But after a while, you realise your PPC campaigns are not delivering the desired return on investment. You start making changes to bids, budgets, and keywords. Still no improvement, so you make more changes.

And so on.

It’s not long until you’ve lost track of what’s working and what’s not. Your keywords and ad groups become disorganised, your Quality Scores start to fall, and you start paying excessively high CPCs to chase after visitors and sales.

If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you need to take a step back and review your campaign optimisation strategy. Are you making intelligent and informed decisions based on reliable, insightful, and unbiased data? Or are your bids being changed and keywords paused in a random and haphazard fashion in a drastic effort to improve results?

Below are 5 optimisation mistakes I’ve found myself guilty of from time to time, and some tips on how to avoid these common pitfalls.

1. Basing decisions on too little data

Data is a PPC advertiser’s best friend. Without knowing which keywords, ads, and landing pages perform better than other keywords, ads, and landing pages, it is almost impossible to create and maintain a profitable PPC campaign. But when assessing the performance of your campaigns, it’s all too easy to make uninformed changes to keyword bids and unnecessarily pause keywords and ads based on insignificant and unreliable data.

A keyword which has received 1 click and delivered 1 sale is not a high performing keyword. Similarly, a keyword which has received 50 clicks and delivered no sales is not a poor performing keyword.

Recommendations:

• 200 clicks is a good rule of thumb – it gives the keyword or ad a fair chance to show its true worth, and any freak anomalies are likely to be cancelled out over a decent-sized data set. So avoid writing off keywords and ads with less than 200 clicks
• Use larger data sets, but keep track of the time ranges used during your analyses (point 4)

2. Being too granular

Another common mistake is placing too much emphasis on the performance of individual keywords and individual ads, and failing to see the bigger picture. If you look at only keyword data, you will fail to spot how each of your ad groups and campaigns are performing.

Recommendations:

• If your individual keyword data is too small, look at your ad group data – you’re sure to uncover greater insights. And if you ad group data is too small, look at your campaign data.
• Same with ads. If you have the same ad messages across multiple ad groups, run a pivot table in Excel to benefit from a larger data set
• Try to only make optimisation changes when you have at least 200 clicks, so keep moving up a level until you have enough data set to make informed decisions – any changes you make will them be more likely to have a positive impact on your account performance.

3. Assuming that just because a keyword or search query has converted in the past, it will convert again in the future

Because it won’t. Well, not always anyway.

People make a wide range of unique searches, so just because you made a sale after someone searched for ‘cheap Bahamas deals summer 2012′, does not mean that bidding on the keyword ‘cheap Bahamas deals summer 2012′ will deliver another sale in the future.

Recommendations:

• Try to view your more obscure long-tail keywords as a whole, rather than individually
• Pick out themes from your search query reports to get more insightful understanding on what types of keywords and searches are working, rather than the individual searches and keywords

4. Optimising the same data twice

One of the easiest yet most dangerous mistakes to make when optimising campaigns regularly is to overlap your date ranges. You’ve selected data for the ‘last 30 days’, made your keyword bid changes, then carry out another bid optimisation 2 weeks later, again using the ‘last 30 days’ of data. Your bidding decisions will be based on overlapping data, so your changes will be made with poor judgement.

Similarly, if you’ve changed bids in the middle of the month, but then view data for the whole of the month, your CPC, CTR, and average position data will not be representative of the current state of the campaigns.

Recommendations:

• Record the date you make changes to your campaigns, and view data from that date onwards – it will then be more representative of the current state of the campaigns
• Download campaign statistics using AdWords Editor – when you come back to optimise your campaigns on a later date, you can see what date range was previously used and select a new date range from that date onwards
• Try to make routine changes such as bid adjustments at the same time each week or month, to get in the habit of selecting reliable date ranges (e.g. ‘last 7 days’)

5. Being afraid to walk away

There’s nothing more frustrating than investing huge amounts of time and effort into carrying out detailed analysis on your campaigns, only to find no findings whatsoever. After carefully compiling results to compare the profitability of prices versus non-prices in ads, or compare visitor engagement and returning visits of landing page A to landing page B, you secretly hope one proves to be a clear winner.

