PPC Bidding Strategy
Relax knowing your Adwords budget is being wisely spent.
Need to find out how your PPC campaign may be wasting spend on automated bidding or a rubbish broad match keyword strategy? Find out what happens when the vast majority of keyword phrases that never convert to a sale are replaced and discover winning bidding strategies that bring more sales via your pay per click campaigns.
PPC Keyword Bidding Case Study – Pongwe Beach Hotel, Zanzibar
Pongwe Beach Hotel is the Island’s most popular getaway on Zanzibar (Paradise Island to you and me).
The Problem:
With a business model that relies on guests visiting all year round for a week or two of heaven, one of Pongwe Beach Hotel management team’s main priorities is to ensure their Pay Per Click campaign is generating the optimal number of bookings from their monthly Adwords budget as possible.
With little experience in paid search, no time to manage their paid search campaign in-house and having inherited a poorly structured Adwords account full of broad match keyword phrases powering dynamic ads using Google’s conversion based bidding, the main task was to quickly resolve the bidding structure, reduce wasted spend and cost per acquisition rates in order to increase conversions.
The Solution:
Having reviewed the hotel’s Adwords campaigns, ad groups and flakey bids on the set of broad match keyword phrases, I suggested a 5 day plan that I guaranteed would pay for itself over the following 3 months via saved wasted ad campaign spend. Armed also with permission to vastly reduce the monthly budget, I was able to focus on the keyword phrases we know are being searched for by people who are much closer to selecting and buying a holiday package.
Using basic PPC best practices in the first 2 days to cut the a large portion of wasted monthly spend was done by pausing all broad match keywords and adding a range of slightly higher bid phrase and exact match keywords. This ensured our search queries were much more closely targeted to our ads and landing pages.
Adding a selection modified broad match keywords phrases that included qualifier keywords such as 2014, book, bookings, best, top, luxury, exclusive, and others ensured we were getting the best qualified clicks. And our strategic use of negative keywords cut of “happy clickers” and ad spend on a sizable number of clicks from people who were in the very early stages of researching a future holiday.
As is often the case in Google Adwords, the structure of the campaign needed to be altered, so that we could more tightly target groups of related phrases and serve them ads that were more relevant to their search query. By creating a range of new campaigns and ad groups full of ad variations, our target search market’s click and conversion data was analysed and used to guide us towards ad wording that generated the most bookings and enquiries.
The work involved in a large restructure was substantial but we believed it would produce benefits that would be ongoing and ensured the following 3 days of ad optimisation and keyword bid optimisation would get maximum benefit from a more tightly targeted campaign.
- Removal of untargeted broad match keywords
- Bidding on best performing phrase and exact keywords
- Bidding strategy de-automated to save wasted spend
- Ad split testing and campaign restructuring
The Results:
- Shaved a huge 70% off monthly Adwords PPC spend
- Removed 50% of clicks – all non converting
- But dropping just 5% of conversions each month
- Halving the overall total cost per acquisition
- Campaign work covered its own costs in 3 months
The Conclusion
Satisfied that their judgment was right and their adwords campaign was wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere, Val and the Pongwe team where able to increase or decrease monthly budgets depending on the season safe in the knowledge that they will no longer be spending the majority of their PPC budget on wasted clicks.
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