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Yes, more context would be very much appreciated!

Hi Chris,

Apologies for not getting back to you quicker.

I believe that Daniel was correct. There are only so many slots available on one page. Even if you search for Grand Theft Auto, there are only roughly 20 positions for a consumer to choose. Then they are listed by price, as most consumers want to see them by price.

You can really shine in the shopping section like this by getting a large number of reviewers to review your product. I don't know of many people who use the Google Shopping area without the reviews section. so Even if you were selling something for .99, if you had zero reviews you were probably more likely to not get the click.

These ads have always been the cheapest I've ever run. I would definitely recommend playing with your bid and monitoring the impressions, click through rate, and conversion totals. Every business has its own difference when working  with the Shopping campaigns so I would highly recommend spending some time to really isolate your top performing products from your feed and bid on them individually. The more specific you make your bids the less you will likely end up paying.

While I do agree that there are difficulties in explaining the value to clients, the most common reasons I have come up across are accounting & cash flow.

When I was managing agency side and I just wanted an additonal $1000/mo (which seems like nothing for most advertisers), there was significant push back. One reason is the client is not only footing the bill for their account, they are also footing the agency bill. There could be added costs when expanding budgets depending on the pricing structure, and everyone wants everything as cheap as they can get it. So if the added cost of the agency + the added cost on the business for the advertising is too much in comparison to the budget the business had put forward for the year, then there is no way they can plan on spending more.

In addition to this, if you are working with smaller businesses, they don't have the flexibility in their cash flow to spend more even when there is a proven opportunity. Not to mention, advertising is very likely not the only bill they are paying each month. They have all the costs associated from man power to tools & software internally to operational overhead. They might say their profit is $65/item but it might actually be more like $15 after everything else is accounted for. Which is poor planning and communication from your client.

If you are working with a larger or public company, accounting requires that you bring in X amount of money (because Stock Market or Parent Company, or Investors, etc). If you are advertising based on LTV (lifetime value) not New Sales, then the accounting team doesn't see the same return you are assuming you are getting. It appears to the accounting team that you are overspending and not getting the same value on more cost compared to previous years.

But, take your client out for a beer if you can. Get them to unload on you about the issues and tribulations that they are coming up across internally or if the company does have a cash flow issue. There are real business reasons behind not spending more, and it might be as minor as "we are exploring another channel that is proving to be quite costly right now" and wont' have anything to do with you or your work.

Good luck! This is the hard part of consulting

A few things to add to this great response, ad type will make a huge impact in your overall performance. Some sites have better CTRs on different ad sizes or types - image v text. It's very important to run all sizes throughout your test.

I agree that display campaigns will suck up your budget, if you can spend the time to manage them well, then they can really turn a great profit for you - branding/remarketing or not. I didn't believe that was possible until I started working under a manager with 10 years of experience in both SEM & Media buys. It takes longer to crack the Display nut than it does to make a profit on Search, but I highly recommend it. There's a significant learning curve but stick with it and keep testing.

Hey Garth,

These are all great options listed, and I'm sure there are more that you can explore (don't forget Gemini, Yahoo's native advertising platform).

I would like to briefly touch though on the part of your post where you mentioned that Google is too expensive. Do you have an experienced person managing your PPC efforts? There are many things that could be contributing to the expense of your Google campaign. If you haven't looked into having a third party review your campaigns, I would highly recommend it. (but don't have Google look, they just want you to spend more money.)

There are different solutions for different issues. The one you have specifically referenced is a offline call tracking. I have used several different companies: IfByPhone, Invoca, Mongoose Metrics, Marchex, CallTrackingMetrics. Each one offers some level of call recording and all have caller ID. Some can integrate with Google AdWords directly to see where calls came from, and others may be able to merge with your CRM. They can get pricey depending on your needs, but it's good to review everything.

With call tracking, javascript replaces your phone number with a unique call number that associates itself to that keyword's GCLID (Google CLick ID). That information is then pinged in their system and will show up in their system or in several other areas depending on your chosen settings.

Hi EGOL,

I see that you have quite the opinion on SEM! I think you have some really great tidbits in your response (like not trusting published recommendations because it can be coming from someone like Google who just wants your money, recommending to do the math before new advertisers dive in, and that there are too many variables to determine if you will be profitable your first go). However, there are a few areas that I think are necessary to provide an alternative opinion on for the sake of discussion and public information.

I was completely in agreeance with you until you mentioned that people who run SEM accounts don't care about profit margins and business owners barely know their own profit margins. I've been working in paid search for 5+ years and never once have I ever met a business owner or dedicated paid search specialist who wasn't concerned about their profits and overall business impact.

I'm glad that you've done the math and have decided that it isn't going to work out for your business, but there is a lot about PPC that doesn't fit well with the math - unless you assumed a 10 QS for every KW and your product still doesn't sell in that atmosphere. As you gain positive account history, you essentially get "discounts" on your bids. From my experience, the Keyword Planner is only a tool to give you a general idea of what you will need to bid and rarely have I seen my actual bids match exactly what the planner suggested - they've been both up & down on the suggested CPC. It's very difficult to assume profit or volume of conversions in a system that is very fluid.

