After 4 years of not going anywhere near Pay Per Click ads (PPC) I’m back at it again! For the past four years I’ve been exclusively using free traffic strategies like Youtube, blogging, email adswaps, but it’s time now to also do some paid advertising.
Over the last few days I’ve set up a lot of PPC campaigns and this morning I was going through the early results of some of these campaigns. Out of the 29 campaigns there was one in particular that was doing heaps better than the others.
When I say heaps better, I’m talking less than 3 cents per clicks, while the other campaigns were doing around 50 cents per click. That’s a HUGE difference! And it’s exciting too.
I knew that I could get a lot more clicks if I upped the bid price, so I did. I took from $0.60 CPM (meaning I was paying $0.60 per 1,000 banner impressions) to $0.80.
By bidding higher, it means that my ad is shown before my other competitors who bid less, which means more exposure and also getting in their before the website visitor is bombarded with lots of other ads.
Then I remembered a ‘sneak’ little trick I used to do back in my old PPC days… you see, almost everyone will bid in multiples of 10, or maybe 5. E.g. they’ll bid either $0.40 CPM, or $0.50 CPM, $1.00 CPM, etc. Everyone likes to enter in nice round numbers.
When advertisers set up campaigns, they rarely will set bidding to something like $0.43 CPM, or $1.08 CPM.
I think you get the point?
And if I was to set up my campaigns using the same bidding amount than someone else, both our campaigns would have equal exposure. BUT…
If I bid just one cent more, it changes the whole nature of the game. My ads get precedence! Yep. Just by bidding one cent more, my ads will be shown before someone that bids that one cent less 🙂
So, when I place my bids I do numbers like this; $0.51, $1.01, etc.
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Great tip John, very sneaky! 🙂
Love the picture by the way, very cool! Lol!
Thanks Steve! Was playing around with GIMP 😛
Thanks for such a relevant information. This blog will really help every digital marketer at beginner level. But what I suggest is that at the very first beginning understand what do you want to do or what your client needs in digital marketing for their business.
Filter keyword position. Anything under ad position 4, bump up the CPC so your ads are showing above the fold. Positions 3-4 are optimal when you have a smaller budget.Having web development knowledge for a PPC consultant is very important. He/she might not have extensive experience in web development but knowing the basic will be helpful.