Budget strategies are key to controlling PPC costs, says MoreVisibility CTO
With spending on paid search expected to reach $7.5 billion or about 40% of all online ad spending in 2010, according to Jupiter Research, marketers can expect to put increasing resources behind search. But whether it’s spending that delivers a return or just gobbles up the budget depends on marketers’ knowledge and use of budget, bidding keyword and copy strategies.
According to Joe Laratro, chief technology officer at search engine marketing provider MoreVisibility.com, marketers now use a variety of budget strategies to control costs and maximize investment while seeking to balance the effort of management with effective returns. One is a monthly budget, divided among the desired ad channels. While one of the simplest strategies to manage, “using a monthly budget alone may not evenly distribute the traffic through the month,” he says.
Managing online ad spending to a daily budget, by contrast, can help limit the traffic to keep the flow steady through the month. A more sophisticated strategy, day parting, requires web site operators to change bid strategies at different times of day. For example, “If foreign traffic is undesirable, it is a good strategy to lower bids in late evening and early morning hours. If lunchtime web traffic is very desirable, bids and budget may need to be raised mid-day on a CPC campaign,” he says.
Some marketers exclude certain days from the campaign altogether, a budgeting strategy that can be used either regularly or sparingly. If a web site is driving calls to a call center, the campaign is turned off on any day of the week the call center is not open, for example. Or in the case of a merchant with seasonal merchandise with shipping deadlines, “A web site that sells Halloween costumes can preserve its spend on non-converting traffic by turning off the CPC campaign a few days before Oct. 31,” Laratro notes.
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