Really, you do.

But all too often, different ad messages and landing pages will perform exactly the same. When faced with such inconclusive and frustrating results, it’s often difficult to walk away and make absolutely no changes whatsoever to your campaigns. Despite the difficulty in doing so, walking away is essential to avoid making unnecessary and often detrimental changes to your campaigns.

Recommendations:

• Realise that making changes based on insignificant data can worsen your campaign performance
• Create two identical copies of each ad style within the same ad group, and let them rotate – only if both ads AA clearly beat both ads BB (or vice versa), can you be confident of a clear winner

Less is sometimes more

PPC campaign optimisation is an art. Especially when you want to include engagement metrics such as time on site and returning visits. Changes to keywords and ads should not be made haphazardly – they should only be made after careful thought and analysis, using reliable and significant data sets.

Not only does efficient and informed PPC optimisation require a good understanding of data analysis, but it also requires a good intuition and experience on when to make changes and when to walk away. Sometimes the best work you can do to a PPC campaign is to do no work at all.

What strategies do you find useful for optimising PPC campaigns? How do you ensure your optimisations are reliable and efficient? Share your comments and suggestions below.

PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.

Or so the theory goes.

But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?

There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.

Capturing less relevant search traffic and achieving a good return on investment involves 3 crucial steps – separation, qualification, and persuasion.

1) Separation

“Keywords of differing levels of qualification should be separated into their own campaigns”

Start with your most relevant and highly-qualified keywords. These are your cream of the crop keywords in terms of relevancy. If you are selling luxury apartments in New York, for example, keywords in this highly relevant campaign may include a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). People searching for ‘luxury apartment for sale in New York’ would be an extremely high quality of visitor, so these keywords must be kept separate in their own campaign.

In your next campaign, create keywords which are slightly less relevant. Keywords in this campaign might contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’), but not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘world class property NYC’ is still relevant, but since it does not contain the words ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’, they need to be kept separate so they can optimized separately.

Next, create a campaign for keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘New York property for sale’ or ‘buy an apartment NY’ are still somewhat relevant, but since they don’t contain any descriptive or purchase qualifier, they need to be kept separate.

Then create yet another campaign for keywords with a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) and a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or buy’), but without a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). This campaign will include keywords such as ‘exclusive apartments to buy’ or ‘prestigious real estate for sale’), which although are somewhat relevant, do not contain any mention of location so need to be kept separate. To increase the relevancy of keywords in this campaign, you might want to geo-target the campaign to a particular geographic area (e.g. searchers located in New York).

Keep creating campaigns, each with keywords of slightly less relevancy, until you start getting very generic and ambiguous keywords such as ‘New York apartments’. By now you should have a few different campaigns, each identifiable by the amount of qualification their keywords contain. Your campaigns may look something like the following:

• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | LOCATION
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• PROPERTY | LOCATION

As you move from one campaign to the next, keywords in your campaigns become less qualified and more ambiguous.

Now comes the exciting part – qualifying your ads.

2) Qualification

“Ad messages should be qualified to cater for different types of searchers”

While showing your best performing ads might work for your highly relevant keywords, using the same ads for less relevant keywords will have very different results. Using the same ‘tried and tested’ ads for less relevant keywords is a major reason why many PPC advertisers complain about the poor profitability of less relevant keywords. It’s not the keywords which are to blame; it’s the poorly qualified ads.

To achieve a strong return on investment from less relevant and more ambiguous keywords, such as ‘apartments in New York’, you need to qualify your ads. The less relevant your keyword, the more qualification is needed in your ads. When a user searches for something generic and ambiguous like ‘apartments in New York’, you are not able to tell whether she is looking to buy or rent an apartment in New York, nor are you able to determine the type of apartment they are seeking (whether it’s luxury, spacious, cheap etc). You therefore need to qualify your ad messages, providing clarity on the crucial missing information your searcher failed to include.

For your keywords which do not include a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘buy’ or ‘for sale’), make it clear you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments) by including words such as ‘buy’, ‘for sale’, ‘now selling’, or ‘from $3.5m’. When a searcher sees a price or a purchase qualifier in your ad, they will immediately know you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments), which will reduce the number of rental seekers clicking on your ads.

