PPC Best Practices in an Enhanced Campaign World #12B

The SMX Advanced 2013 Conference featured many speakers on various SEO topics.  In the PPC arena, several experts from large companies spoke about trends in the field.  The presentation of Enhanced Campaign News for PPC users by Ben Vigneron from eSearchVision revealed some new techniques for PPC ad users.

For Enhanced PPC Campaign users, mobile modifiers are now available at the ad group level but not the keyword level.  In order to isolate top keywords for specific ad groups for bidding optimization, it is important that you put one keyword per ad group.  This allows you to test different ad copies for tier 1 and tier 2 campaigns.

Vigneron advises against using mobile-only campaign ads, but says you can use low desktop or tablet bids with aggressive mobile modifiers.  However, you will only get 50 percent of the mobile impressions rather than 100 percent.  The base bids and modifiers should be close to the first page bid estimates.  Users should aggregate desktop and tablet performance and compare mobile performance with the aggregate.  He uses the following formulas:

A. Mobile bid adjustment

= 100 x (Mobile CPA target / Actual mobile CPA) -1

B. Mobile bid adjustment

= 100 x (Value per mobile click / Value per desktop and tablet click) -1

Vigneron also advises analyzing geographic data for statistical significance before bidding wholesale on location-based keywords.

After bidding, Vigneron advises A/B testing to compare mobile and non-mobile ads as well as cross-device tracking, which Google launched in June.

Jeff Allen also shared the results of a two-week test on $1 million in advertising spending.  His results were:

• Tablet impressions were up 48 percent and clicks up 45 percent.

• Computer impressions were up five percent and clicks down 13 percent. 

• Post-campaign budget allocations showed computer spend down eight percent and CPA up 12 

percent for computers, 40 percent for mobile and 13 percent for tablets

Official Youtube Channel: Orange County Web Design 


Brad Geddes also spoke about a case study performed for SiteLinks that studied 13 accounts of companies only on mobile devices.  These companies spent roughly $4 million in combined ad budgets. Their bid modifiers for mobile were 300 percent with a keyword level bid as low as possible.  The study found that the companies went from 100 percent clicks on mobile to 19 percent clicks from desktops.  

The problem is that the bid modifier is not a well-support feature for tablets and desktops at the ad group level.  Until Google corrects this issue, results will continue to be ambiguous.


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