Monthly Archives: December 2021

Should You Increase Your CPC Bids to Google’s Recommendations?

SPICY NUGGET

If that’s your ‘Hail Mary’ move to get more leads, it will generally give disastrous results and you’ll have to revert the change.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

We receive many questions from our PPC clients and from prospects asking us to help them understand their pay-per-click campaigns better.  Here is one of them: “This campaign has the best ROI but many of the keywords are below first page bid. Shouldn’t we increase the CPC bids to match Google’s recommendations?”

So, obviously, the client is looking at Google’s recommendations (Spoiler alert: they want you to spend more) and suddenly has doubts as to the CPC bid level.

As it turns out in this particular case, the bid recommendations weren’t even that high. But in some industries, Google recommends bidding $40-$75 per click. Big G’s recommendations for attorneys and insurers reach into the hundreds of dollars… per click!

In all of our campaigns, we set our cost-per-click bids based on a number of factors, including cost/lead and ROI. If we increase bids and get worse or equal results, we lower them again.

When the overall ROI of a campaign is good, increasing CPC bids will almost always decrease ROI.

Let’s do some basic math:

Say a campaign has a 3.0x ROI, and we increase the bid from $4 to $12 (i.e. 300% increase) to follow Google’s recs. We may get more leads and even more sales. But unless the conversion rate increases, the ROI would drop from 3.0x to 1.0x because it’s not a linear increase in clicks, leads and sales.

In order to maintain a 3.0x ROI while increasing our bids by 300%, we would also have to get a 300% increase in conversion rates. This could very well prove to be impossible, especially if conversion rates are already really high.

Typically, increasing the CPC bid actually results in a decrease in the conversion rate, twice impacting your cost-per-lead.

• • If the cost/conversion of the keyword is much lower than the rest of the campaign, I increase the CPCs proportionately — up to $0.25-$0.50 above Google’s bid recommendation.

• • If the cost/conversion of a specific keyword is considerably higher than average, I lower the bid.

I compare the cost/conversion of the keyword to the average for that specific campaign: if a campaign generates a good ROI, I will tolerate a higher-than-average cost/conversion compared to the rest of the account.

Final comments

Keywords do very often show up on the first page, getting impressions and clicks, despite Google warning you “below first page bid”. “Impressions” and “impression share” metrics are your indicators for that.

What’s the Biggest Question our Clients Have When Launching a Google Ads Campaign?

SPICY NUGGET

The focus of your concerns as far as digital advertising must depend on the stage of growth your business is at.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

In this video, Adam is being interviewed by Howard Wolpoff, of DailyAdFriend.com, a digital marketing information platform focusing on interviewing pro marketers to share tips and information with business owners.

The interview focuses on the genesis of Eden Ads, and the most major question our clients have in mind when they prepare to launch a product or service offer on Google Ads.

The video starts with a short introduction of how Eden Ads was formed, and the professional experience of our CEO, Adam Sene, in the world of digital advertising.

TRANSCRIPT:

“Howard Wolpoff: Welcome back to Marketing Champions here on Daily Ad Brief. I’m Howard Wolpoff, your host. Again, we’re talking about marketing around the country with great marketers, and today we are in Clearwater, Florida. We’re talking to Adam Sene at Eden Ads. Adam, welcome to our conversation today.

Adam Sene: Thank you. Thank you for rolling me.

Howard Wolpoff: Well, we want to learn more about you and you obviously have been involved in marketing for a while. Why don’t you tell us how you got started?

Adam Sene: I’ve been in marketing for about 11 years. Prior to that, I actually was touring the country in a band and it was a rough time. It was in the middle of the recession and when things didn’t work out there, I took on a job for a company that was doing direct mail. They had an agency that was doing their online ads, and I saw an opportunity. If I learn this, I could probably take it over, and that’s where it sort of began. I’ve been doing then, ads for 11 years since. For much of that time, I did it as a freelancer for many different verticals, whether it was health, ecommerce, health products, supplements, etc, lead generation for B2B, and just ran the full gamut.

And then started this agency, Eden Ads, officially January 2020 last year. Some of our clients carried over from prior to that, but officially the start date was January 10, 2020, which I have to say it was not a great time to start a business because a few months later is when the pandemic started. So, we had to learn to pivot and deal with a major worldwide event, and I think emerged out the other end. It’s still going, but our coming out the other side, all the more strong for it, and that’s the history of today.

We specialize primarily on ads online, being Google Ads, Facebook ads, but we also in there, add additional services that are needed in order to supplement that like landing pages and websites, design, et cetera, and we do a splash of SEO in there as well. That’s who I am and what my company is and where it came from.

Howard Wolpoff: Well, life is definitely about timing and lots of people had interesting timing with, whether the start or different periods of their businesses, because of COVID. Just glad to see that you’re stronger as we are at this point of the process. When you’re working with a client and you’re getting started, what are the biggest questions they have about getting their message out there and why they’re there for you to be helping them?

Adam Sene: Well, it really is going to vary from client to client. You get people at all different stages in their business, whether they’re well established and far along and already successful, or whether they’re just a brand new startup and they just ordered some inventory for a product that they want to start a business around. It really depends on that stage of where they’re at in their business, the questions that they’re going to ask. Someone earlier along is going to be having more concern about their branding and their direction and what they should do. Whereas, further along guys, they’re going to have a good amount of that dialed in, and they’re going to be more interested in the more technical questions in terms of, where can we reduce wasted budget? How can we improve the ROAS on the budget that we have?

You’ll get guys who are at a stage where… This has happened a few times, you get a client that basically has gone through a handful of agencies and all they’re looking to do is scale. They’re spending X number of dollars a month. They’re happy with the returns that they’re get getting, but they’ve been trying to double it for a long period of time and gone through agencies that have only been able to increase the ad spend, but haven’t been able to increase the revenues proportionally alongside it. Like I said, different phases and really where they’re at is going to determine the type of questions they’ll have.

Howard Wolpoff: It shows just where different companies have been. Again, you mentioned the experience of different agencies and trying to find that right sweet spot for them with the revenue level that they’re going to be, and it’s good that you’ve had this varying experience throughout your career to guide them and put them in the right direction and get their businesses seeing the results. It’s great that you’re able to share this with us and we really appreciate you joining us today.

Adam Sene: Yeah, of course. My pleasure.

Howard Wolpoff: Thank you all for joining us as well. Adam really tells a great story through what he is sharing with us, through the information he has on his website, the type of business that he works with, and really the right way to get their message out there, and the results that they’re looking for. You can learn more on Daily Ad Brief, but go out and have a great rest of today, and we’ll see you next time on Marketing Champions.”

Direct link to the interview

There is way more to be done with your Facebook ads to ensure you get a good ROAS on any monies you spend on Facebook, but this will be the topic of other videos. Reach out to us at Eden Ads if your Amazon sales numbers aren’t up to snuff: we’ll have a conversation to understand where you are coming from, and how we can help you. Call us at (813) 940-5699.