Similarly, for your keywords which do not include a location qualifier, make your location extremely clear in your ad messages to minimize wasted clicks from people searching for properties in irrelevant locations. And for your keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘world class’), ensure the searcher understands you are selling high-end property by using words such as ‘luxury’, ‘world class’, and ‘from $3.5m’ in your ads. This will help to filter out first time buyers or property seekers looking for low cost properties.

Qualifying your ads need not be a difficult task. One of the main reasons why you separated your keywords into different campaigns in step 1 is to make ad qualification all the more easier. By keeping keywords of differing levels of qualification spate, you should be able to quickly and easily create ad messages with the appropriate amount of message qualification.

Next comes the interesting part that is crucial to achieve profitability from less relevant keywords – persuasion.

3) Persuasion

“Ad messages should make it clear you are not offering the product or service the user has searched for, but provide clear messages as to why they should consider you as a substitute”

If you are an artificial grass manufacturer, for example, and you wanted to show ads for ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’, you need to persuade searchers why they should change their mind and consider purchasing artificial grass instead. Messages such as ‘Grass that never needs watering’ or ‘Find out why you should go artificial’ might do the trick.

Similarly, if you’re a 4* hotel in Manhattan, New York, and want to reach people searching for hotels in the close by Midtown, New York, don’t just bid on the keyword ’4 star hotels midtown’ and show a generic Manhattan ad. Don’t just include the word ‘Midtown’ in your ads either, as that would mislead potential customers, and result in wasted clicks and few conversions. Mention the word ‘Midtown’ in your ad, but instead point out how far your hotel is away from Midtown. An ad such as the following would do nicely.

You’ve made it clear your hotel is not in Midtown, but clearly suggested why they should consider you anyway. You will filter out those people who must stay in Midtown, but encourage people who are flexible to consider your hotel. And since you’ve pre-qualified your ad messages, you’ve set their expectations at the right level which will help to deliver a strong conversion rate.

Relevancy Is Still King

While separation, qualification and persuasion can help to deliver strong profitability from slightly less relevant keywords, relevancy is still essential for paid search success. There is little point bidding on the keywords ‘apartment decorating’ or ‘the apartment film review’ to sell New York apartments, so keywords must still be somewhat relevant to your offering.

That said, if it’s approached intelligently, the three-pronged attack of separation, qualification, and persuasion should enable you to target less relevant keywords and still achieve a good return on investment. Separation allows you to keep your different keywords separate, qualification helps you reduce wasteful clicks, and persuasion helps you increase your conversion rate. Use all three strategies together, and they can be extremely powerful at increasing conversion volume within your cost budgets.

Are you a fan of the mid-tail? Have you found it possible to achieve a good return from slightly less relevant keywords? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

So it comes as a surprise to see widespread discussion criticising the quality of Google search results among search marketing professionals, talk of people getting up in arms because they can’t find the information they are looking for, mention of people having to resort to old-fashioned bookmarking to avoid losing track of that golden nugget of an article they found back in 2003.

Are search results really becoming less relevant? Or are our expectations of high quality search results increasing faster that improvements in search quality can keep up? While Google no doubt needs to continue to improve the relevancy and usefulness of it search results, it’s not just Google who need to improve. We can also learn how to better construct our search queries to find the right information more quickly and easily.

More Information

There are no two ways about it – the amount of information on the internet is growing at an exponential rate. And while the number of pages being indexed by search engines such as Google rises exponentially, the number of Google search results remains unchanged. More information, but still only 10 search results. Google, therefore, are faced with the dilemma of trying to organise the world’s increasingly varied information into 10 small search results, while at the same time trying to please an increasing number of varied searchers who use the same search words but have entirely different requirements.

But should we really blame Google? Perhaps Google’s search results have not got less relevant. Perhaps, instead, our demands for increased relevancy have grown, providing us with the false illusion that Google’s search result relevancy has deteriorated.

