First Campaign: Home Services Paid Search (9)
Hi all,
As this is my first foray in to pay per call I thought it might be useful to document my first campaign.
I used to do a bit of AM back in the day but stopped about 6 years ago when I started working in wildlife conservation in the UK. I still work in conservation land management but now have a wife and son so am looking to supplement my salary. I use the term salary loosely, its more like pocket money really. The rewards of working in conservation are many and varied, but lets just say no one ever did it for the money.
I am realistic and fully expect to spend some money getting schooled over the coming months. I figure that even if I don't make a go of it on this offer, paid search and pay per call are areas of performance digital marketing that are definitely worth learning more about.
Following the advice of my affiliate network I have picked a low payout ($2) home services offer to start with. I have registered a dedicated domain for the campaign, installed wordpress and a decent theme, and added a minimal amount of content explaining the services on offer, illustrated with a few stock images. I have also built a landing page with my promo number and some basic info on it to get my call-only AdWords ads approved.
In terms of keywords I have compiled approx. 20,000 broad match keywords, about 18,000 of which are made up of a select number of core keywords combined with city names. I checked out some of the call only ads already running for my core keywords and used them as inspiration to come up with my own ad. I will make additional targeted ads for some of my adgroups eventually, but I just wanted to get started running traffic so at the moment I am using the same ad for all my keywords. I have also added a small number of negative keywords to the campaign and will add to this over time.
I am using manual CPC bidding with a max bid of $0.50 to start with. To be honest I think I am unlikely to get many (if any) impressions for some of the keywords I am targeting with such a low bid, especially in the top 2 positions, but I cant see how I would ever be able to turn a profit going in much higher than that. Hopefully there will be some low hanging fruit attached to some of my long-tailed keywords, even if they don't have much in the way of search volume.
My hope is that this campaign provides a good learning opportunity for me and other ppc newbies who stumble across this thread. If I manage to make the campaign turn a small profit then all the better. One aspect I need to learn more about over the coming days is quality score and how it is determined, as getting this right will lower click costs and should help get me some more impressions.
I could and maybe should have learned more before diving in but as I have a tendency to get stuck in "analysis paralysis" I decided just to throw myself in and see if i can swim.
If I have forgotten to mention something important or if anyone has any questions about the campaign please ask below.
Looking forward to sharing experiences on the forums. Great community here, really inspiring.
Looks like your off to a great start! Wish you the best of luck.
The more you share, the more we can provide guidance. Is this $2 raw call? I don't know what the offer is, but $2 sounds really low for any home service.
It's important to have at least two ads per ad group. Off the bat the adwords algo will give you a QS bump for having more than one ad, but also you want to be testing angles & ad copies from the start; it doesn't require that much extra time to set up.
If you're doing 20k KWs on BM, you don't want to skimp on the Neg KW list. Especially with home services, you should block all the sex, edu and employment terms asap. Quick google search will give you some decent starter neg kw lists, just vet them before using.
Hey makeitrain, thanks for your input.
Sorry I should have mentioned above that its a Tree Services (trimming, removal etc) offer that pays out $2 when a caller stays on the line for 60s. I know what you mean about the payout seeming low, but being new and not really understanding how to select a good offer to promote I went along with the advice of my affiliate manager. I hold chainsaw qualifications and regularly do this sort of work myself in my day job so it seemed like it might be a good fit for a first campaign.
Thanks for your advice about running more than a single ad for each ad group. Getting to grips with QS is going to be so important in keeping click costs as low as possible. I imagine that the $2 payout will mean the margins are going to be tight. I will make a second generic ad for all ad groups later toady and then start adding some more keyword specific ads over the coming days.
I will also be sure to expand my negative keyword list as you suggest. Currently it consists of the following:
advice
association
career
cheap
courses
free
guide
how to
job
repair
salary
sex
The ads I added to AdWords yesterday have all been approved so all going well I should start getting some impressions when my ads start running at 9:15 EST.
The payout is REALLY low ... I am not sure how you can get this to work on PPC search with those payouts and if you are bidding up to .50 per click.
I would even say that this is close to impossible.
Yes, the payout is really low.
While I haven't run Pay Per Call campaigns through an affiliate network, I have generated alot of phone calls through Adwords for clients of mine. I'm very surprised at how low the payouts are on many of the Pay Per Call networks. I can easily get a much higher return by working directly with a company to generate them phone leads.
It's not that a $2 payout for your offer can't work but you have to consider what traffic methods would be best suited.
If you get the CPC's down to the .10 to .25 range and identify the honey holes, you may do ok. But be careful not to burn through your cash by testing an offer that may be set to fail from the beginning due to payout.
Andrew
Thanks for your input here cmdeal & mrpayne,
I can totally see where your coming from in terms of this campaign being unlikely to work on AdWords. Ads have been running for about 7hrs now and only 2 impressions, 1 in position 6 and 1 in position 7 at $0.50 max bid. No clicks. Just to go through the process I am going to go ahead and add a second ad for each keyword and see if that has any effect on impressions by improving quality score. If the situation is the same tomorrow I might raise the max bid to $0.60. Failing that I might see if I can identify some slightly longer-tailed geo-targeted keywords with appropriate combinations of click cost and traffic level. I also want to go through the campaign setup process on Bing Ads so it will be interesting to see what the click costs and traffic levels are like over there. I understand that traffic sources other than paid search can work with pay per call but I think I will stick to running campaigns on Adwords and Bing for the time being until I have figured them out.
If it becomes clear that there is no chance of this campaign working at all I will look for another to test with a higher payout.
This is all good experience, really enjoying the learning process. Your comments and feedback are very much appreciated.
This is not what you want to hear, but I would find a different offer.
#1 Tree Service is pretty seasonal in the US (I'm assuming this is a US based offer). In the winter the volume goes way down and the CPCs go up. This is what tree services looks like in Google trends:
#2 The payout should be more than triple what your getting.
Are you working with a few dif networks so you can compare offers/payouts?
I agree starting with a lowish payout offer will be easier, because you can collect data fast & affordably, but the CPCs have to be proportionally low as well and of course the volume has to be there.
Thanks makeitrain, actually the advice of experienced affiliates such as your good self is exactly what I want to hear. Much better to move on quickly rather than continuing to waste valuable time and money. I should of thought of checking google trends too.
At the moment I am only working with one network. I dont have a very big starting budget so I didnt want to end up with small amounts of earnings spread out across a number of networks as I thought this might hamper cash flow in the early days. Maybe this is misguided?
At the end of the day this campaign has got me to the point where I can throw up a quick wordpress site with the required content and landing pages, undertake keyword research and come up with 20,000+ geo targeted keywords to test, set up a pay per call campaign in AdWords, research and write ads, and use the web interface to see how the campaign is going. In this case the major mistake I made was the offer that I selected to run on AdWords. I can forgive myself for this as its pretty much inevitable when your new and you dont really know what your looking for in an offer.
Looking at it from a learning perspective I actually feel like I have come quite far. If I can find a better offer for the next attempt I should hopefully get to the next step along the path, probably make some more mistakes, and hopefully learn some more important lessons.
Thanks again to all who shared their views here.
Agree with low payout - this is low. For home services, you need to have $8-10 at least.
Also: check out ziplist. That's the other hidden issue with home services. If it falls out of coverage, they will drop the call.
Not a lot of offers on tree service - which is bad in this case, since the network is undercutting you.
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