Welcome to PPC Myths vs. Reality, a series with the goal of equipping our readers and our YouTube subscribers with tested advice for running successful PPC campaigns.
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Today we’re going to learn how to answer the question we get all the time: How long will it take to see results from PPC?
Knowing how to answer this question reduces your frustration, decreases wasted spend, and ultimately increases your revenue. To answer this question, we’re going to explain the concept of Keyword Testing.
Video Transcription
One popular myth about paid traffic is that it has an immediate ROI. This just isn’t true. The only immediate thing about paid traffic is that you get immediate data – you’ll get information on clicks, CTR, and impressions right away, but that doesn’t mean you will have a positive ROI your first week. Here’s why.
Say you sell a blender.
Let’s See What The Keyword Testing Process Will Look Like.
Here are 6 keywords:
Which will do best?
We don’t know yet, and need to launch to get the data.
And here comes the question: How long will this take?
There are 2 big factors that influence this. The first is how big your budget is. Obviously a larger budget means more data faster – it’s easier to optimize an account spending $20k/mo. than $200/mo. The second is how popular these terms are.
You can see that some keywords relating to blenders are more popular than others. Will your terms get 20 or 200 searches per day?
So we’ve launched these keywords, and now we have our first round of cost, revenue, and ROAS data.
Some generated no revenue, some have a negative ROAS and some generated some really high ROAS. At the end of this first phase, we come out slightly positive, but nothing too exciting. Now what do we do? We optimize!
Based on the data we got back, we can recommend actions.
We’ll want to:
- reduce the bids on keywords with a negative ROAS
- block keywords that were irrelevant
- maintain mid level earners
- increase the bids on keywords that performed exceptionally well
After making these changes, we wait again for our second round of data.
This is the PPC keyword testing process. Realize that you don’t have a crystal ball to predict if a keyword will be profitable or not. You need to test, and you need to optimize.
The longer the account history, the more data available, and the more effective optimization is. This is one of the reasons it’s easier to optimize an account spending $20k/mo. than $200/mo.
To summarize, PPC data on clicks and impressions is immediate, but the testing to find your best keywords and ads does take time.
This is influenced by budget and popularity of terms. That’s why we have a minimum ad spend requirement of at least $3k/mo, and prefer accounts over $10k/mo – the more data we have available to optimize, the better and faster optimization can be. This is also why we have a money back guarantee after 60 days to increase ROAS or Net Revenue – because it allows some time for this testing feedback loop.
What’s your process with keyword testing? Are you working in multiple phases?
Let us know in the comments below. We hope you guys join us soon for the next PPC Myths vs. Reality video. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Search Scientists YouTube channel.
