The Tug of War between PPC Labor Time and Click Costs
In previous posts I discussed how to allocate investments in SEO, and DISC’s head PPC guy, Dale Webb, recently posted on determining your ideal PPC budget. Here, I try to help you understand that if you spend too little in monthly PPC management, you will pay more in click costs – often more than revenue or profit per conversion.
Think of it: if you divide costs by hourly rate to get labor time, even $2000 a month at a suspiciously low $100 per hour is less than one hour per business day. And think about the work that must be done in PPC (and in shopping comparison site marketing, which is also PPC-driven, except for Google Product Search):
One must
- write brilliant ads with the discipline of haiku;
- assess and choose from among thousands of phrase combinations — each with options for exact, phrase, broad, and negative matching;
- produce ad groupings that maximize quality score and minimize the risk that a few bad ads will spoil the adgroup barrel;
- marry each landing page text with each ad;
- track which of several positions produce the best combination of clicks and conversions, for every ad;
- do split A-B and multivariate tests on landing pages to maximize conversions;
- report clearly the results, the plans for next month, and the precise ROI;
- keep reading and learning to stay apprised of the most profitable tactics;
- and choose and tune many other variables that the search engines allow you to alter.
All of this work must be done by an excellent mind with exceptional linguistic and analytic aptitude, and lots of experience. If you don’t do this work at least as well as your top 10 competitors, you will pay much more in click costs relative to conversions than you will save in labor cost.
Of course the extent and acumen of your PPC competition is a major variable in the calculus of how little labor time you can get away with before you fall below maximum ROI towards negative ROI. But remember that Google’s market capitalization is close to GE’s because 95% of Google’s enormous revenue comes from its PPC, which means few industries are under-investing in PPC now. Increasingly, if a website has mediocre or worse usability (conversion rates), or if a business’s margins are too low, no amount of PPC expertise and time will produce profit.
Having managed PPC campaigns for as long as they have existed, we at DISC have found that $1500 per month in labor (10 hours per month, or 2.5 hours per week) is the minimum labor time – and that’s in industries with poor PPC competition, and after more time up front to set-up the campaign. Average PPC competition requires at least $2500 per month, usually $3500. Of course large businesses often spend upwards of $50,000 per month in labor to achieve maximum ROI.
The substantial amount of labor time required to find, implement, and tune the lowest hanging fruit means that you can’t just dip your toe into PPC to “test” the waters. A valid test must look at the best opportunities in PPC, and ascertaining those opportunities takes highly skilled time – the easy quick pickings have long since been bid up to the max.
If you are among the fortunate few, your resistance to spend what it takes is shared by most of your competition, which means you have opportunity to win profitable business that they neglected. Moreover, because there is a shortage of PPC talent, a gifted (and thus well-paid) PPC manager – who is given enough time — can deliver great ROI even if your collective competition is heavy. Fortune favors the bold – and the smart.
