PPC Case Study
Pubcon 2010
About Me
• President Stone Temple Consulting
– 19 person SEO/PPC Services Firm
• Columnist:
• Author:
> $50K Per Month Spend?
Competitive Marketplace
Optimize Campaigns
> 10 Hours /Week?
If Not …
But All I Need is a Bid Management
Tool, Right?
Quick Case Study
Client Scope
• Local Service area business with a
national scale
– 5 to 10 service mile radius
– Many hundreds of locations
– High local search term volume
• Willing to aggressively invest in online lead
generation
Initial Situation
• Worked with a PPC agency (not us!)
– Approach was to implement their tool
– Report on it weekly
– Tweak dials and gauges are requested by client
• Typical metrics for a given month:
– $80K Spend, 80% ROI
2008 through 2010 Results
160%
140%
Spend
120%
100%
$350,000.00
80%
$300,000.00
60%
40%
$250,000.00
20%
$200,000.00
0%
$150,000.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
$100,000.00
ROI
$50,000.00
$1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
How did we get these results?
Client Selected Kenshoo
Kenshoo Provides
• Overall Campaign & Bid Management
– Set ROI goals
– Keyword by keyword bid management for those
with enough data
– Grouped keyword bid management for those that
do not
• Aka portfolio management
• Note: Marin does these things very well too!
too!
Typical Bid Management
Results
Summary of the Results
• Redline is the target ROI
• Each data point is the ROI for a keyword, or
group of keywords
• Actual average of these numbers 15% higher
than the target ROI
• Results are all over the map!
• This is normal
Human Input Required!
Key Areas
•
•
•
•
•
Negatives
Bid down or disable losers
Scale Winners
Discovering new keywords
Ad Optimization (summary of results from
when we did that)
• Competitive analysis
Negatives
• Every month:
– Review actual user queries
that resulted in PPC traffic
– Identify the higher volume ones that don’t make
sense
• Ex: you bid on “printers” and you got a query for “cheap
printers”, but you are the high priced product
– Don’t have resources to do this?
• Use Epiar
Dealing with Losers
• Every week:
– Find underperforming keywords
– Evaluate scope of the problem
– Pause them if it’s too big to fix
– Or, bid them down if you can
Scale Winners & Discover New
Keywords
• Every week:
– Identify winners
– Milk them for all they are worth!
– Look for related keywords that you
are not bidding on
• See if your competitors bid on them
• Add them to your mix
GKWP Report
Identifying Winners
Identifying Losers
Ad Optimization
• Ongoing Basis
– Test multiple ad copy variations
• Wait until you have
enough data, then:
- Pick the winners
- Prune the
losers
- Start Your
next test!
Ad Optimization Results
Ad Optimization Results
0.00030000
0.00025000
0.00020000
0.00015000
Series1
0.00010000
0.00005000
0.00000000
Round 1 Baseline
Round 1 Winner
Round 2 Winner
Round 3 Winner
Competitive Analysis
Source: SEMRush
Competitive Analysis
Source: SEMRush.com
Source: SEMRush
One More Thing …
Separate out Brand Terms
• Don’t let your competitor steal your
business!
• Simply outbid them
– You should have the quality score
advantage
• Don’t take the risk that they will be
bid down
Thank You!
Eric Enge
President
Stone Temple Consulting
eenge@stonetemple.com
@stonetemple