IMMania.com

One thing that most everyone who uses PPC advertising to drive traffic experiences, is losing campaigns. For some marketers those may be the only kinds of campaigns they experience. And for other marketers like myself, we have more losers than winners.

Getting bashed around by Google and the other major PPC search engines seems to be part of the daily routine of doing business online. It’s kind of like back in elementary school when you had an appointment over at the monkey bars with the school yard bully who would rough you up and then steal your lunch money — “Thanks, see you same time, same place tomorrow!”

My mantra now for doing PPC advertising, which is almost exclusively in Google Adwords, is “stem the bleeding!”

I try to follow the general guidelines to protect myself in the trenches — set a manageable daily budget, use a good set of campaign negative keywords, delete non-performing keywords, don’t get into bidding wars, and pause campaigns that are not profitable after X number of clicks.

A valuable lesson I learned early on from a more experienced IMer is to gradually slow down losing campaigns by setting your max bids to whatever your calculated break even point is for the product or service you’re promoting.

So if my conversion rate is the average 1% and I’m paid $10 for each conversion, then my break even point for every 100 Adwords clickthroughs is $10 = 100 clicks x 0.10 max bid.

Throttling back the max bids for all of your keywords is sure to render quite a few of them inactive for search in Adwords, which is probably a good thing overall. This will tell you that your Quality Score for these keywords in not high enough or that you’re in a very competitive niche that you might not want to play in.

This is also a great time to prune out a lot of dead weight keywords — the ones getting impressions, but no clicks or very few clicks. Sometimes by getting your CTR up higher, Adwords will reward you with lowering your minimum CPC on other keywords, but not always.

When to start starving a campaign is variable. Some campaigns I’ll just kill when it’s clear that they unlikely will ever return a profit. Others I’ll let run beyond the maximum number of clicks I’ve set for the campaign and others I will start to wind down before they reach that point.

In my brief experience, most campaigns don’t turn profitable even after throttling back to the break even point — they tend to hover around break even, but every now and then, one will limp along eking out small profits.