As you've already mentioned, when working in PPC it's very possible the target market can be quite competitive. If you're in a competitive niche it will be harder to turn a profit on a per-product basis. And even that has conditional standards against it, like how large your orders are, how many times you have return customers, how optimized your PLAs are, if you're driving the right traffic to the right pages, your conversion funnel. If you make it difficult at any piece of the process then PPC is going to be costly because the experience is poor and competitor experiences are likely much higher quality.

I agree that there are many opportunities for failure, however there are just as many times PPC succeeds - or else companies wouldn't continue paying for traffic or putting $500,000+ a month into Google AdWords.

This is also a question from someone who is interested in experimenting and seeking generalized recommendations for how much to spend with no inclination to their intended market or vertical. Things that may not work for one company might work incredibly well for another.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your response on the aspects of what make PPC hard, but I definitely challenge the notion that it's not worth investigating.

Hey Crystal, how is this going? Are you still seeing 0% bounce rates?

Martijn is completely correct. Organic & Paid in no way assist in the other's performance.

The piece of information you are lacking in this is what keywords are people coming to your site for. Your brand, of course. but there are other nuances to organic that keeps your time on site up than from PPC. You might not want to be using your home page for your PPC Brand traffic either. It might be too broad for the fast clickers who tend to click on ads. Making sure that you're sending them to a landing page on your site that answers pertinent questions most users are looking for will liekly help with your time on site.

Also, make sure that your PPC account isn't broad matching to your brand name. You will want to make sure you're using a modified broad match on your brand and keeping your PPC account in good shape or else it will pull in irrelevent traffic and not perform as well as it should.

The AdX network requires a significant amount of finessing to get it running smoothly. I know you make more money from DoubleClick but running Adsense allows you to stop spinning you wheels as frequently. It's a little less intensive to manage. With DoubleClick, you are going to need to do a lot more scheduling. Your settings may be restricting other advertisers from being able to appear on your site. I would play around more with the settings until you are serving more ads.

For the reasons above, you should noindex them, but do make sure that the Google AdWords bot can crawl them - if this is the same bot as the organic bot, then don't noindex. I heard from a reliable source that noindexing will lower your ability to gain a higher Quality Score as google doesn't know what your page is about. If you are using Dynamic Search Ads then you will need to point those to the seo pages on your site, not your ppc pages.

I agree with this.

However, you should not be bidding for 1st position with the highest bids possible. 1st position costs 25% more than 3rd position and doesn't necessarily have an arguable CTR or Conversion rate.

What keyword types are you advertising on? This is going to make a SUBSTANTIAL difference in how much you are spending.

Are your keywords major head terms for "HP Printer" or are they a little more focused like "Refurbished Laserjet Printer" -- as this second one is probably not as broad as the first, the chances are higher that it will cost less.

But the specifics of your account aside, what is it you are ultimately using AdWords for? Are you research or ROI focused? Because if this is going to stick around a little longer than a one time test, we need to discuss your processes to lower costs over the lifetime of the account.

My colleague Kristina Kledzik wrote a really strong post about how to integrate PPC into your online marketing strategy, and one of the major CTAs toward the end was "Don't give up. Try it for at least 6 months" before you can determine that PPC isn't profitable.

The takeaway is that PPC is hard work, and to make the best decisions for your business you're going to need to dedicate a lot of mental space to making sure it runs smoothly. You don't have to spend a lot over your test times, but you do have to be committed to attempting to make keywords work.

I use Spyfu now for competitive research and like all competitive research it's not more than 60% accurate. I used SearchEngineMetrics and they aren't extremely accurate either (for my own clients as well as for their competitors).

Is the client not using Google Analytics? I feel like this would solve all the problems you're having.

If a client is using GA, here's a step by step way you can get the information you're looking for at no cost

1. Navigate to the Search Overview in Traffic Sources.
2. Select the Ecommerce option from the Goal Set nav
3. See the Average Value per Transaction
4. Simultaneously have AdWords up.
5. Customize your column view to show the Conversion Many Per Click options (Cost / Conv, Conv Rate, Conversions, and Total Value if you don't already have it)
6. Multiply GA Average Value by the target Cost (opposite of profit margin).
   This is your middle-of-the-road CPA (cost per acquisition or Cost / Conv target).
7. Compare to each campaign in AdWords.
8. Make the necessary changes in AdWords to work toward this goal. 
   If the average value increases, technically so does your CPA.
9. This gets a whole lot trickier if you are tracking a non-eCommerce goal and the client is lead gen based.

I know that looks like a lot to go through, but it's cheap, faster than it seems, and AdWords is really better than any bid management or campaign management system I've found. I'm still looking for the right one for my clients. Analytics is the best way to go. All of it's already right there.

