How To Create Successful Campaigns: From Bids To Daily Budgets
Today, I thought some brief thoughts on bidding, budgets, and negatives would be a good idea.
New Campaign Bid Strategies:
Some affiliates go pretty aggressive with their max CPC when launching a new campaign to garner enough traffic to identify some sweet spots in their keywords that are worth going deeper on. This is good, but it really depends on your tolerance for losing money. If you’ve got more time than money to invest, you may want to start with a uniform mid-level CPC across all adgroups to start everything out on an even playing field. Starting with variable bids for different new adgroups isn’t going to make finding sweet spots very easy. Whatever you choose to do, DO NOT rely on the Google Traffic Estimator when setting bids for your new campaign. That tool pulls numbers from seemingly nowhere and is rarely ever accurate enough to trust.
What is a “uniform mid-level max CPC”? Well, if your new campaign is in a broader niche (is that an oxymoron?:), then you may well have an idea what the CPC range is likely to be. For instance, if in your other campaigns in that broad niche you typically see it range from .25 for lower performing keywords to 1.00 for great keywords, then going in t .40 across the board is likely a safe bet.
Daily Budgets:
I’m not entirely sure if this was ever the case in practice, but a year or two ago, many affiliates felt that if they set their max daily budget to Google’s maximum allowable amount or $250,000, they would get more traffic on a new campaign out of the gate. This may have been the case previously, but I’m not aware of that being the case now. It’s also dangerous these days with all of Google’s new content and search partners and their potentially junk traffic.
The potential for missing a ‘minefield’ negative keyword is pretty high with a big new campaign, so the safest way to protect yourself from bringing in 10,000 clicks on an irrelevant match is to limit your initial daily budget on a new campaign. Many affiliates start at $250/day or $500/day; enough to get some traffic moving, but not enough to wake up to a nightmare the next day. Of course, as you grow the campaign you can extend this incrementally.
Negatives:
This is so key for a new campaign. I recommend that if there’s any doubt at all in your mind about the potential irrelevance of a term in any of your phrases or keywords, you cut it initially or add it as a negative. You may miss out on potential traffic there, but it’s much better to phase in riskier terms later as the campaigns matures than right out of the gate as you’re trying to get profitable.
Once you’ve got some traffic coming in, carefully watch your search query reports and flag and add any potential negatives that you notice asap.
Have some tips for starting new campaigns? Share them with a comment!
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As a Newbie, I am usually searching on-line for articles which can support me. Thank you