Be Commanding

While Google must work to improve the relevancy of its search results, and also better understand searcher intentions to provide the most appropriate, useful, and personalised search results, we also need to take some responsibility if want a seamless searching experience. Faced with the dilemma of mounting information yet more increasingly individualistic preferences, we need to become more informed about how to better find the information we seek. Let’s have a look at a few possibilities using Google’s search commands:

1. Use “quotation marks” if you know certain words appear in a certain order. This is especially useful for finding the name of song if you only know one line, or finding an academic article if you know the title.
2. Use +plus +signs to denote essential words in your search query. These are words which you know are important to your search, and must be included in your search query. Avoid using plus signs for words about which you are as less confident, as this will dilute the relative importance of your more essential words.
3. Use –hyphens to remove words which you know are irrelevant. If you’re looking for football (soccer) pitches in Australia, and see a whole bunch of results for AFL pitches, adding the word ‘–AFL’ would improve the relevancy of your results considerably.
4. Use OR operators if you are unsure of certain aspects of your query. If you’d like to eat at a Melbourne Italian restaurant in either Windsor or Prahran, searching for ‘Melbourne Italian restaurant Windsor OR Prahran’ would show results which satisfy either of your location criteria.

Be Creative

But it’s not just about learning the Google commands. For a completely stress-free searching experience, it’s also about learning how to think strategically, creatively intelligently when making searches:

1. Use the rarest and most unique words possible. If you’re looking for a certain hotel in New York your friend recommended recently, but can’t quite remember the name, don’t just search for ‘New York hotels’. Where possible, try to include rarer and more unique words such as ‘hotels Manhattan’ (if you know the hotel is in Manhattan), or include other unique aspects such as ‘cheapskate Tuesdays’ you know about the hotel. Similarly, if you’re looking for that article you read last year, try to remember something unique about it. Did the article provide an uncommon but memorable metaphor to illustrate a point? Did it mention anything which would separate it from other similar articles on the subject, and make it one of a kind? The more unique and specific you can make your search, the better.
2. Only include words in your search query which will narrow down the information you seek. Avoid adding words into your search query which do little to better specify your intentions, as this will reduce search result relevancy. Google can’t weight the relative importance of each of your words (other than using plus signs to denote essential words), and will see each of your words as equal importance. So if the 4^th word in your query is not as helpful as your first three words, get rid of it – this will add more weighting to your more important words.
3. Consider how combinations of Google commands can help you be more specific. If you’re looking for the name of a song, but can only remember two short lines of lyrics, enter those lyrics in the same query, but separate them with quotation marks. If all you can remember about the song is the words ‘walk by the trees’ and ‘coat to the rain’, entering those words into google without quotation marks will give you an unhelpful result. However, thinking strategically, and placing each of your lyric snippets in quotation marks, will provide a very helpful result. By using Google strategically, you can quickly and easy find the name of the song that’s stuck in your head.

And the creativity doesn’t just stop there. Ken Lyons from WordStream wrote an excellent article on using Google to find anyone’s email address, providing numerous examples of how to cleverly construct your search queries to retrieve only the most  useful results. Similarly, Ann Smarty provided some great insight into using Google to find guest post opportunities, identifying key phrases which are likely to appear on pages asking for guest post writers. Want a new job? Try searching for something like:

+location + “job title” “we’re looking for” OR “ideal candidate will” OR “the following skills” OR “your CV” OR “your resume” OR “cover letter” OR “covering letter”

Or get even more creative and add date parameters into your job search to increase the likelihood of finding recent job postings. It could be a great way to find poorly advertised job postings and give yourself a greater chance of securing a new role.

Be Intelligent

It is all too easy to jump on the bandwagon and become frustrated with Google’s search results. While Google obviously has a significant role to play in improving their search results, so searchers also have a role to play in learning how to better structure their search queries. Plus signs for required words, hyphens for irrelevant words, and inverted commas for phrases would improve the average searcher’s experience considerably, while thinking more creatively would also get better results. If we can learn to search more intelligently and strategically, I imagine few people will have trouble finding their desired information quickly and efficiently.

