Refining Campaigns

Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for even the best Internet marketers. As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are under performing. and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertiser's keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are either under performing. or not making sales at all. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.

There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?

There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.

When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.

How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns

Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.

Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.

If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.

For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!

Deleting Keywords

There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!

Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.

One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.

We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.

Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.

Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.