Every digital marketer knows that keywords are an integral part of getting traffic and conversions. What many fail to realize, however, is just how important it is to bid the optimal value for your keywords.
You don’t want to lose out on impressions that could lead to sales, nor do you want to throw money away by overbidding. Finding that balance is a big challenge!
Let’s see how to evaluate and optimize your bids so that you know when to raise bids on keywords. More to the point, you’ll discover how to identify the right keywords to increase your bids on.
Your keywords are an intrinsic aspect of the campaign and Ad Group life-cycle.
Starting out, marketers tend to focus more on impressions, before turning their attention to driving customer engagement and interactions with your ad. Finally, the emphasis is on maximizing conversions.
With this cycle in mind, you should align your bid management with the three phases.
Invest more in keywords that generate a good number of impressions and a good clickthrough rate (CTR). The goal is to maximize the number of impressions so that our ad has a healthy CTR.
Once you have your high-value keywords in place, you can focus on the keywords that are driving engagement and eliciting reactions from your target audience.
When you reach this point, you will still be focused on refining the first two phases; however, you shouldn’t invest as much in them. Instead, you should seek to have the most keywords in this phase, as they are leading to conversions.
This report from PPCexpo takes the life-cycle and campaign phases into consideration. It values each keyword and then calculates a score that correlates to each phase.
Therefore, each keyword will be evaluated by the following three metrics in the report:
The primary goal of this report is to provide deeper insights into your campaign keywords, allowing you to determine which ones are already generating revenue, and also see which keywords are close to generating revenue.
After all, driving revenue and profit is the ultimate goal of virtually every advertising campaign!
To help you identify which keywords deserve a bid increase, the report considers several key metrics related to each phase.
This is a key indicator of ad quality and reach. Having good reach lets you know your ad is being displayed to lots of people, while a good CTR is indicative of an engaging ad that is relevant to your audience. The report uses the following metrics here:
Search Exact Match Impression Share, Search Impression Share, Search Rank Lost Impression Share CTR, Keyword Competition, Search Rank Lost Impression Share, Average Position, Impressions, Average CPC, Keyword Match Type, Cost, Clicks
Gauging engagement helps you measure the quality of your traffic. You can use the following metrics to see which keywords are the most engaging:
Average Time On Site, Bounce Rate, Percent New Visitors, Average Page views, Impressions, Search Impression Share, Search Rank Lost Impression Share, Quality Score, Average CPC
This phase is of paramount importance in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The report uses the following metrics to identify bid increase candidates:
Conversions Rate, Cost Per Conversion, Impressions, Search Impression Share, Search Rank Lost Impression Share, Conversions, Clicks, Cost, Average CPC
With CTR in the picture, you can actively begin looking for keywords that are driving interactions.
Which keywords make customers click to visit your site? Which keywords cause them to interact with different pages or stay longer on your product pages?
These are the keywords that will earn a higher engagement score. In the beginning, there won’t be too many, and the vast majority of keywords will still be in the CTR phase.
As your campaign matures, the ratio will change, and more keywords will attain a high engagement score. The report uses the values from the CTR phase as a weighted value to calculate the engagement score.
Therefore, the highest-ranked keywords will have great values for engagement and traffic (CTR).
Once your campaign is generating conversions, you’ll know things are on track. However, the ultimate goal is to maximize those conversion rates, so don’t get lax just yet!
At this point, the report will give more weight to conversion scores. This will consider several other metrics, including:
It also takes engagement score and CTR score into account, as they are indicators of user engagement and traffic.
In this phase, your keywords will have good conversion rates, a higher engagement level, and greater traffic focus.
This report is good for new campaigns, as it encourages you to bid higher on those keywords that are generating impressions and have a good impression share.
After you have completed your bid settings, stay proactive by measuring the outcome. You can stay on top of your data analysis by scheduling reports from PPCexpo.
Here are three PPCexpo reports worth getting in your inbox.
You can use these insights to determine which keywords will soon have a better CTR score, as the impression metrics are an early indicator of things to come.
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