When it comes to PPC, the value of a click is almost immeasurable. When a
PPC campaign
performs like the one we have been running for CfPIE, that is something worth celebrating. With our knowledge in the field, we were able to see a 95% increase in clicks over the course of 9 months, and a
.87% increase
in click-through rate, both on the Display Network. We did this using two strategies, audience targeting and placement refining.
Audience Targeting
We targeted our audience using a funnel, starting with wide interest targeting at the top of the funnel. We used analytics from CfPIE’s website to tell us which In-market and Affinity Audiences (both considered wide interest within Google) already visit their site, and then created campaigns to target more of these same people. At the bottom of the funnel, we created two separate audiences - one that targeted websites and blogs containing carefully selected keywords related to each course offered by CfPIE, and the second containing the URLs of industry competitors. Creating audiences this way ensures our ads are being seen by the right people, on relevant websites.
Placement Refining
When wide interest targeting, there can be a lot of placements that don’t make sense at the start. Many websites and users are grouped into the Affinity and In-market Audiences that aren’t necessarily our target market, but share 'some' characteristics of them. To refine where the ads showed up, we had to be diligent in culling irrelevant placements every week. Over the course of 6 months, our impressions went from ~10M to ~7M/month
, but our clicks went from ~5K to ~50K/month
meaning we successfully refined the placement of our ads on relevant websites, in front of relevant users, resulting in more clicks at the same cost.