Do you think Google’s results are becoming less relevant? Or do you think it’s simply a case of making more intelligent search queries? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

Although we infer that profit sharing is sound from an economic sense, we find it does have problems of its own in terms of implementation and conversion attribution, and conclude that profit sharing should only be considered once a strong and tested relationship has already been established between client and agency.

So let’s get started.

With a profit share deal, instead of paying the client paying the agency a percentage of PPC spend fee, or a set fee for each sale, the PPC agency receives a share of all profits they help to deliver for the client through PPC activity.

If the PPC agency helps make the client $50,000 in profit from PPC, and the agreed profit share percentage is 10%, the client will pay the PPC agency $5,000 for their troubles.

Since the more profit the agency makes for the client, the higher their fees, it is therefore in the agency’s best interests to make the client as much profit as possible. Unlike the percentage of spend (markup) model, there is no monetary incentive for the agency to spend money haphazardly on clicks to increase their commission. With a profit share model, it’s the other way around. There is an incentive for the PPC agency to reduce wastage and increase spend in areas which generate a return.

The profit share model is the only PPC pricing model which is perfectly efficient from an economics point of view. Unlike the management fee model, the percentage of spend model and the cost-per-sale model, with a profit share model both client and agency have the same common goal: to maximise client profit. As pointed out by Andreas Reiffen in his analysis on paid search profit sharing, it allows a win-win situation in which both the client and PPC agency are better off.

So the profit share model is economically sound. The point of maximum agency profit is also the point of maximum client profit. There is no other click volume which will deliver a higher profit. It provides the necessary incentives to help both client and agency maximise their bottom line.

What’s more, since a common goal is being chased by both parties, the profit share model provides a solid foundation for a long-lasting, open relationship between client and agency. It creates a platform for innovation, makes testing worthwhile and encourages the sharing of ideas to reduce clicks costs and increase click revenue. It’s in the agency’s interest to make recommendations to improve website conversion rates; and it’s in the client’s interest to share knowledge of their business with the agency to improve keyword targeting and ad copy. It’s a mutually beneficial agreement that can’t go wrong.

Or can it?

Perhaps. A client’s profit figures are sensitive information. If leaked into the hands of competitors, it could be disastrous for the client. A significant level of trust between both parties is therefore required for a profit sharing model to work.

Conversion Attribution

There’s also the issue of conversion attribution. Since the PPC agency’s fees are bases on profit generated from PPC activity only, how much the agency receives is entirely based on tracking capabilities.

Tracking generally uses cookies to measure customers who buy online within a certain time period (say 30 days), and generally ignores revenue through offline methods such as phone calls and store walk-ins. If someone clicks on a PPC ad while at work, then makes an order when at home on a different computer, or perhaps picks up the phone, that revenue is not attributed to PPC. Nor is revenue from users who have high browser privacy settings or reject cookies.

As pointed out by Econsultancy, PPC marketers are currently missing out on credit for half of the revenue their campaigns are driving, which is a huge amount. With a profit share model, agency fees are based entirely on trackable revenue, so the agency will be under-rewarded for the value they deliver. This can significantly compromise the level of investment in the client’s PPC campaigns, and the level of testing and innovation.

This bias in conversion attribution can also lead to the PPC agency reducing bids on generic ‘research’ keywords from customers earlier in the buying cycle. These keywords might not convert profitably online (according to the under-reported tracking), but may be essential for the client’s walk-in orders, branding or long-term growth. Again – not very efficient.

So although the profit share model performs exceptionally well at aligning the motivations of client and agency, it is far from a perfect PPC pricing model. A high level of trust is essential for it to work – as is accurate (and fair) revenue tracking. Until conversion attribution improves considerably, any business with strong brand or numerous different marketing touch points should use the profit share model with caution.

Are you a fan of the profit share model? Have you made it work for both client and agency? Or is it one for the future when conversion attribution improves? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

One common model that many agencies use is the ‘markup’ model (also commonly known as the ‘percentage of spend’ model). If the agreed markup is 10%, and the client spends $30,000 on clicks, the client pays $33,000, of which the agency receives $3,000.

Nice and simple.

But does it create incentives for the agency to maximise profit for the client? Does it fairly reflect the work and expertise involved at all spend levels?

