Is Your PPC Campaign Economical?

There are a lot of variables to keep track of when running an ecommerce site. Driving quality, targeted traffic to your site is of the upmost importance. You can have the absolute best site in the world, but you won’t get any business from it if you don’t have interested buyers.

Pay Per Click search traffic is one of the best traffic sources that you can use. Adwords and the Bing AdCenter are probably the best traffic sources, but there are others worth looking into, such as 7Search or Bidvertiser. Before you choose a traffic source, you need to make sure that it is economical and always look for ways to lower your CPC.

Does PPC Offer a Good ROI?

While the traffic from search is among the highest quality, it also tends to be much more expensive than other traffic sources such as PPV or media buys. You need to carefully monitor your costs to make sure that you are generating leads and sales cost-effectively.

You should generally aim for an ROI of at least 20% off of your PPC traffic. This is a good buffer in case keyword bids rise in the future. If the traffic costs too much, there are a few things that you can do.

Lower Bids

Lowering your bids is the easiest way to reduce your costs. However, it should also be the last resort. Lowering your bids usually means that you will receive less volume.

Improve Your Quality Score

Bing and Adwords both use quality scores to determine ad rankings and CPC. You can lower your cost significantly by improving your quality score. There are several ways that you can go about this:

• Increasing the CTR of your ads
• Using dynamic keyword insertion in your ads and landing pages
• Improve the landing page experience by making it more concise, increasing load times and improving relevancy
• Create separate ad groups for different keywords

The quality score is a very important factor in PPC advertising costs. Try to improve it if it is under 8/10 for any of your primary keywords. Wordstream has some more great tips from PPC experts like Andrew Goodman if you want more details.

Improve the Conversion of Your Landing Page

You need to make sure that the design of your landing page means that your site will convert well. You may want to look into using an ecommerce platform such as 1stshoppingcart to create your sales pages. Make sure that the design matches your brand message and your landing pages are tailored to your audiences.

Look Into Different PPC Traffic Sources

Adwords is the default traffic source that most ecommerce companies turn to. While the volume and quality tend to be the highest, the bids are also much higher. You may be able to get a better ROI on Bing, 7Search or Bidvertiser. You will never know unless you test them. Make sure that you understand the platforms properly first, so you aren’t stuck overbidding for traffic.