Are you excited about all this Christmas trade everyone’s been raving on about recently? Can you smell the scent of cash? Are you going to be PPC-ing your little heart out to get it? Are you like a little kid on Christmas day at the thought of a bumper festive season?
However, with till bells already starting to ring and many people running oodles of campaigns, it’s time for my festive warning….
Beware… The Christmas PPC Grinch is Out and About!
You see, during the heat of Christmas trade it’s very, very easy to get carried away and indulge in the upping of PPC bids based on good performance… and then forget completely to analyse how much festive bang you are getting for your PPC buck. When this happens, that sneaky little PPC grinch can nip in and nick a good whack of your profit on a campaign or campaigns. The result? Yep. The PPC Grinch has stolen your Christmas!
As an aside, this is just as true at any other time of year. However at Christmas that devious little Grinch weaves his wicked magic, throwing glittering dust into the eyes of bedroom affiliates up and down the country. They often don’t notice until later until they’ve chucked away a distressing wodge of cash that evil influences were operating in their PPC campaign.
Let Me Give You An Example From One Of My Festive PPC Campaigns…
I increased the bid level on one of my small campaigns that is experiencing a nice little lift by 1p, hoping to increase my positions and traffic considerably. This equates to a 20% increase in what I’m prepared to spend. I did this about 4 weeks ago with absolutely topping results so I could expect the same again, right?
After my changes, my campaign was still in profit and had increased a little. As it was only a few pounds a day I then forgot about it for a while and never saw it again until I happened to get a mail from the merchant and it reminded me to have a looksee. Here’s what I discovered the effect of my increase was: -
Old PPC Bid
Average impressions per day – 9,149
Average Clicks per day – 110
Average CTR -1.2%
Average CPC – 4p
Average Cost Per Day – £4.40
New PPC Bid
Average impressions per day – 9,653
Average Clicks per day – 140
Average CTR -1.46%
Average CPC – 5p
Average Cost Per Day – £7.00
**edit, I had to change the above figures after I umm… goofed them up! I was re-doing them after miscounting the average number of days in the second part when Duncan rushed into the office to tell me about a Kookaburra in the garden. So I lost my place and got them all back to front – sorry everyone!
Yes Thats Right Folks…
To achieve an additional 30 clicks per day (22%) I increased my PPC spend no less than 37% which was enough to stuff my campaign margins. Now, you might well say “that’s all very well Kirsty but any idiot would notice if they’d done something like that”. Which broadly speaking should be true. However I know of at least one idiot who has fallen into this trap during Christmasses past and she’s the lady sitting writing this cautionary tale.
Why? Because too often at Christmas you simply count up your daily take – there’s just way too many campaigns going on and too many distractions. It’s not until afterwards when you really analyse what went on and realise you goofed up!
So Take Heed Of My Cautionary Tale…
Analyse each and every change you make to your Adwords campaigns. Sometimes the increase you get from increasing your PPC spend isn’t really worth the extra outlay which means that mean and nasty old Christmas PPC Grinch can nick your hard earned cash and you won’t find out till his Christmas gold dust has cleared from your eyes.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Great post Kirsty
It really is a timely reminder to keep an eye on not only PPC advertising.
But any advertising costs.
I find it quite astounding.
The amount of business owners that throw money away on advertising.
Advertising that they never test and measure,therefore they have no logical way of knowing.
How effectively their marketing dollars are being spent.
These are usually smart business owners, that have been brainwashed by ineffective marketers.
That convince them that they “need to get their name out there”!!!
November 10th, 2009 at 11:17 am
134 x 5p = £6.70 ??? not £9.48 or am i reading something wrong ? i dont do PPC so may have it wrong
November 10th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Don’t quote me, but the figures from Kirsty were average daily figures, so before she may have had a lot of clicks for less than 4p, and this time a lot of clicks for more than 5p? I don’t know, I do agree that it doesn’t add up though!
November 10th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Mark – nah, you’re right I goofed up my figures after getting the average number of days wrong, starting to go back through the new PPC bid section, and then having Duncan come in and talk to me about a bloody bird in the garden. Have corrected now!
You’d think after all these years living with an affiliate marketer he’d have learned not to talk to me when the calculator keys are ringing, LOL.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
This also shows how easy it is to make simple maths errors. Something that I would imagine can really screw your campaigns up.
The annoying thing is when you find a mistake that has been staring you in the face for ages and you wonder how you could have missed that.
Makes you wonder sometimes, are you actually taking in what you are reading or just looking a words and numbers on a screen?
November 11th, 2009 at 12:04 am
It is so easy Stuart, I do it way too often. You get half way through working something out, the phone rings or someone asks you a question, you start back on the wrong number and that’s it – you’re operating on the wrong assumption and don’t find out till the next time you go through it!!
Another example I was going to give in the post was that on Sunday there was a huge traffic increase as people started shopping online for Christmas. I got 180 visitors for about twice the price I’d have gotten 140 visits at my old CPC level ( I wasn’t getting that many more impressions just an enhanced CTR). It got too complicated for me though so I left it out.
I was quite tired when I did the post too, so its at times like that you will make number mistakes!
November 11th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Kirsty,
Speaking of PPC, I’ve been reading on webmasterworld about affiliates being banned for life from Adwords for multiple landing page policy violations. You have mentioned previously that you have on occasions had the dreaded Google Slap applied to some of your PPC activity. Are you worried that you might get a permanent ban at some stage?
November 11th, 2009 at 5:47 am
Hey John, Its a long, long time since I had a landing page slap. About 2 years I think.
If you always try to address why Google is slapping your landing pages rather than “churning and burning” with disposable domains you will always be fine. I’ll put my hands up – I’ve done the churn and burn thing in the past, but only for as long as it took me to do my research and work out what my solution would be. I was deeply uncomfortable doing it because I felt it could ultimately end in exactly the situation you’ve just described!
So in short, no, I’m not worried about getting a ban. I always try to add bags of value to the user and make my landing pages compliant with Google’s desires (insofar as I am able to interpret them!).
The people you are talking about probably did the wrong thing one too many times – you even get a final warning before Google pulls the plug!
November 17th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
The Google Grinch seems to have a big downer on my price comparison landing pages this year (worked a treat last year) quality scores gone from 10/10 to 1-3/10 overnight