Hey! This is really common, and something I deal with a lot.

AdWords is First-Touch Attribution based. Meaning that no matter how someone got back to your site, AdWords will still claim the conversion for itself.

So if someone browses through to your site like so:
Paid > Organic > Organic > Paid > Direct
the first paid search click is going to receive the credit for the conversion, in AdWords' eyes.

So yes, your affiliate cookie is being dropped because someone is most possibly coming back to the site through a different channel.

The best way to look at this is to check out the Multi-channel funnels in GA to see if there is a higher percentage of profits being attributed to AdWords at the first-click level.

This would be my first guess, but there are several other pieces that could be broken. I don't think it's broken, but if this theory doesn't work out, I'm happy to troubleshoot other possibilities.

This is definitely a job for Analytics!

Typically you can see how important paid search is to your funnel by looking at the Assisted Conversion Funnel in the Conversions section of Analytics. The closer to 1.0 each channel gets means that it is more important to the completion of that funnel.

Or, here's a quick way I just worked out for you to see how many times PPC touches a converting funnel where Direct is also involved... I don't typically work this out from this direction so my math could be incorrect. You'll want to look to the Multi-Channel Funnel > Top Conversion Paths report, select the conversion metric you are most interested in viewing (we can only see multi-channel paths for conversions with this method), and set the lookback date to 90 days, and choose to list more than 10 instances. I chose all of mine for this experiment.

Download the Top Conversion Paths for your transaction. The sample size I had was 187 different conversion paths. But the client I was viewing also had a "greater than 5 min on site" goal and the number of paths to that was 4113. There are so many ways someone can come to your site, so don't forget to be open minded about the paths that people take!

I filtered this list of 187 paths to just PPC (66) then I used this function {=SUM(LEN(A192:A236)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A192:A236,"Direct","")))/LEN("Direct")}* to find all the instances of Direct within those (317). For this particular conversion type, we see 20.8% of conversion funnels that involved PPC and Direct, 16.8% that involved PPC and Direct and Organic. But this could have been a funnel that was as bizarre as: Social > Email > Direct > Organic > PPC > Email > Direct. It will take a lot more granularity & descriptive funnel naming to pick out what instances of these started or ended with NonBrand or Brand searches.

• This function must be entered as an Array, so instead of just hitting ENTER when you submit it to a cell, you must CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER to get it to work, thus the brackets will show in the cell.

The page you linked to needs to be tested with Optimizely, Google Analytics Experiments, or Unbounce against another page that is much cleaner. I didn't even realize there was a form on this page. It's really busy and might not be legible for your audience. If you want a kick ass campaign, your conversion rate is going to make a massive difference on your performance (you'll have a lower CPA no matter what you're spending). You should definitely test this because long form and informational pages sometimes work better.

Typically when you're aiming for newsletter sign ups, you should have a higher conversion point on any keyword that you're looking for. I would say start with vague head terms on exact match. These terms aren't typically profitable and may lead to lower newsletter signup costs.

Ah! Ok, so on the left hand side of the tool, there is a pop up that says something like "My Keyword Ideas". After you minimize that, there will be 3 boxes for selecting your match type. Select Exact from this list and deselect Broad.

It never used to be like this. There have been many many changes and even more to come here soon. So I wouldn't doubt if it moves location or doesn't work appropriately in the future.

Let me know if for some reason that doesn't work for you either.

gI0BNWr

Hey Edmond,

Eric definitely has touched on the first questions I would have asked.

As far as tracking your PPC conversions, you need to have Google Analytics (or your preferred advanced web analytics platform) installed completely, with goals set up to track the number of website leads you receive so  you can double check the attribution modeling. PPC might not be the last touch converter, but might instead be initiating a TON of converting traffic to your site.

If you want to track a lead offline in your CRM, you will need to apply manual tracking to all of your campaigns. Then you will also need to have hidden fields in your form to pull this information from the site and place it in your CRM. Whether dealing with insurance, or dealing with Tshirt orders, it's imperative that manual tracking be ironed out and tracked appropriately. I've worked in a financial field before and manual tagging became our life force. It's amazing and great if you do it right!

Two domains can run in the same account. They cannot run in the same adgroup.

If you never plan on spending more than 15k/mo per domain then I think it's OK to keep them all in the same account. Just be sure to label them differently for each campaign.

If your brands will be bidding on the same keywords, then do not put them in the same account. Because they are two separate brands you can double serve ads, but it's not advisable. There are MANY things that can go wrong if you try to bid on the same terms with two different accounts. I would suggest hiring someone who knows what they're doing to help you set this up & possibly run it for you so you don't end up bidding against yourself and running up your own CPCs.

You will only be able to monetize them if you have ads enabled on your current channel and are targeting the channel with the real estate ads. However, this is not a good strategy. Real Estate may not share the same user base and then your video ads will not have been beneficial.