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I need advice...My PPC Banner Campaign is taking a CRAP

by Peter Helps
17 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone could help me out here. i have been trying to figure out what the problem is and I cannot seem to get it fixed. Here are the facts:

I am running a Banner Ads using Google Adwords
I have been running them for about 1 1/2- 2 months.
For the first month, I have been getting pretty good results, lots of Impressions resulting in Higher CTR and conversions). However, I noticed that my campaign had one flaw.

My target audience is in United States. My campaign was set for Worldwide reach. Even though I was getting pretty good results, lots of signups to my list, I noticed that most of the signups were out of country (not in US).

So I changed the targeting to just US, Canada.

After I made that one change, my impressions along with CTR and conversions were down dramatically. I am barely getting 1000 impressions a day now when before I was getting at 10,000 a day.

I tried the following:

Increase minimum CPC (right now, it's about 10 cents per click)
Increased budget per day

Nothing has worked so far. Remember, I didn't change the keywords, banners or anything else. The only change was the area targeting.

Before anyone says that I probably don't have as much audience here in states, I'll tell you this. This is a huge market, especially in US.

What do you think the problem is? Thank you! I will give you a thank you (click the thank you button) to everyone who leaves a good comment/solution.

Thanks again.

Peter
#advicemy #banner #campaign #crap #ppc #taking
  • Profile picture of the author Sipboy3000
    Hey Peter,

    I can tell you really quick that your bid is waay to low for US and Canada only traffic.

    $0.10 per click bids won't cut it.

    You probably need to raise your bids a considerable amount to see if you can get more impressions.

    Before doing that though, you need to lower your budget first so you won't get a runaway campaign and deplete your account too fast.

    If the first bid increase doesn't get you more impressions, you will need to continue raising it until you do.

    Then you will need to figure if you can be profitable based on the bid price that is getting you the impressions you are comfortable with.

    Tommie
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    • Profile picture of the author Aussie_Al
      Sometimes people develop "banner blindness" too

      I have a series of different banner ads for each niche I work in and rotate them on a regular basis
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      • Profile picture of the author Sipboy3000
        Originally Posted by Aussie_Al View Post

        Sometimes people develop "banner blindness" too

        I have a series of different banner ads for each niche I work in and rotate them on a regular basis
        This is indeed true and a very good strategy.

        However, Peter's problem is that he isn't getting any impressions of his banners for people to develop "banner blindness."

        He needs to get some impressions going again before even tackling that issue.

        Tommie
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      • Profile picture of the author dburk
        Hi Peter,

        I agree with Tommie, you probably need to increase you bids significantly because you likely have stiffer competition within the US market. However, I would advise that you increase your daily budget to avoid the throttling of your impressions. If you lower your daily budget you are likely to pay higher per click costs due to the throttling issue. Just monitor your results and adjust the bids until your average daily ad spend aligns with your desired daily budget. A managed campaign typically performs far better than a set-and-forget approach.

        Banner blindness may occur over time, I'm not convinced that is your problem. I would definitely run alternate ads on percentage of your placements. You need to be testing rather than guessing. You'll never know if that next banner design is the one that doubles conversions, unless you are always testing.
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        • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
          Thanks for the reply dburk.

          Quick question for you:

          What's a "throttling of impressions?" Can you elaborate on that for me?

          Peter

          Originally Posted by dburk View Post

          Hi Peter,

          I agree with Tommy, you probably need to increase you bids significantly because you likely have stiffer competition within the US market. However, I would advise that you increase your daily budget to avoid the throttling of your impressions. If you lower your daily budget you are likely to pay higher per click costs due to the throttling issue. Just monitor your results and adjust the bids until your average daily ad spend aligns with your desired daily budget. A managed campaign typically performs far better than a set-and-forget approach.

          Banner blindness may occur over time, I'm not convinced that is your problem. I would definitely run alternate ads on percentage of your placements. You need to be testing rather than guessing. You'll never know if that next banner design is the one that doubles conversions, unless you are always testing.
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    • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
      Here's the kicker Tommie,

      I just went into my account and this is what I have so far:

      Max CPA is $0.70
      Average CPC is only $0.04
      My CTR on the banners is 0.43%

      With that said, do you still think I need to raise the Max CPA? It doesn't make sense to me. What can I do to kick start that campaign again?

      Peter

      Originally Posted by Sipboy3000 View Post

      Hey Peter,

      I can tell you really quick that your bid is waay to low for US and Canada only traffic.

