, etc.

Making money on PPC can be very difficult.  You can be competing with people who can obtain product at cut rate prices, ship their packages at a discount and have highly efficient fulfillment teams and very smart ad managers.  If you are not tracking your conversion rate and keeping a close eye on your profits and costs you can loose more money than you make at PPC.  I am willing to bet that a lot of my competitors are loosing money at PPC and don't know it.

It is really hard for a small business to make money at PPC.  You have to be super smart and super efficent and get all of your expenses down to rock bottom.  Try it and find out.  I bet you are surprised at how easy it is to blow a lot of money.

[john4math]

EGOL as usual is spot on.  If you're interested in going forward, here are a few good types of campaigns to get started with that are generally high ROI:

• Remarketing (generally for display advertising, and now for search!).  This will allow you to show ads to people who visit your site, or add things to their shopping cart and don't check out.  You can link your Adwords account to Google Analytics to use your goals and events from there to make this even easier (see here).  Since they've been on your site before, you know there's some extra interest in your products.
• Product Listing Ads.  Many merchants see a good return on these if you can optimize your merchant feeds properly.  These are the ads that appear when you search for a specific product, with the tiny pictures on the search results page.
• Brand advertising.  For example, if your company Acme sells trail running shoes, if someone searches for "Acme trail running shoes", they're going to see ads above your organic listings, and you'll lose some clicks to them.  You can pretty easily get your ad to the top of the pile because your quality score will usually be a perfect 10 for these keywords.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Brett,

I would suggest starting off with a very focused PPC campaign aimed at a few products and review the performance. As EGOL has mentioned, you will have to watch your competitors very closely to ensure that they are not offering better deals than you for the same keywords. This should help bring in funds as the SEO campaign is ramping up. We have also seen a correlation with PPC traffic improving organic traffic for our clients.

Cheers,

SEO5

[Branden_S]

Hi Brett,

EGOL is correct...PPC is really competitive, especially for high volume / expensive products.  John is correct that Re-marketing, PLA and branded keywords are the most profitable.  I also recommend going after competitors names / product name.  PPC is the only way to rank for competitors terms, and since competitors keywords are targeting people looking to buy your type of product, they will convert well.

PPC takes time and money to determine the best keywords for you...it will also take some time/money to establish high Quality Scores, which are essential to the long term success of a PPC campaign.  However I always recommend my clients start with PPC because you can rank at the top of page 1 today; and SEO can take months to get to the top of page 1.  Even when you rank on page 1 organically, having multiple ads in the SERP will increase your overall clicks (1+1=2.25)  i.e. 1 PPC ad + 1 SEO ad = more clicks than  you would achieve with just 1 organic ad.

I also recommend using a high quality PPC manager who has the knowledge, experience and ppc tools to make your ppc campaigns profitable quickly.  There is a learning curve with PPC, as with SEO, or any other marketing niche.  Its better to use a ppc manager who is already over the learning curve. You should also look for a manager that uses Marin Software to manage their campaigns...Marin's bidding algorithm optimizes keyword bids better than any person can.  A person can't optimize millions of keyword bids daily...that's what computers / PPC software is for.

If you would consider working with a PPC manager, please private message me.  I offer a free AdWords review, no strings attached.  To demonstrate my PPC skills, I will give you a handful of actionable ideas that will improve your ppc campaigns.  If you think I am worthy of managing your PPC campaigns, we can start a marketing relationship. If not, you will have a handful of PPC strategies that will improve your campaigns.

Have a great day

Branden

[admonster]

If your website has no issues and your product is good. You should start making money after 1 month.  The biggest problem is not to waste money. Learning curve costs money. plan it carefully arithmetic is your best friend.

Regards Igor