No.

Conflict of Interest

In short, the percentage of spend model is a highly inefficient pricing model for paid search management, and should be avoided. As pointed out by George Michie in his recent post on SEM Pricing Models, since the agency receives a commission on every dollar spent, there is an incentive for the agency to spend as much as possible, which can be far in excess of the point of diminishing marginal returns.

To find out exactly what George means by diminishing marginal returns, and how it creates a conflict of interest for client and agency and renders the markup model pretty much useless, let’s consider the cost and revenue structure of the client.

Look at the line CPC (marginal) in the diagram below (Cost Per Click). It shows what happens to the Cost of each subsequent Click as the volume of clicks increase. It is upward-sloping, so each extra click costs progressively more than each previous click. Makes sense – since the first few clicks are usually very cheap, and raising bids and showing for more expensive keywords is generally needed to increase click volume.

Now have a look at the line RPC (marginal). It stands for Revenue Per Click, and shows how much Revenue is generated from each subsequent Click. It is downward-sloping, which again makes sense, since each additional click is likely to be less relevant and have a lower conversion rate than each previous click (this is known as diminishing marginal returns). A rational advertiser would always go for the low hanging fruit first (the most relevant keywords), which will naturally convert better than the high hanging fruit (less relevant generic keywords).

(If this all sounds very confusing, you may like to check out Wikipedia’s articles on marginal cost and diminishing marginal returns first).

So we have an upward-sloping marginal CPC line and a download-sloping marginal RPC line.

Now, assume the client has no other costs other than paid search click costs. If the client spends $1,000 on clicks and generates $1,500 in revenue, the client makes $500 in profit (this is of course very unrealistic – but just bear with me for the sake of argument).

Look at where the two lines cross. This is the level (2,000 clicks) where the client will make the most profit.

Why?

Well suppose click volume increased to 2,100 clicks. The 2,100th click is now costing $0.85, but is only bringing in $0.55 of revenue! The client is losing money on these extra 100 clicks, so reducing click volume would increase the client’s total profit.

What about reducing click volume?

Well, at 1,900 clicks, the 1,900th click is costing only $0.65 but generating $0.85 of revenue. The client is making $0.20 profit from their 1,900th click, so why not increase click volume further, and make $0.19, $0.18 and $0.17 profit from additional clicks? It makes sense to increase click volume until no additional profit is being made – until the cost of an extra click equals the revenue of that click.

It is where the marginal CPC and marginal RPC lines meet that no additional profit would be made, and it is at this point which makes the client the most profit. It is this level of click volume that the client should aim to target with their PPC activity.

Now let’s complicate things a little. The graphs above were only concerned with marginal costs and marginal revenues – costs and revenue at the margin. They show what happens to the next click or the previous click, but they don’t show what happens on average – to the average cost per click or the average revenue per click. Average CPC and average RPC lines are therefore needed for this purpose.

Have a look at the red CPC (average) line and see if it makes sense. Like the green CPC (marginal) line, it’s upward-sloping, but flatter. Why?

Think about it for a second.

If you just spent $1,000 on 2,000 clicks, each click costed you $0.50 each on average, right? If you then decided to go crazy and purchase a few extra clicks on some expensive keywords for a hefty $4.00 each, what will happen to your average CPC price? It will increase, but not by very much, maybe to $0.41? Adding some expensive clicks will pull up the average, but only by a relatively small amount. Hence the flatness of the average Cost Per Click line.

The same is true with the average Revenue Per Click line. If a few extra keywords bring in only a small amount of revenue, it will pull down your average revenue, but only slightly, hence it’s flatness.

Still following?

Great. So we now have 4 lines which represent the cost and revenue structure of a client:

1. Marginal CPC – shows how much each extra click costs
2. Marginal RPC – shows how much each extra clicks generates in revenue
3. Average CPC – shows how much clicks cost on average
4. Average RPC – shows how much clicks generate in revenue on average

These 4 lines are all that’s needed to assess the client’s profitability.

Now remember how we decided that 2,000 clicks was the most profitable click volume for the client? Let’s see exactly how much profit the client is making from 2,000 clicks.

