Some bid and position management features vary among PPC services. Learn the answers to the following questions about yours: Adjusting bid prices How do you change bid prices for individual keywords? What about for groups of keywords? Can you set parameters so that your bid automatically increases or decreases based on what your competition is bidding?

Budget caps Can you set daily or monthly budget caps? Can you set limits so that certain bidding or cost parameters are not exceeded?

Controlling position What kind of control do you have over your listing position? As you’ll recall, bid prices are not the only factors at play in determining the position of your PPC listings.

Tracking and Reporting Options

You will probably be pleased with the detail and flexibility of reports you can generate with whichever paid search engine you choose. Your role in paid search reporting will be less about compiling data and more about finessing the report parameters to get at the information you really want. Here are some things to look for: How recent is the data that is included in reports? Is conversion tracking an option? Is there at-a-glance information in your campaign management interface so you won’t have to run a report to see how your paid search day is going?

Once your campaign is in full swing, at a minimum, you’ll want to do a regular review of the following information:

• Top-performing terms

• Total campaign cost

• Average cost per click

• Total click-throughs

• Click-through rate

• Conversion rate

• Cost per conversion

Be sure you know how to find this information from your PPC service’s reporting screen.

Account Services

Some PPC services will help you get up and running by offering setup assistance services for a fee. We generally don’t recommend paying for such services, and anyway, you won’t need them if you follow the procedures in this week’s tasks. However, if you are destined to be a big spender with a PPC service (on the order of $10,000 or more per month), you may be able to get the free services of an account rep who can smooth over some of the bumps in the process.

Your PPC service may ask you to input your keywords and bids, and a starter ad, before you can complete the sign-up process. You can just enter your company name as a keyword for now.

Paid search engines have their own tools to help you figure out which terms you want to add to your campaign and how much you want to spend on each. Today we’d like you to keep your campaign turned off while you use your paid search interface to select your keywords.

Choosing Keywords to Sponsor

Since you’re starting small, you could easily sponsor just your top-priority keywords. But it won’t hurt to include additional keywords you’re interested in testing. Review your long list of keywords. Were there any terms that caused a lot of debate but didn’t make the cut? Were there two terms that seemed equally promising? Results of this test campaign will be a great tiebreaker. How many keywords should you have in your PPC campaign? That depends on two things: your budget, and your desire to stay within the hour-a-day time frame. But we’ll throw you a bone with this vague suggestion: somewhere between 10 and 50. For the purposes of this PPC trial period, it’s best to keep your campaign smaller so that you can give proper attention to the details.

Assigning Landing Page URLs

Just as with organic keywords, your home page is not necessarily the best landing page for searchers arriving via your paid ads. You’ve done a lot of work segmenting your target audience, so make sure that your paid search campaign helps you continue this strategy. Match your keywords to the most appropriate landing pages.

Creating Ad Groups

An ad group is a subset of sponsored keywords that all trigger the same ad or ads. Think of ad groups as a simple categorization scheme for your paid search campaign. Since you’ve got an hour a day to work on campaign creation and maintenance, it would be reasonable to have from three to five ad groups. (Ad group names are not displayed to searchers. They are for administrative use only.) Even though more ad groups require more management and more ads, it’s probably better to err on the side of too many categories than too few. Here are possible ways to group your keywords:

By landing page For example, an animal feed distributor may want to create an ad group for its Pet Care Tips page for terms like “overweight dogs” and another ad group for its Horse Care Tips page for terms like “preventing colic in horses.”

By target audience For example, our animal feed distributor might create a category called Pet Products for terms like “dog food” and “cat food” and another category called Livestock Products for terms like “bovine feed supplement” and “equine grain mix.”

By concept You can categorize based on the needs your product or service fills or the concerns behind the searches. For example, our animal feed distributor might create a category called Low Cost for terms like “cheap dog food” or a category called Pampering for terms like “dog treats” or “dog rewards.”

Bidding for Position

If you can swing the bid price, try to land your ads in the top three. (Some studies show that these are the most effective positions.) This way, you’ll improve your chance for click-throughs, and you’ll be able to judge the performance of your paid search campaign in a more straightforward way. Naturally, some keywords on your list will be more expensive than others. If it would take too big a bite out of your budget to bid into the top three positions for every one of your keywords, mix it up a little. Bid high on just one or two. You can always change it in a couple of weeks if you don’t like the results. You can also consider adding modifiers to your keywords to see if a longer-tail approach is more feasible for your budget.

Estimating Click-Throughs

Predicting paid search click-throughs especially when you’re starting a campaign from scratch is an inexact science. You can use the estimation tool that your paid search service offers, but don’t trust it for more than a very rough ballpark figure. If your boss is breathing down your neck for a specific click-through rate estimate, we’d suggest that you just say no. You can’t foretell how successful your campaign will be, but you can set up your campaign so that there will be few risks: Start with a low budget and bid price, and focus on fewer keywords. You can gradually increase these parameters until you’re comfortable with the results.

How Pandora Partners, Inc., Miscalculated Cost per Click for Six Months!

We once worked for a client (the name and some identifying details have been changed to prevent embarrassment) who was very enthusiastic about pay-per-click (PPC) because his campaign provided valuable conversions in a very competitive market.We came on board several months after his PPC campaign was in full swing, and we were pleased to see that this client had made his own spreadsheet to track important trends over time.

After a few days on the job, we made an astonishing discovery: Due to an unfortunate spreadsheet error (we’re going to be charitable here and call it a typo), this company was working on the assumption that they were paying an average of $3.80 per click as opposed to the actual value of $0.26! Can you imagine how that affected their advertising budget, not to mention their opinion of the value of their PPC campaign? Can you imagine the smoke that rose up from our speedy phone-dialing fingers when we realized what they had been doing wrong?

Even if you’re like one of us (hint: not the one of us with a degree in engineering) and gave up math class at an embarrassingly early age, you need to know this simple equation:

Cost per click = (cost) ÷ (# of clicks)

As we’ve mentioned, any PPC engine provides this kind of data for you. But if you ever decide to create your own reports, you can save yourself a big headache if you take some time at the start to double-check your own formulas against your PPC engine’s prefab reports.