Surfside PPC Advertising Podcast - Episode #4 - How to Benchmark Properly in PPC Advertising

Key Takeaways

you are now listening to the Surfside pay-per-click advertising podcast alright what's up everybody welcome to another episode of the Surfside PPC advertising podcast today's gonna be our Thursday show so our Monday shows are gonna feature news from the previous week and our Thursday shows you me more of more related around things that you can learn around PPC lessons you know all sorts of things like that it's not going to be as news focus it's really going to be focused on kind of teaching different things about pay-per-click advertising about marketing in general it's not always just gonna be geared towards pay-per-click advertising it might be geared towards you know just digital marketing junk as a whole so to get started one of the first things I want to do is talk about one of the great products that I use it's called SEM rush if you're you know might be familiar with this tool already but I highly recommend giving SEM rush a try if you go to Surfside PPC comm slash SEM rush you can join for free and you can sign up and if if you don't like it you don't have to put your money in or anything right away so you could always give it a try before you pay anything I think the pricing is around $50 a month now but it it's an incredible competitive tool and I haven't been able to find anything quite like it you can look at your competitors organic and paid search strategies so just I'm going to take a look at if you go to surf side PPC comm slash SEM rush you can sign up there support the podcast and it's a great tool you I mean you might as well give it a try if you haven't already and there's a lot that you can use with it so let's get started with today's show so today's show is going to be focused on benchmarking so this is something when you're a new pay-per-click advertiser you might not be too aware what to aware of but um a lot of times we use benchmarking in a business sense so we talk about benchmarking ourselves first our competitors trying to find basically performance gaps whether it's a certain process sometimes you might benchmark your logistics and basically the whole thing is you're trying to improve that that's really all you're trying to do is improve so when we talk about benchmarking a lot of times it's benchmarking yourself first your top competitors and in pay-per-click it's a little bit more difficult to do that using the tool I just talked about SEM rush you can kind of get some more data that you want but you're never really gonna know you know the exact statistics within your competitors you know what they're doing in their AdWords campaigns you're never gonna know the exact you know their exact results so benchmarking your results versus their results it's kind of meaningless because you'll never really know it I mean if you have that insider information but you know that seems like something that's a little unethical so what we're gonna be talking about as far as benchmarking is benchmarking the results within your own account so I'm gonna use AdWords as an example today but really you can apply this to Facebook ads Twitter ads anything you really need to to go over you know what benchmarking is and what benchmarking isn't and how to do it so you know so first the importance of benchmarking it's really to improve there's no you know it's it's not something where it's like anything too much beyond that it's really you're just trying to improve you're trying to make a note saying okay here's what here were a results for the previous week here's basically the benchmark that we're setting right now and next week we'd like to improve it so for me as far as benchmarking I don't set specific goals my specific goal is just to improve so let me give an example so let's say we have campaign ABC and it's a search campaign it's targeting some of our most profitable keywords so campaign ABC right now is converting let's just say at twenty twenty-five dollars per conversion so twenty-five dollars per conversion and let's say we have a large sample set and that's kind of where we're at right now is twenty five dollars per conversion so how do actually benchmark is you start with with that exact number so you start with twenty-five dollars per conversion and you use it on a specific fake period of time so let's just say the last 30 days are 22 $5 per conversion and let's say we're in the month of February okay so we want to let February run through and then we want to do a new benchmark so this is on February 1st based on what happened in January and we'll just use 30 as a as an easier number but based on what happened in January our benchmark is $25 per conversion so that's basically where you start with your benchmark and you have your one statistic your one key performance indicator that you're looking at and it's $25 per conversion over the past 30 days so if that's the one benchmark we're looking at the next thing you need to do is come up with a list two three four five six things that you can improve on processes that you can improve on things within your campaigns you can improve on so let's talk about Google AdWords so 30 days $25 per conversion now you're looking into thin your account you're saying okay how can we improve and get this you know dollars per conversion down and let's say you're trying to spend the same exact budget let's just keep budgets out of it let's keep all that out of it your whole goal is to drive $25 per conversion within the same exact budget because if your budget goes up and down your it can change you know what your can what your conversion goals are because a higher budget you might say okay well we're spending more sort you know what we're paying per conversion might be a little bit more and when you're spending less you might say okay we're going to try to limit as much as possible and get that as low as possible so let's just say same budget everything like that what you need to do is look at every aspect of your campaign so that includes your text ads so do you have two ads per ad group AdWords recently switch to expanded text ads are you able to say are you able to pause certain ads and create new ones so basically what you're doing right now is your first step is you're gonna look at your text ads and this doesn't have to be your first step but just one of the steps is your first step is you're gonna look at your text ads and look at areas for improvement so go to your your top 5 ad groups let's say for example and it depends how big your budget and what you want to do is look at each individual ad within the ad groups and see if there's anything not performing well if something's converting at $30.00 per conversion the other one is converting at $20.00 per conversion then pause your $30.00 ad and create another ad