Well, at 2,000 clicks, the average cost per click (CPC average) is $0.30. The client is spending $600 on clicks ($0.30 x 2,000).

At 2,000 clicks, the average revenue per click (RPC average) is $1.50. The client is generating $3,000 in revenue ($1.50 x 2,000).

Minus one from the other ($3,000 – $600) and we have a healthy client profit of $2,400.

Fantastic.

Now this is where the inefficiency with the percentage of spend (markup) model comes in. Since the agency is paid a commission on every click, the agency will always want to increase click volume and spend as much as possible. As we’ll see from the following examples, this is often in excess of the point of maximum client profit.

Suppose the agency increased click volume to 3,000. The average Cost Per Click (CPC) increases from £0.30 to $0.45, and the average Revenue Per Click (RPC) falls from $1.50 to $1.20. The client is still making a healthy profit of $2,250 (revenue of $3,600 ($1.20 x 3,000) minus cost of $1,350 ($0.45 x 3,000)), although their profit of $2,250 is less the previous level of $2,400.

The agency, however, has increased their profit, since they now receive a cut of a bigger spend ($1,350 instead of $600). Assuming the markup is 10%, the agency’s profit has increased from $60 to $135, at the expense of the client’s profit.

But here’s the thing. The client is unlikely to complain – the agency is making them $2,250 of profit, after all! How is the client to know that they could be making $2,400 of profit, should the agency decide to reduce click volume? The client is none the wiser and would most likely praise the agency for their ‘efficient’ work in making them such as tidy profit of $2,250!

But why stop there?

The agency makes a cut of every click spent, so why not increase click volume further? Why not increase it to – wait for it – 4,000 clicks!

Here, at 4,000 clicks, click spend will be $3,000 ($0.75 x 4,000) so the agency’s profit will be $300 (10% of $3,000) – much better than the measly $60 or $135 from the previous click volumes of 2,000 and 3,000.

But look at what’s happened to the client’s profit at this new click volume of 4,000. Their costs are now $3,000 ($0.75 x 4,000) and so is their revenue! The client is making no profit at all! Any more spend, and the client’s average revenue will fall below their average cost, and they will make a loss. If the client is losing money, they will most likely leave the agency, or at least apply massive pressure on the agency to increase performance (reduce click volume), so any click volume in excess of 4,000 is not sustainable in the long-run.

So it’s in the agency’s interest to maximise their commission by getting the click volume as close to the point of 4,000 click where the red lines cross (where average costs equals average revenue) – but without going over, so as to keep the client happy (the client will still be making some profit).

What happens is a negotiation of pushing and pulling between the client and agency until a compromise is found – say 3,000 clicks. Exactly how close to the point of maximum client profit or the point of maximum agency profit is settled upon depends on the relative bargaining strengths of client and agency, access to cost and revenue information and countless external influences to name just a few factors at play.

What is clear though, is that whatever click volume is reached as a compromise, it will not be efficient. It is impossible to maximise the profit of both client and agency using a percentage of spend model. At every click volume, there will always be a way to increase agency or client profit by adjusting click volume.

With a percentage of spend model, there is no working together of client and agency, no common goal, no shared vision. It’s a constant pushing and pulling and conflict of interest. Time and effort is wastefully diverted into politics in an attempt to move click volume closer to one party’s optimum, not to mention the reluctance of each party to be open and transparent and share useful information with each other. Doesn’t sound like the foundations of a successful and lasting business relationship to me. Perhaps it’s why some agency churn rates are so high?

Of course, no PPC pricing model is perfect – every method will have its weaknesses. The key is to find one that works best for your goals and objectives as a business, and one which appropriately compensates the agency for their efforts in helping you develop your paid search marketing strategy. But in terms of aligning the agency’s monetary motivations with that of your business, and creating incentives encouraging them to maximise your profit from paid search, the percentage of spend model fails miserably.

My advice: use the percentage of spend model with caution.

