What Are You Bidding On?
You have your keywords, you’re tracking conversions and you’re adjusting your bids accordingly… or are you?
Are any of your keywords on broad or phrase match? Are you simply adjusting your bids based on the performance of the keyword on which you’re bidding? Then you’re potentially throwing away a lot of money. Efficiency in PPC is all about analysing data, so if you’re only looking at surface level data, you’re missing the big picture.
Here’s what I mean: with broad and phrase match, several search queries are being matched against the term you’re bidding on. If your keyword is something like “shoes” and is being broad matched, just think of all the search engine queries that could potentitally contain the word shoes! It’s a rather severe example, but I’m trying to make a point.
Say you’re bidding on Keyword X, and Queries Y and Z and both being matched to it. You’ve spent $110, received 120 clicks and made 6 conversions worth $30 each. You’ve spent $110, made $180 and might feel pretty good about that. Let’s dig a little deeper and see what’s actually happening:
Keyword X
- Query Y: 100 clicks, $100 in spend, 1 conversion
- Query Z: 20 clicks, $10 in spend, 5 conversions
So while you’re bidding on Keyword X, it’s actually Query Z that’s making all the money while Query Y is losing it. You think you’re bidding on a single term, but in reality you are placing a bid based on the aggregate performance of all the queries being matched to it!
The solution of course is to gain this kind of insight into the actual search queries your keywords are getting and their performance. Then it’s simply a matter of adding those queries as exact match keywords so that you can bid them appropriately. In the above example, Query Y converts and is probably worth holding onto at a much lower bid. It will convert far less often, but will at least turn a profit.
So how do we go about gaining this insight? If you use Google’s conversion tracking, you can simply run a Search Query Performance report in the report center. This will show you some of the search queries triggering your ads along with some performance metrics like CTR and conversions.
If you’re running ads as an affiliate or are not using Google’s conversion tracking, you might want to look into a product like Xtreme Conversions. This program tracks each individual search query and matches a TID based on the query, engine, referring domain (great for “search partners”) and the bid keyword. You can then match the TIDs from your conversions and see which search query and bid keyword produced it.
This info should be plenty to take your keyword targeting to the next level and improve your PPC efficiency dramatically.