that's similar to $20.00 per conversion but maybe with something with a slight improvement maybe do a better selling point maybe do a better headline so the first thing you want to do is improve your text ads use the data available to you from the previous 30 days and you can even go back further than that but use the data available to you from the previous 30 days and improve your text ads and by doing that you're going to start improving the processes that lead to twenty-five dollars per conversion and that's something you need to keep in mind keep improving those processes keep improving what's happening within your account so let's say you start with text ads so you optimize text ads so now mark that off your list so number two we're gonna to look at keywords so look at your top twenty keywords or even look at your keywords that have driven conversions and look at keywords that are spending a lot and having German conversions what can you learn from them what what is something you can take away from them but you have a keyword that's then since we're looking at twenty-five dollars per conversion if you have a keyword that's spent fifty bucks and hasn't converted yet you might want to pause it if you have let's say an exact match keyword that's not performing well but the modified broad match keyword is performing well then you have to take it a step deeper and you need to look within your actual search terms report to see what search terms are driving the results that you're looking for so those are some things that you can look at as far as keywords and ultimately the goal is again processes what can you do to your keywords to make sure that the processes that are happening all month are gonna improve if there's keywords that are converting like crazy maybe you have a keyword that's ten dollars per conversion that increased a bit increase your bids a little bit and and do that so after you optimize text ads you go into keywords you use your search terms report and basically one of the things I love to do and and this is gonna be geared towards AdWords a little bit but one of the things I love to do is go into the search terms report and find which individual search queries are driving the most conversions so if you can find a search query that is driving the most conversions you can use that exact match keyword and bid up on it and make sure that you're driving those optimal conversions as best as you possibly can so now you've improved text ads you've improved keywords you've optimized both of them so now what so the next thing you want to do is look at some of the different data when your ads are running gender data location data and see what you can take away from that I've had accounts that just simply didn't convert on the weekends there were business to business accounts and most of our conversions actually all of our conversions came Monday through Friday and even though the spend was limited on Saturday and Sunday we just never saw a conversion so it was one of those things where it was a quick and easy way to say okay let's just cut out Saturday and Sunday all together focus on Monday through Friday and then you put that budget that does convert back into the week so days of the week and hours of the day are two quick things you can look at you could look at gender you can look at locations and you can bid up and down on specific things so if California is converting but Nevada isn't you can bid up a little bit on California and the same with genders you can bid a little higher on men or female or you know male or female depending on what's converting so for number three take a look at your location data take a look at when your ads are running and take a look at your gender data because the more that you can use to your advantage the better everything's gonna end up being a long run so use those those different things to improve and again these are more processes that your campaigns going through and every auction they're gonna be able to say okay we want to bid a little bit higher on females this month because females converted better than males did last month so it's just a way to improve your current processes and that's really what we want to keep drilling down with benchmarking is improve your current processes so once you've improved all those things location gender age you can move on to the next thing and that's going to be devices so AdWords recently allowed you to switch to mobile desktop and tablet bidding we used to have desktop and tablet together but now you can bid separately on every device so look at your device data and see if you can take anything away from that and again you want to use data you can use data from the previous 30 days but depending on how much data you have you can go all time data you can go you know last 60 days 90 days and just look at some of the trends because things are constantly changing you might have one month where mobile devices perform oh and one month where they don't perform as well so depending on your budget you could always go back further than the 30 day period and ultimately what you're looking for is to keep improving and so right now we're at the $25 per conversion as we entered February and you've taken your account you've said okay let me improve these text ads let me improve these keywords let me add some negative keywords let me bid up on our top performing keywords let me look at location they'd let me look at gender data let me look at you know hours of the day days of the week let me look at when our ads are running and where we can find slight improvements again you're not looking to save the world with one thing you're not gonna say oh wow well females you know how I'll convert at $1 per conversion while men were converting in $100.00 per conversion it doesn't work like that it's basically you're looking at every process that's going on within your account to improve it so let's say you do all that and we're on devices now so you can bid up and down on devices see where you know maybe your mobile website is performing extremely well and you want to bid up on mobile devices so that's the next thing you want to look at devices after that look at ad extensions do you have every ad extension in place is there any ad extension that's not relevant can you add ad group extensions how can you become more granular and become more relevant for every search query is there you know a site link that you can add for a page that's performing well these are all the little questions that you need to be asking yourself constantly constantly constantly and things that you need to be analyzing and data you need to be looking at so you can benchmark and you can improve everything if if you just benchmark if you just say okay well we're at $25 per conversion you're all you're doing is basically writing down a statistic but