Wouldn\u2019t it be great if you knew that every new campaign would be a great success? This could mean: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
– Next to your highly optimized STAG alpha campaigns, you run a broad match beta that delivers 20% more clicks at the same CPA.
– You expand your account with some display remarketing campaigns, and get thousands of dollars extra profit next month.
– For the latest product in your client’s shop, you launch a Performance Max campaign, and the product sells out in the first week.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, things don\u2019t work like this. Anything worth doing brings with it a certain risk. In our PPC world, this could be: a non-zero chance of you wasting some (or a lot) of the budget on clicks that don’t convert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday, I had a client asking me to promote a new product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I explained to the client my expectations are low; the product is relatively expensive compared to the alternatives, the USPs only resonate within a small set of the market, and the keywords used by the target audience are also used by a lot of people that are outside of the target audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conflicting thoughts went through my head:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
– There’s no way I am going to do this, the risk of disappointing my client is too high
– What will my colleagues think if this turns into one big failure?!
– But damn, this could be a nice opportunity to discover the effects of a new campaign setup I’ve been thinking about for weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, I do feel that some smart bidding magic just might be able to detect the right audience signals and zoom in on the clicks from the audience that will convert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, here’s what I did:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Coordinate clear expectations with the client (“this is a test, we need a separate test budget for this, with zero ROI expectations for the next 6 weeks”)
2. Formulate success criteria for the last week of the test, based on our main KPIs (“we aim for 50 transactions per week at a ROAS of 450% or higher”)
3. Come up with a reasonable strategy to test smart bidding for the new product
4. A detailed plan for the setup and daily\/weekly optimizations for the new campaign<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you have these things in place, there’s really no reason not to take the risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n