PPC Case Study 1
This first example is more than just a case study, it explains who we are and how we came to be involved in PPC Management and Search Engine Optimisation since it is the personal experience of the founder of our business.
In his own words:
“I fell into the World of online business somewhat serendipitously, if not completely by accident, when I decided to try selling a digital product that I’d produced through a dedicated website.
At that time I had no experience whatsoever of websites, search engines, or anything else related to the internet, and so the natural way for me to promote my new website was using Google Adwords.
At first I was gobsmacked – excited, enthralled, energized, and loving the fact that from the very first day I was selling my digital product – the same product in effect – over and over again for £19.99 (about $35 at the time) with hardly any effort on my part.
The Adwords PPC campaign delivered exactly what I wanted, visitors who bought my product for a good price and at an incredibly low cost – in the first 18 months the average cost per click was around 4p (roughly 6c to 7c), I had over 1000 visitors per day, and a typical conversion rate of around 1%.
This was more than I could have hoped for, since I was selling around £200 ($350) per day and the costs were just £40-£50 (well under $100) per day. This was a highly profitable venture.
I was at that time the happiest that I had been for a long time, since my online income was making me more than my full time job and my money worries we’re now just a distant memory.
However, this harmonious existence didn’t last for too long once that the cost per click started to creep up – and up, and up, and up!
Within what seemed like a couple of months the average cost per click had climbed from 4p to around 20p, and suddenly, and almost without warning, all of my daily sales were needed just to pay for the advertising!
My business had gone from being highly profitable to being not profitable at all, and I had no idea how to correct the problem.
I really didn’t want to lose my nice little sideline, and so I came to the rapid conclusion that I needed to do 2 things:
1) Find a way to get my PPC costs back to an acceptable level (this was most urgent)
2) Learn how to optimise my website so that I didn’t need to rely on PPC
This second option seemed like a huge mountain to climb, but as a side note it is something that was concluded more than satisfactorily – this same website is now 6th on page 1 of Google completely naturally and under its own steam – and the resulting lessons learned were the driving force behind a thriving Search Engine Optimisation business and our search engine optimisation course.
With regards to the first point, I was under the impression previously that my PPC campaign was perfectly fine, and I couldn’t see how I could possibly make it any better, or reduce the costs.
It seemed pretty straightforward – you choose a load of relevant search terms that people looking for a product like yours might use, and then people come to your site and buy – what could be more logical than that?
Furthermore, with no real control over the cost per click (i.e., if Google set it at 90p per click you couldn’t choose to pay 5p and expect your ads to show) how could you reduce your PPC costs?
I started to read everything that I could on PPC advertising to understand what I was missing, and to see if I could find any methods or techniques that I could use to at least try and revive my now flagging business.
With little to lose I decided that I needed to take drastic measures and so I embarked on a quite ruthless trimming of my Adwords keywords list, coupled with a handful of other ideas to try and reduce the costs.
My reasoning was that although I might see my turnover drop substantially, at least if I was making a profit then I would still be getting something from my now struggling website – which was better than the place I was now at.
To my amazement I found that while my Adwords costs dropped by around 90% as I’d expected, my turnover dropped by less than 10% – in other words, I was now back in a highly profitable position again with little more effort than managing my keywords list!
I found this quite fascinating, and it is something that I have studied vigorously over the last few years – in essence, it boils down to the way that people think and behave, and the language that they use online, which can be completely different to how they think, behave, and the language that they use in everyday “real” life.
Where I had made the main mistake (which is where many others fail with PPC advertising) was to try and cast my keywords net too far and wide, mistakenly believing that this would allow me to catch the internet fishes that lived at the very edges of my products likely target audience.
While my vast and sprawling net would occasionally catch the odd lone fish, it cost me a fortune to keep and maintain – and there was really no need for this cost – the biggest, fattest, most profitable shoal of customers was right there in front of me, and I could catch them all with a small, low cost, carefully targeted net that cost me a fraction of the previous huge one.
Of course this is over simplifying the process, especially since we have now developed other techniques and methodologies that can further drive down the costs of PPC advertising, but in essence it is correct.
The simple truth is that when people search for a product online they do it in a totally different way to how they shop on the high street.
When people go to the high street they browse – they will walk into a store and look around at a variety of products.
When they shop online they search for a specific thing – they have in 99.9% of cases already decided exactly what they want, and their searches reflect this fact – they search for exactly the thing that they want to buy.
Clearly then, if you have a website selling nothing but red shoes, you want your visitors to be made up exclusively of people who want to buy red shoes.
It is completely useless to try and funnel to your website people looking for black shoes, pink shoes, golfing shoes, red sneakers, red slippers, or anything else that does not EXACTLY match your product range.
We have a tendency to think that maybe if someone is looking for a pair of red sneakers then they might be interested in our red shoes – maybe they’ll see something that they like better – THEY WILL NOT!!
It is a complete and total waste of money to pay for visitors to your website if they are not looking for exactly the thing that you sell – period!
People approach PPC advertising from completely the wrong angle. They think that they have 100 customers per day now and a 1% conversion rate, so they get 1 sale per day.
If they increase their visitors to 1000 per day through PPC, then at 1% they’ll have 10 sales per day.
What actually happens is they pay for the extra 900 visitors and find that they still only make 1 sale per day – in other words, the conversion rate isn’t static, it varies depending on the quality, or the focus, of the visitor – the less focused the PPC keywords, the lower the conversion rate will become.
Once that you understand this fact and you have the necessary tools and techniques to implement a carefully planned PPC campaign, then you can kill your advertising costs by 90%+, increase your conversion rates, and have an advertising ROI that will be envied by other online businesses.
Most important of all is that you’ll actually make a profit.”
