This is the 1st post in the SEM Advanced Series, a continuation of the SEM Intermediate Series and SEM Beginner Series. These posts are intended for search engine marketing professionals looking for guidance in monitoring and adjusting the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign.
For the first part of this series, let’s deep-dive into the Spend until Depleted budget setting – looking at the same questions we asked in the introduction post. As you know, Spend until Depleted is essentially running your ads around the clock until they hit your allotted budget amount. This can benefit each type of business goal as long as you’re employing some key optimization tactics.
Fitting Your Business Goals
Results Driven: If you’re able to optimize and are getting quality traffic, it's in your best interest to be live at all times. This setting allows the display of ads 100% of the time until budget is gone.
- Optimization Suggestions:
Branding: Spend until Depleted is the most logical setting for branding campaigns. When people are searching for your brand term, your CTR and conversion rates improve drastically. Making sure your ads are live for a high-converting brand campaign is critical.
- Optimization Suggestions:
- Make sure you have relevant misspellings of your brand in the campaign as well; you’d be surprised how often users enter misspellings in their search queries.
- Run a search query report to devise negative keywords to qualify the traffic you’re receiving.
Lead Generation: If you are generating leads (either as a business owner or a lead firm) it’s important to create a high volume of potential leads at optimal CPA goals. If you have campaigns outperforming your goals, using Spend until Depleted could be a way to enable more impression volume and more leads.
- Optimization Suggestions:
- Keep a careful eye on when your ads are most profitable – you can add additional targeting by geographic location or demographic to qualify and optimize for the leads you have coming in.
- Be sure that you’re running keyword performance reports and optimizing the keywords to your ROI goals. Look at match type expansions for highly profitable keywords.
In the next part of this series we’ll look at Divide Across Month and examine optimization techniques for that particular budget type and how to manage it in accordance with your particular business goals. Stay tuned!
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