Forecasting Account Performance And Why To Exclude IP Addresses ‑ LunaTV Ep. 13 ‑ PPC
This week’s topic is PPC. We talk about how to forecast the performance of an account as well as why you might want to make use of the IP excluding feature in AdWords.
Got questions? We want to answer them! Send us a tweet at @LunaMetrics with your PPC, Social Media, Analytics, or SEO questions and we’ll feature them right here on LunaTV!
Transcript:
Brittany:
Hi I’m Brittany Baeslack
Sarah:
And I’m Sara Peduzzi
Brittany:
And you’re watching LunaTv where we answer your questions from around the web. This week’s episode is about PPC, and you can find out more about PPC in our industry blog, which we publish 3 times a week!
SarahL
Or you can become a real expert and visit us at one of our trainings that we host all around the country. If you want to find out where we are, what cities, look at the link below.
Brittany:
So this week one of our questions is “How do forecast future PPC Account performance?” This is a really common question that we get a lot. Essentially, ideally you would have historical performance that you could work with along with some traffic estimates that you could generate from tools such as Google Traffic Estimator or SpyFu. If you do not have historical performance try using some of the traffic estimates from those tools and apply them to the performance that you see once you start running the account. So an idea you could use is running a traffic estimator and using the impressions that they give you for, let’s say, new keywords or a new campaign name that you’re hoping to add to your account. You could then apply the click through rate and the average CPC that you’re seeing in your own account against the impressions that the tool is giving you more specific numbers to your account. If you’re adding keywords specifically to an existing campaign, you would want to use that campaign’s specific average CPC and click trough rate. But again if you do not have your own historical performance your best bet is use tools that already give you that information. Get a little bit of data in, about one to two weeks, at the very least, and then apply that to get a better idea of what you’ll see in the future. In terms of trying to find out some trends in the industry Google Insights is a great place to find that. You can use Google Insights to get ideas for different countries or globally for different searches you can perform. It will give you information on how trends differ throughout the year. You can base it on different months, different times of the year, different years and etc.
Sarah:
And our second question this week was, “Why do we need to exclude IP Addresses in Google AdWords?” Not a lot of people see this option, but if you go into your campaign settings, it’s the last expanded plus sign at the bottom. People wonder why you can do that. There are quite a few reasons. The two main ones, I would say, are you want to exclude your competitors from viewing your ads or impress or click on them. And a lot of people think that you can go in and Google a competitor and take some ideas from what their ad copy is saying. But if they’ve excluded you, you can’t see it anymore. So that’s actually a great tool if you’re in a very competitive market and you want to keep those ads very focused and unique to you. Another reason why people use IP exclusion is if their client is quite large and there’s a lot of company employees, you can exclude that company’s IP address and if an employee is maybe on a sales call or they’re doing anything that needs to look up the brand name or on a certain part of the website you can avoid the possibility of one of those or more clicks a day or anything like that from happening so that you’re costs can stay in control. Another IP exclusion used maybe less commonly is the actual agency themselves if they’re larger and there’s quite a few employees that are working on the same project and they’re using Google to look up that company the ads won’t show up. So really it’s for Keeping in control of whose viewing your ad keeping the costs under. Hopefully if your market is cut throat enough you’re stopping click fraud. There’s a lot of third party applications that you can research to find the IP address, and less practical ways LunaMetrics does not suggest. It definitely depends on your goals for the campaigns and the type of client you’re working with. Ok that’s it for today, Thanks for watching Luna TV!