Are you a fan of the percentage of spend model? Have you made it work for client and agency? Or does it create more problems than it’s worth? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Next: cost-per-sale performance models – rewarding agencies based on how they perform. Do they work? Are they efficient? Economics of PPC Pricing: Why Performance Deals Often Fail

 

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

But despite the reassuring nature of campaign budgets and the ease at which they can control your spending, they should not be used to control your spending. Instead, cost per click (CPC) bids should be your tool of choice for spend management.

More clicks, no extra spend

To understand why, suppose the daily budget for one of your campaigns is set to $100/day. Each click costs you $1.00 and your ads are showing in position 3.0. Your daily budget of $100 is being hit, so you receive 100 clicks/day.

Since your campaign is reaching its daily budget, your ads are not showing for all eligible searches. Depending on your campaign ad delivery settings, either your ads are not showing later in the day (accelerated delivery), or they are only showing intermittently (standard delivery). In either case, you are missing out on potential customers.

Now suppose you were to reduce your bids by 25%. Your average cost per click drops to $0.75 and your ads are now showing lower down in position 5.0. But since your ads are now appearing throughout the whole day for all eligible searches, you receive more clicks. Instead of 100 clicks, you now receive 120 clicks. Daily spend is now $90 (under your budget of $100).Ceteris paribus, reducing CPCs for campaigns which hit their daily budgets is likely to give you more clicks for no extra (or possibly less) spend. That’s more visitors, for no extra spend. Assuming that all clicks are of equal value to your business, and average position does not affect your conversion rate, these extra clicks are likely to mean more sales and a higher ROI.

More clicks, same CPCs

Alternatively, leaving CPCs constant and instead increasing your daily budget, will likely result in more clicks for the same average CPC. That’s more visitors, more potential customers, without paying a higher per-customer premium (CPC) for the privilege.The bottom line is this: campaigns which hit their daily budgets are inefficient.

For this reason, it is important to check on a regular basis that each of your campaigns are well within their daily budgets. If you notice any of your budgets are being reached, or ore close to being reached, alarm bells should start ringing.

Check your budgets

One simple way to keep on top of daily spending is to log in to Google AdWords, select ‘yesterday’ as the time period and compare the ‘cost’ and ‘daily budget’ columns for each of your campaigns. If any of your campaigns are hitting – or are close to or hitting – your daily budgets, either increase your budget (if extra spend is financially viable), or reduce your CPCs.

A more comprehensive approach, which looks at campaign costs a longer time period, gives you a better understanding of daily trends. By looking at a month’s worth of data (instead of just ‘yesterday’), you will be more informed and better equipped to make changes to your CPCs and budgets.

Download a campaign report

Log in to Google AdWords and create a new report. Select ‘campaign performance’ as the report type (since daily budgets are set at campaign level), select ‘daily’ as the unit of time and enter a date range such as ‘last 30 days’. In ‘add or remove columns’, ensure ‘daily budget’ is ticked. Leave all other options as default. Run the report, and export it to Excel.

Identify overspend

Once you have the report in front of you in Excel, create a new column to identify the percentage of budget spent by each of your campaigns each day, such as in the example below. Once you have done this, you will then be able to see how close each of your campaigns came to its daily budget.

Suppose you are a retailer of European holidays. You have two campaigns – one for Venice and one for Amsterdam. Both campaigns have a daily budget of $100.Looking at the % spent column, it is clear that the Venice campaign is regularly reaching its budget. Reducing CPCs for Venice keywords would likely result in more clicks for no extra (or possibly less) spend.

By all means continue to set daily budgets to protect against freak spikes in traffic which you cannot afford, but make sure CPCs – rather than budgets – are your primary tool for spend management.

Summary

When you notice any of your campaigns regularly hitting daily budgets, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Are you achieving less than satisfactory results from your current AdWords spending? If so, reduce your CPCs – you will likely see more clicks for no extra spend.
2. Are you achieving satisfactory or good results? Do you have extra funds available for AdWords? If so, increase your daily budgets – you will likely see more clicks for the same CPCs.

Either way, it’s a win-win. You will either get more clicks for the same budget, or more clicks for the same average CPC. Effective spend management is essential for a performing PPC campaign, so make regular budget checks a priority.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how efficient PPC budget management can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.