Tips on How to Spread your PPC Budget across Multiple Engines.

Regardless of an advertisers monthly budget, and the fact that Google owns roughly 65%+ of the market, there is still that extra 34+% of an audience that should not be forgotten. Now, with that said, this does not mean an immediate sharing of the budget pie to other platforms with the expectation of equal ROAS%. In fact, it’s not so much about the “how much” to allocate, but rather “what campaigns” should we allocate that spend to.

In this post, I will not only provide an example of a “stock portfolio approach” but I will also dive a little deeper into the different strategies on how to best allocate your monthly PPC ad budgets and possibly identify other opportunities to increase that budget.

The Search Market Share

As you can see in the pie chart below, Google dominates the landscape, but there’s that extra 30% of the “Yahoo/Bing” audience that is still available to all advertisers. Also, please note that these rankings from comScore do not include Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, etc… which are also both great testing opportunities as well as social media enhancers.

October 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings from comScore

Effective Search Network Migration

A full replication of the existing Google Adwords account into Yahoo/Bing is sometimes not the best strategy to implement. In fact, I would recommend a “quick wins” approach where you simply import the best performing campaigns/adgroups, modify the keywords and text ads that the AdCenter Platform requires and monitor the performance. Most of the time, the CPC’s would be lower and you have the option of activating demographic targeting within the Search Network, which Google does not currently offer.

Display Network Options

The Google Display Network is an effective platform to manage a daily and monthly budgets across a wide audience. The problem with the Google Display Network is simply their Adsense Partner sites, which are frankly not that relevant. However, what advertisers need to understand, is that there are other platforms available which provide better behavioral targeting features as well as different content properties. For example, Yahoo’s Network Plus offers performance pricing and personalized targeting within all of Yahoo Properties and strategic partner sites. Click here to download the Yahoo’s Network Plus Document (via.pdf)

Yahoo’s Network Plus

Creating a Testing Budget for Other Platforms

In a previous blog post entitled “Display Network Strategies to Get The Most out of your Budget” I discussed the benefits of Leveraging Facebook Ad’s Targeting Abilities and applying those learnings’ to the Google Display Campaigns. With that said, platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn provide an extra  window to reach an audience who is not using a typical search engine. When Developing and Defining a Test Budget, the advertiser should consider the following before spending the first penny:

• Understand this is test and have low expectations
• Make sure the Landing Page is prepared to capture various levels of conversions. (emails, newsletters, contact form, social media, etc…)
• Tag everything for Web Analytics
• Take a deep dive into the platform’s analytics data (GEO, etc..)
• Try and learn as much as you can from the initial launch.
• Look for any areas of success and then “fine-tune” the winners.

In Conclusion:

It’s no secret. Having a “stock portfolio” approach to a PPC budget is a good strategy for optimal growth. Advertisers should not have all of their Eggs in one basket, regardless of the fact that Google will give you the most volume. Depending on the advertiser’s businesses industry, other search platforms can perform better than others. The bottom-line of this article is “to proactively push to find the right audience at the right time, with the right ROI% within the appropriate budget.” It’s much more affordable to create a test using PPC than it is with TV, Radio and Print. One of the biggest misconceptions in PPC marketing is the ability to take what is learned, (backed by in-depth analytics) and apply it to other “offline” advertising initiatives.