It’s called the paradox of thrift when the consumers who haven’t been affected by a poor economy decide to save rather than spend. So unlike the dot-com crash when consumers were reluctant to purchase online and the big online retailers suffered by the “Get Big Fast” Internet strategy, during our current economic downturn consumers are simply cutting back on the spending, and it’s affecting a range of businesses from mom and pop shops to the larger retailers, both online and offline.
How might this economy affect your PPC campaign?
If you are running a generic PPC campaign with a budget to burn and no ROI to prove, then this economy may not affect your PPC campaign at all, unless the sponsor decides to pull the plug on the campaign. But for marketers who have to prove an ROI, you might have noticed that you are still buying clicks at the same rate but your conversion rates have dropped and average sales are down. It’s sometimes a case where consumer spending has slowed but they are still window shopping, and that results into a diminished once proud ROI. It’s amazing, frustrating, and counterintuitive to watch PPC visitor levels maintain or actually increase while ROIs decrease.
Stay ahead of the trend.
When you notice a negative trend your instinct might be to let it run, lower your ad spend, or pause the entire campaign, but there are steps you can quickly set in place that could help you stay ahead of a negative trend or at least help set it upright again.
- I always watch Google closely because if I notice a negative trend developing I usually spot it in Google AdWords first. I’ve found that Yahoo and MSN are not good indicators because it sometimes only takes a few sales to skew data.
- Pause any content network or site targeting as these channels generally result in very low conversions and will only eat your budget and destroy margins.
- Pause your lower performing ad groups so your budget is concentrated on the high performing groups with proven results.
- Have a look at your AdWords search query report or examine your analytics for the top coverting keywords throughout a recent better performing period of your campaign, keep those keywords active, more than likely these better performing keywords will be exact match. Pause all of your lower converting keywords.
- Examine your AdWords or analytics geographic report and limit the campaign to those higher converting regions, while this may result in less clicks for your campaign, the conversion rate and ROI should maintain itself and in some cases dramatically increase.
- If possible examine the daily and hourly purchasing patterns on your site and schedule your advertising to appear during these high converting hours and days.
- Once you’ve made some of the adjustments mentioned above you might have saved your ROI but you’ve also lowered your overall search engine presence, so don’t be afraid to increase your budget for a few weeks, you can always lower it again.
- Many marketers don’t bother with MSN and Yahoo but this may be the time to actually focus on optimizing them for better results because they can often produce good results.
And remember that watching your organic conversions will also help you gauge your PPC campaign. When organic conversions begin to trend up it might be time to expand your PPC campaign. But watch out for false short trends because a few bad days could erode your positive ROI into the gutter. Also remember there is a wealth of information in your PPC reports, so use them to search for any information that could be used to your advantage!
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