EPC less than CPC

Hi domain2day,

Don't manage them just from the campaign level!

The best thing about AdWords advertising is that you can micromanage your campaigns down to the individual keyword/ad/landing page combination. While some keywords may perform poorly, it is often the ad or landing page that is the culprit. With the approach you summarized in your post you will likely throw out campaigns that could easily be profitable if you simply manage them at a more granular level.

First let me say that running an ad for just a few days will probably not get you enough data to be actionable, unless it is a very high volume keyword. Since you have only spent $12 it is likely you don't have enough data to make any kind of decision yet.

Go through each campaign, including the successful ones, and look at each keyword Quality Score. Focus first on the keywords that are generating the highest cost to your campaign and work your way down in order of cost. Immediately pause any keyword with a poor quality score. Those are likely costing you too much and should be improved before you enable them to run again. Examine each of these poor quality keywords to determine why they have earned a poor quality score, fix the cause and re-enable the ones that you have improved.

Next go through your ads and look for any that have a very low CTR. Pause those ads that have low CTRs and write new improved ads to take their place. Ideally you should have setup multiple ads for each ad group and have included very tightly focused keywords for each ad group.

Once you have your keywords and ads generating significant clicks you will begin to gather data on your landing page conversion rates. Your landing pages are an integral part of any PPC AdWords campaign and need to convert at a high enough rate for your campaigns to have any chance of success.

Make sure that you have followed best practices for high converting landing pages and perform continuous testing and optimization experiments to adapt and improve your landing pages. The higher your conversion rate is the more money you can make.

Last, but not least, focus on keyword bid management for each individual keyword. Any well targeted keyword should be profitable if you bid at the right price, assuming you have good ads and good landing pages. When they are not performing well it is generally because following reasons:

• Selecting keywords that are not highly targeted keywords.
• Poorly written ads that are too general and/or lack relevance, benefits, or call-to-actions.
• Landing pages that fail to following best practices for high conversion rates.

With proper bid management you can exploit any opportunity for profit if you have properly addressed the above issues.

There are other factors that can severely limit you chances of success including:

• Low demand for your chosen products or services.
• Products or services with too little profit margin.
• Over-saturated competition for your chosen offering.

With proper bid management, well written ads and effective landing pages you can avoid losing money and turn any viable offer into a profitable campaign.