I wanted to quickly add a note today that getting a 1% CTR on the Google content network is very easy. I did not realize that when I added 5 ad copies per adgroup would have the affect of bumping up the clicks on each adgroup. This is because each ad copy  fitted one of the adgroup themes better. So all my adgroups received really good CTRs. My conclusion is that the more ad copies you insert into a campaign, the better chances you have of keeping a higher CTR.

And if you are running several ad copies within the same campaign because you have multiple landing pages, all your landing pages will benefit from this. Remember that each ad copy can point to your specific lander. So you don’t need to send all your users to the same lander. The URL is set in the ad copy, not the adgroup/keyword.

For me, keyword research was the most time consuming part of setting up a new campaign. If you can think of 10 offers to run off the same Adwords campaign, boy you’re cooking. Think of how many variety of offers you can run based on the same keyword set. All of them can be shoved into the same campaign.

In the past when I had over 50 adgroups in my campaign, I found that I was deleting over 50% of my adgroups within a few days. The reason is it was attracting either the wrong traffic or was not getting any traffic. Now instead of wasting those adgroups, you can give it one last chance by sending it to a different offer in the same adgroup theme.

The one downside of this technique is that your clicks are going to be really high … so expect to spend a bit more in your campaign proportional to the number of offers your are promoting.

I am just throwing out ideas here. I got a new book called “How To Get Ideas” and in the book it teaches me how to think like a 6 year-old. Now I got all these novel ideas to share.

In this post, I will show you how to keep your campaign CTR high and keep your campaign costs to a minimum. The techniques I am showing today is based on hard-and-fast rules. Just like good stock market investors, rules give you consistent outcome and keep the emotion side of the game out of the picture. This is really important because it is easy to get too “attached” to your campaign and let your emotions cloud your judgment and decisions.

Setup Your Baseline

Use these values as a starting point for all your campaigns.

1. Ensure you have 1000-2000 broad keywords. It is important to have a large set of broad keywords as you literally are throwing shit against the wall to see which keywords stick. Because Adwords allows 2000 adgroups per campaign, I would place each keyword into its own adgroup.
2. Set your starting bid at $0.18-0.20 (USD). This is the magic number that is enough to get some impressions flowing. If you cannot get impressions, then your market is either too competitive or there is no interest in your keywords (i.e. your niche is not popular).
3. Set your daily budget to $15. This will allow your campaign to stop at $15 for you to inspect your campaign’s success. If by $15, you still have not generated revenue in your campaign, then it is time to abandon the campaign entirely. You can increase this budget as you feel more confident about the campaign.

Monitor Your Campaign

If you thought getting your campaign live on the network was all the hard work, you haven’t seen anything yet. When you first launch your campaign, you need to carefully monitor and babysit your campaign. The goal is to optimize your CTR and lower your bid costs.

1. Start lowering bids after 1000 impressions. Once you know that your campaign can generate traffic, it is time to make your first bid change. Lower your bids by $0.01-0.02 each time and do not exceed more than 3 bid changes per day. Stop lowering bids once you’ve reached around $0.06-0.10.
2. Optimize your CTR by pruning. The purpose of pruning is to discard keywords that are bringing down your overall CTR for the campaign. I believe that Google looks at the overall CTR for “all time”. So you best babysit your campaign at the start to not let your CTR run too low. My advice is to check your campaign and prune every hour using the following rules:
   1. Delete adgroups lower than 0.15% CTR.
   2. Delete adgroups with 500 impressions and 0 clicks.

Note: You campaign should be able to reach 100,000 impressions per day easily. If you are having trouble, it is possible that your niche is too narrow or specialized. Once you start pruning your adgroups, your impressions should drop below 10,000 but your CTR should stay in the 1-5% range. To put this into perspective, this gives you 100-500 clicks to your poll page. That’s pretty reasonable.

Take-Away Points

To lower your bids on Adwords, you need to ensure that your CTR is very high (i.e. >1%). In order to achieve this, you need to prune and drop poor performing adgroups. If you wait too long to do this, you have doomed your campaign by letting the impressions run away with low CTRs. Therefore, do not launch your campaigns and go to bed. Sit there and monitor your campaign every hour to stay ahead of the CTR race.

Ah, the question about max bid is always asked by beginners starting PPC. In most cases, setting a value and forgetting doesn’t work because you are not maximizing your CPC. It is also important to have good tracking on your campaigns so that you know where to tweak and optimize your bids.

So let’s get started.
Is it better to bid a maximum of $0.10 at the start, or is it better to bid higher (e.g. $0.30) and then gradually lower it over time?

Starting Low
If the keywords you are bidding on are very competitive, then starting at $0.10 will get you nowhere. Now what if you slowly bump up by $0.05 increments until you get impressions? I have heard of people trying this technique and still never getting impressions. You may have ruined your campaign forever.

Starting High
The alternative is to start high (e.g. $0.30) to lock in your traffic, and then gradually lower your bids to a sustainable level. Yes, it is very difficult to make money bidding over $0.20 on a typical e-mail or ZIP submit campaign, but if you know that you are getting good conversion rates, then you can rest assured that lowering your CPC will eventually keep you afloat. In this stage, you will lose some money to research what adgroups are getting traffic and are converting. If you are not getting decent traffic from certain adgroups, you can prune them to improve your CTR with Google. This is a small sacrifice to learn what works and what doesn’t.

The general rule of thumb for me is to bid $0.25 right off the bat. If impressions and conversions are decent, gradually reduce by $0.02 per day. At around $0.15-$0.19, you should slowly lower it by $0.01 per day until you hit your maximum ROI. Don’t expect all adgroups to give you the same ROI. Certain adgroups can only go as low as $0.14 and earn you 25% ROI. While other adgroups can go lower to $0.10 and give you 100% ROI.

The general theme on bidding is to divide and conquer until you have found a happy medium.

Caveat
Aha, there’s always the damn fucking caveat at the footer of all documents.

1. If you have a good history with Google, you can actually start your bids off right where you want it to. Initially, you may have to start at $0.25, but with good standing with Google, you can start at a lower bid price.
2. Even bidding $0.50, if you have a new Adwords account, it may take 5-7 business days to get impressions. So please be patient and don’t setup 30 campaigns in frustration. When it kicks in, you’re going to lost a lot of money quick.