PPC Case StudyPubcon 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

Spend

ROI

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 ManagementResults

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 NewKeywords

• 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

Competitive Analysis

Source: SEMRush

Competitive AnalysisSource: 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 EngePresidentStone Temple Consultingeenge@stonetemple.com@stonetemple