Forums/Tips & Tricks

Using BringShare for Paid Search Insights

Suzy
posted this on October 14, 2011 09:44 am

Six steps to assessing a paid search campaign.

1.

Start with your CPA. Is it too high? If so, you’ll have your work cut out for you. If it’s not, you’re doing well. Either way, you’ll want to continue the assessment.

2.

Check your cost over the last week. Are you spending your entire budget? If not, you may need to figure out how to add more impressions by creating more keywords or adgroups.

3.

Check your CTR (clickthrough rate). It’s normal for it to be pretty low but if it’s not at least above .5%, put on your marketing hat and consider expanding your ad campaign by testing other key messages and value propositions to see what resonates with customers and improves performance.

4.

What is your AVG CPC (average cost per click)? You should know what your maximum cost per click should be before you are losing money. If it is too high, you need to “pause” expensive keywords/adgroups or lower your bids.

5.

Look at the Impressions and Click Trends by Day graphs. If your Impressions are going up but your Clicks are going down, it means your ads aren’t doing their job or your ads are showing on searches that aren’t right for your business.

6.

Look at your Conversion Trends graph. Your conversions should be holding steady or improving. If you see a declining trend start to develop, figure out what happened and correct it. You may have changed your website, added new keywords or other things that can impact your conversion rate.

Think of it this way: with BringShare’s dashboard data in hand, a paid search assessment is like watching the dashboard of your car. Low on gas? Fill the tank. Low on oil? Change it and replace the filter. It’s common sense, right?

You wouldn’t want to pay a high-priced mechanic to address simple, do-it-yourself maintenance procedures on your car, and you don’t need a high-priced consultant to help you understand how to maximize paid search…not when you have BringShare riding shotgun.

 

BringShare is Internet marketing software that makes it incredibly simple to track your marketing. We mash all your marketing together into concise, beautiful dashboards and present it in a way for you to get the most out of your data and time. Beyond that, our automated report builder lets you build a marketing report in seconds, rather than hours.