      $0.10 per click bids won't cut it.

      You probably need to raise your bids a considerable amount to see if you can get more impressions.

      Before doing that though, you need to lower your budget first so you won't get a runaway campaign and deplete your account too fast.

      If the first bid increase doesn't get you more impressions, you will need to continue raising it until you do.

      Then you will need to figure if you can be profitable based on the bid price that is getting you the impressions you are comfortable with.

      Tommie
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      • Profile picture of the author Sipboy3000
        Originally Posted by Peter Helps View Post

        Here's the kicker Tommie,

        I just went into my account and this is what I have so far:

        Max CPA is $0.70
        Average CPC is only $0.04
        My CTR on the banners is 0.43%

        With that said, do you still think I need to raise the Max CPA? It doesn't make sense to me. What can I do to kick start that campaign again?

        Peter
        Peter,

        dburk makes some excellent points in his analogy as well.

        I still say that you should carefully consider your budget until you can determine if your bid is going to satisfy your goals.

        Then you can scale your budget up and optimize your campaign by decreasing the bid over time as well as getting rid of sites and/or adgroups that do not perform well.

        Again, to get it jumpstarted you will need to continue to raise your bid until you get the impressions you are looking for.

        Tommie
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  • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
    So far, thank you guys. Those are good answers and I really appreciate them. I will go ahead and raise the bids. I'll double them and see what happens.

    I also understand the banner blindness factor. However, my banners have not gotten to a point where that would occur.

    Peter
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  • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
    Also, does anyone know if Google give priority over campaigns based on impressions, CTR, budgets when doing banner ads? If I'm not mistaken, they do that with regular adwords but I'm not sure if they do it here.

    Peter
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi Peter,

      Throttling your impressions is simply the suspension of ad delivery for a period of time. The closer your daily budget is to your maximum CPC the more throttling of impressions will occur, with the intent of preventing a budget overrun.

      When an ad impression is served to a page for display, that page could remain open for minutes or even hours before the user clicks the ad. Once a number of ads impressions are served the AdWords system will suspend impressions until a sufficient amount of time has passed to prevent your daily ad budget from being exceeded. Since the system attempts to spread your ad delivery up over a 24 hour period it will likely suspend impression delivery many times throughout the day.

      If you combine a high maximum CPC with a low daily budget you will force the system to limit your impressions to the most expensive clicks and miss lots of opportunities for lower cost clicks. As a rule you should never allow your daily budget to limit your ad delivery, since doing so would mean you are paying more for your clicks than you need to.

      I always set my maximum daily budget limit to at least 4 times my planned daily budget. This insures that I will get most low cost impressions available throughout the day. You know... those open ad positions created when my competitor's ad impressions are being throttled.
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      • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
        Thanks for your explanation. That was awesome. I never realized that.

        Just to clarify and make sure I understand this concept correctly. If I set my adwords to say $.50 CPC and a max daily budget of $10, then Adwords will calculate how many impressions they think they will allow me to show spread across the 24 hour period. Is that case, my campaign would need 20 clicks to reach my limit. Since the # of clicks is so low, the impressions in turn will be low as well because they don't want to "overdo it or bother with it."

        However, if I increased the daily budget to let's say $30, they we have a different story. Am I on a right track here?

        But then, if I increase to $30, won't they give me $30 worth of clicks for that day? Since I'm testing the conversions to sales at the beginning of this campaign, it's kind of hard to justify that. Or am I wrong here?

        In this case, before I switched the demographics to only US and was worldwide, I was getting lots of impressions thus resulting in lots of clicks. Are you saying that since US probably has higher CPC, I would not only need to increase the CPC but daily budget as well?

        Thank you,

        Peter

        Originally Posted by dburk View Post

        Hi Peter,

        Throttling your impressions is simply the suspension of ad delivery for a period of time. The closer your daily budget is to your maximum CPC the more throttling of impressions will occur, with the intent of preventing a budget overrun.

        When an ad impression is served to a page for display, that page could remain open for minutes or even hours before the user clicks the ad. Once a number of ads impressions are served the AdWords system will suspend impressions until a sufficient amount of time has passed to prevent your daily ad budget from being exceeded. Since the system attempts to spread your ad delivery up over a 24 hour period it will likely suspend impression delivery many times throughout the day.