when you start going through and saying okay we can improve here we can improve here we can improve there we can improve their it becomes a lot easier to manage everything in to optimize everything so so far we've gone through text ads keywords locations genders devices time of the day and day of the week so those are the ones we've gone through and now we're talking about ad extensions so all these different things that we're looking at if you're able to implement them within your own account you're able to improve these things it becomes much much easier to constantly improve and constantly you know get drive more conversions for the same exact budget um so after you look at ad extensions and improve their and this is something you want to be doing monthly you want to be looking at landing pages so one of the biggest mistakes I believe in pay-per-click advertising is like landing page development and landing page testing a lot of come I know I've been with companies that spend millions of dollars a year and run one landing page and it's terrible it's one of the easiest ways and it's not easy in terms of development and employment but it's one of the easiest ways to improve your cost per conversion for an entire year if you say okay you know what instead of just using this one landing page let's try landing page B and see if that helps us at all landing page B improves a little bit let's try landing page C against landing page B and it's just this constant optimization for your conversion rate you know on the landing page and it's something that a lot of companies just don't do it's just something to me it's laziness and that's just a huge part of something that you can improve so these are all kind of the little things that you can improve within Adwords I know I didn't touch on everything there's so much to touch on you can also look at your remarketing list audiences you can look at our using conversion optimizer all sorts of these things are using customer match lists and and improving them there's so many things to look at and improve and that's basically what the process of benchmarking is so what we did at the beginning of this of this podcast is we said okay we want to improve on our $25 per conversion that we had in January and let's I'm just pretending it's February first it's not February first today but we're in the mobile month so let's just say you know in February I want to get that $25.00 per conversion down what benchmarking is is saying you start with that $25.00 per conversion that's your benchmark and then what you're doing is looking at improving every single process that's in place so that you can improve that benchmark so the processes and an AdWords account include the ads the keywords the bids the bidding strategy the location the devices the genders landing pages you know remarketing audiences what conversions you're tracking how you're tracking them all these little things so there's all these little processes in place in your AdWords account and sometimes we get and I've had this too where you sit there and you're like well I think everything's improved up to where it needs to be improved and maybe I just don't have enough data to keep improving it and that's always wrong that's always the wrong mindset to have because if you're sitting there saying okay well my keywords and text ads are extremely optimized and I need more data before I can optimize them more there's always something else you can do you can look at your ad extensions do you have ad group extensions the answer is probably most likely no based on the accounts I have looked at if you have ad group extensions are they all relevant is there any real time extension you have an update yet call-out extensions are there call-out extensions that seem to have a lower click-through rate so there's all these little things that you're looking to improve the processes out so that you can improve your benchmark your benchmark of twenty-five dollars per conversion and ultimately you might have in February you might Stace you might stay still at twenty-five dollars per conversion after doing all these different improvements but then you do it again in March and maybe in March you get it down to twenty two dollars per conversion because of the stuff you did in early in February and the stuff you did it get in March so these are the types of things you need to do and it's it's such an important I want you to remember this podcast when you're sitting at your desk and looking at an account and you don't know what what you need to do because there's always something to do there's always something to improve and I think all you really need to do is sit down write down all these different processes that are involved in your AdWords account and improve them improve them over time continuously improve and AdWords accounts are always changing so when there's a new feature at it try to get it up as quick as possible when something comes out of beta try to get that up as quick as possible so whatever it is you're always trying to improve and that's kind of the whole point of this podcast is to talk about benchmarking the process is in place to improve your benchmark so keep that in mind there's always something to do within your AdWords account it's one of the things that frustrates me because I've had people contact me saying all I've been working on this you know for the last three months and I just can't improve it and what are you getting usually what happens is people aren't looking at the right things or they're just looking at keywords or they're just looking at text ads they don't care at all about landing pages or they have no control over it and if that's the case then you need to have a good solid form of communication with whoever is managing landing pages because it's really it's it's not going to be an excuse for you to improve and at the end of the day you're the company you're working for it's gonna come to you and say hey we need this improvement and why aren't we getting it so all these different things that go into it all these different inputs that create the output of the conversion you know what your cost per conversion is for that month need to be constantly improved and when you keep doing that then you'll start to see some of the results so that that's a podcast today thank you for joining us again I just want to go over sem rush one more time so if you go to Surfside PPC comm slash sem rush you can see a lot of the different competitive data for your competitors you can get some ideas as far as keywords both in organic search results and in for paid advertisements so surf side PPC comm slash SEM rush give it a try today and let me know what you think thanks for joining us stay in the podcast thanks so much for listening to the surf side pay-per-click advertising podcast we'll catch you next