(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/positions-vs-impression-share.jpg alt: positions vs impression share)
When I was about 12 I was in a race with some of my friends. I had been practising for months granted it was on Mario Cart but hey practice is practice. I think the distance was about 800 metres. When the whistle blew I shot off, I was so pleased with myself I took the lead. This lasted all of about a minute, I was spent. My friends soon passed me and I was left out of breath and I could hardly walk, never mind run. It may be of no surprise I came dead last. That final lap was painful as everyone had finished and I was slowly making my way round. There was one benefit to this, I had the time to reflect on what I was doing wrong. The answer, of course, was that I spent all my energy trying to get in first place and I never left enough to finish the race in a good place.
Years later, I found myself in a similar situation, though this time my practising had involved a little bit more running. The only problem was this time the competition was actually digital. Like all PPC account managers, I had identified which of my keywords historically performed the strongest, and I was bidding aggressively to ensure we remained in the top positions in order to maintain performance. Unfortunately, over the previous few months we had seen rising CPCs which had put a lot of pressure on our already stretched budget. In essence trying to maintain top positions for these converting keywords meant my budgets depleted early on in the race, this led to fewer conversions because of lower traffic levels.
Of course for this we could look at day parting, improving quality score, bid shaving, geo targeting, etc. all of which would improve things to a degree. Unfortunately due to the rising costs this would still not improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the accounts to the extent that we could get performance back to earlier levels within the budget constraints we had.
Accepting that, following our existing strategy would only result in diminishing returns. We needed to change our approach. As dropping traffic was the problem, this gave us an area to focus on. We had been doing frequent SQR’s (search query report analysis) so we knew the traffic we were driving was relevant and of a good quality. Looking at the other metrics we saw impression share was low due to budget. As a result of this we decided to change our strategy from aggressively bidding on performing keywords to increasing our coverage by improving impression share (the maximum number of searches we would appear on). We did this by freeing up budget through decreasing our max CPCs, this in essence means we would be paying less for our clicks as we were in a lower position (our Quality Scores were already high). This was a risk as there was no guarantee that we would get clicks in a lower position.
This was the result of our change in strategy:
(image: https://www.superdream.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/conversions.png alt: conversions)
We saw a significant rise in conversions as traffic levels increased. Whilst we didn’t get as many clicks on the mainstream keywords, we actually saw an increase in conversion rate as we were driving more clicks for long-tail keywords. This approach actually resulted in more conversions than what we were originally generating.
I think the natural question that arises is, is this approach right for every campaign? The short answer is simple, no & the long answer is just as short, no. This strategy will work when:
– The product or service you offer is not too niche
– You have a strong known brand
– You know which search terms are driving your negatives
– Your ads have been tested and have proven Click Through Rates
– There is a significant amount of traffic available
If I had been in the shape I needed to be and had the necessary energy those years ago taking first position early on would have been highly beneficial as I believe it would have taken less to maintain that first position than trying to fight to the top the entire way (I think there is also a lesson for PPC strategy in that too). But as I wasn’t, actually scaling back and maintaining a steady pace for longer would have worked better, as I found out with my PPC competition.