        If you combine a high maximum CPC with a low daily budget you will force the system to limit your impressions to the most expensive clicks and miss lots of opportunities for lower cost clicks. As a rule you should never allow your daily budget to limit your ad delivery, since doing so would mean you are paying more for your clicks than you need to.

        I always set my maximum daily budget limit to at least 4 times my planned daily budget. This insures that I will get most low cost impressions available throughout the day. You know... those open ad positions created when my competitor's ad impressions are being throttled.
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        • Profile picture of the author dburk
          Hi Peter,

          There are only so many impressions available per day for any given keyword. If you allow your daily budget limit to throttle your impressions you are bidding higher than you need to to get the same number of clicks. You can limit your clicks by bidding lower, if you are bidding lower your average CPC will be lower and you can purchase more clicks with the same daily ad spend.

          As you lower your bids you eventually reach a point where you are buying every available click where the purchase price is below your maximum bid and staying within your budget.

          Conversely, if you throttle your impressions with your daily budget limit you will miss click opportunities that may be much lower than your average CPC during those periods where your ad is not being displayed. This drives your average CPC higher and uses your budget up with higher cost clicks. You end up with fewer clicks while paying a higher CPC. While you have the same daily ad spend you end up with fewer clicks.

          You see search queries do not always come in at a steady rate spread out evenly throughout the day. There will be occasional spikes in traffic that will cause many ad campaigns to suspend delivery of impressions for your competitors campaigns. This creates an opportunity to win the ad position for a much lower cost. Unless of course you are amoung the advertisers that have their impressions temporarily suspended. Don't throttle your ads with your daily budget limit and you won't miss these opportunities.

          Increase your daily budget way above your intended spend. If you bid lower you will have fewer impressions but still every impression that can be bought at or below your max CPC. If you want to limit your daily spend to $10 then adjust your bid lower until you are only able to spend $10 per day on average. Your number of clicks will be higher and your avrage CPC will be lower.
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  • Profile picture of the author timpears
    I am not understanding something. You said that you were getting good traffic, and getting conversions. So why do you care if they are not in the USA? If the traffic is converting, isn't that the goal of advertising?

    I would go back to your original settings and enjoy the conversions. But, maybe I am missing something.
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    Tim Pears

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    • Profile picture of the author Peter Gregory
      Originally Posted by timpears View Post

      I am not understanding something. You said that you were getting good traffic, and getting conversions. So why do you care if they are not in the USA? If the traffic is converting, isn't that the goal of advertising?

      I would go back to your original settings and enjoy the conversions. But, maybe I am missing something.
      Maybe you missed this part:

      Originally Posted by Peter Helps View Post

      My target audience is in United States. My campaign was set for Worldwide reach. Even though I was getting pretty good results, lots of signups to my list, I noticed that most of the signups were out of country (not in US).

      So I changed the targeting to just US, Canada.



      Peter
      Good luck Peter (nice name btw) and you should definitely increase bids and budget to test, but keep a close eye not to let it get away from you. after a few days you should start to settle in and see what type of bids/budegt will be required to be competitive.
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  • Profile picture of the author timpears
    @Peter G. Yes I did miss that post as I read a bunch of the posts and then skipped down to respond. I don't know what he is selling, so not sure why his target is US & Canada. If he is convertint, what is wrong with foreigners money?

    But, that is what I would do, may not be what is best for him. Sounds like he is set on US & Canada, so be it.
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    Tim Pears

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    • Profile picture of the author junkdna
      one way, that some gurus recommend, is to spend lot more money at a beginning of the campaign, find out what works, and than cut back and focus only on the good bits you found. Kind off, it makes sense.
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    • Profile picture of the author Peter Helps
      Without going into the specifics, I sell products and services to an audience that needs to use these products/services in United States. This is a B to B type of a product and service. This isn't a product like make money or loose weight, acne, etc that is universal to the world.

      I wish it was because I could just go back to the worldwide reach and get traffic for pennies on the dollar.

      I'm actually thinking about how and if I could make my product and service universal. Not sure if I can do it though.

      Thanks for commenting.

      Peter

      Originally Posted by timpears View Post

      @Peter G. Yes I did miss that post as I read a bunch of the posts and then skipped down to respond. I don't know what he is selling, so not sure why his target is US & Canada. If he is convertint, what is wrong with foreigners money?

      But, that is what I would do, may not be what is best for him. Sounds like he is set on US & Canada, so be it.
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