Lower Adwords Bid Costs & Save Time with SpeedPPC
Whether you are new to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing or a seasoned professional, PPC is well known to suck you dry of both time and money. In an attempt to improve both of these areas I recently decided to try out a copy of SpeedPPC. This post is my review of SpeedPPC.
Created by Jay Stockwell and Allan Gardyne, SpeedPPC is a tool that works in tandem with Google Adwords Editor to produce highly effective campaign management.
SpeedPPC professes to help:
- Reduce click costs
- Improve quality score
- Increase click-through rates
- Identify weak landing pages
- Reduce campaign adminstration time
The tool interface is split into 4 main areas. The first of these is the Keyword Setup page.
Keyword Setup
On this page you set your campaign name and keywords. This is the first area where SpeedPPC really starts to save you time. Whilst you can just input or import a list of kewords in a single list, things really get going when you choose to base your campaign around dual lists (SpeedPPC calls the two lists ‘Seed’ for the primary list, and ‘Expansion’ for the secondary list). A dual list campaign will automatically combine the search terms in both lists to create the completed search term. This is great if you want to run similar keyword phrases with minor changes.
Say for example you sell framed prints and also posters. You may want to tailor your adverts to both audiences in a quick and easy manner. So in the seed list you may put a list of the types of prints and posters you offer, such as blockbuster films. For this example I will choose Batman and Superman. In the second list you then put two terms: Prints and Posters. When you then combine these, you would end up with these final search phrases:
- Batman Prints
- Batman Posters
- Superman Prints
- Superman Posters
You can see that if you have long lists then this will save you an immense amount of time!
The Keyword Setup page is also where you will choose how you want to group the keywords into AdGroups. The options for this are to group by seed, expansion, whole phrase (or ‘final; in SpeedPPC’s language) or you can assign a name of your own independently. You are also able to add a prefix or suffix to the AdGroup name.
When using the dual mode (i.e. seed and expansion lists), you are able to stipulate how these terms are combined. You can choose to combine them in forward or reverse order, both, or to pair rather than mix them. Finally on this page, some basic tools are provided for cleaning the keyword list which may be useful if you are importing lists where there are unwanted spaces or characters.
Overall I find this page very intuitive to you, and is really only limited by your imagination.
Pricing & URL
The second page is where you choose default keyword bid costs and URL destination. Support is provided directly for Google, Yahoo and MSN although there is also an option to provide support for other search engines through the use of the Custom Output Setup. You can set individual costs for the 3 match types (Broad, Phrase & Exact) for both Google and MSN outputs. Yahoo only offers Search and Content differentiation although presumably this will soon be modified following Yahoo’s recent announcement that they are pulling out of the Content market.
Ad Setup
The 3rd page, Ad Setup, is where the real engine is based. There are two interfaces that are offered. Standard provides a familiar layout with simply the typical headline, description and URL fields. It is very easy to write one advert, and copy it to up to 6 variation adverts to then modify these which is essential for split testing.
Within each of the fields, you have the ability to insert variables. That is, you can choose to insert the Seed, Expansion or Final keywords with the copy of the ad. This is how you get the ability to easily and quickly generate ads with a higher quality score as the advert is deemed to be of higher relevence to the keyword search.
Bear in mind that each advert will be generated for each keyword if you choose to build the specific keyword or keyphrase into the ad text. This can lead to a lot of adverts generated (but not as many as if you choose the Advanced advert generation - more about this in a moment). Having multiple variations of an advert running against the same keyword gives you the ability to split-test ads to identify which work best for your campaigns. I tend to have two different text ads and two different landing pages running for each keyword (so 4 ads in total) which I find helps to identify the best possible conversion rates for every single keyword. If that doesn’t help to lower your CPC (Cost-Per-Conversion) then nothing will!
Moving on to the Advanced ad generator opens up a whole new world of possiblities. You have the ability to choose any number of variations for each line of the advert which then are automatically combined to produce almost limitless adverts. Be careful if you use this method however as you can quickly generate literally hundreds of ads for a single keyword which could easily become counterproductive when trying to establish the best CPC. The only drawback of this page is that you can only choose a single ‘Actual URL’ for all ad variations which means that you lose the potential to track exactly which ad generates the most clicks. For this reason I have used the Standard ad generator for my campaigns.
Output
The final page, the Output page, is where you take all the ingredients and bring them together into an export-ready format for tools such as Adwords Editor. Provision is made for a specific output for Google, Yahoo and MSN, as well as the ability to export to a custom format should you need to. Simply copy the output for both keyword and ad generation and load them directly into the editor of your choice. I now create a full campaign within 5 minutes that is keyword specific and split-test ready. It really doesn’t get any easier than this.
Summary
I have to say that I have been extremely impressed with this tool. It does exactly what is stated, is quick and easy to use, and has literally saved me hours in ad-writing.
On a more general note, the accompanying members area on the SpeedPPC website is packed with useful articles for improving your ad campaigns, has a very comprehensive training section complete with step-by-step video tutorials covering practically every aspect of the tool, and a forum which is well used and helpful.
SpeedPPC is certainly worth the one-off purchase fee and already saved me more than I paid for it in lower bid costs and higher conversions. I really can’t rate this high enough! For more information visit www.SpeedPPC.com.