PPC is Like the GRE - Super Charge Your Quality Score
I haven’t been posting as much as I would like recently because I have been focusing on PPC advertising. Specifically trying to do PPC / CPA affiliate “arbitrage” as some seem to call it. From AdWords to Social Ads I have been noticing one observation over and over again.
PPC is like the GRE !!!
Let me explain exactly what I mean, and then I will show you how to use this fact to your advantage. First let me explain what the GRE is, for those of you who do not know it is the Graduate Record Examination . It is a placement test for people looking to go to Grad school. I was flipping through one of those “Beat the GRE” books when I noticed one of the biggest pieces of advice across the board was that the very first question is the most important.
The GRE test is taken on the computer and unlike other tests where questions get progressively harder, the GRE adjusts in difficulty based on weather you got the previous question right or wrong. Below I put together a chart explaining this. Both of the patterns are the same the only difference between the green and red is that the greet dots assume you got the first question right.
Please note that if you get the first question wrong it will be much tougher to climb back towards the top. Now you might say what does this have to do with PPC… the answer is EVERYTHING.
All you have to do is replace Question Difficulty with Quality Score and Question Number with Number of Clicks (QS x #Clicks). Just like the first question when you first launch the campaign the PPC engines assign an average score for you. Depending on how you do initially they adjust accordingly just like the GRE. If you have a bad start it will be very hard to climb back out of your whole, on the flip side if you do well to start to you can make a mistake and still rebound quite quickly.
This might not be anything new to some of you, but for the rest of you here are three ways to take this knowledge to SUPER CHARGE your PPC campaigns and give you the best fighting chance.
1.) Prime the Pump - Simply put click on your own ads, better yet get people to click on your ads. It sucks that you will burn some of your money, but it will put you in a good place when you are getting started and make things easier moving forward.
2.) Day Parting - Launch the campaign during peak CTR hours not necessarily peak Conversion Hours. Lets face it CTR is still one of the most important elements in determining how your PPC campaign does.
3.) Outlier Method - This strategy is a little more advanced and was initially discovered on Facebook Social Ads. While creating a bunch of ads I messed up and instead of having an ad for each age, I created 100 of the same ad. They were all approved and launched at the same time. Something very interesting happened, some of the ads had INSANE CTR while others not even one click all with the same impressions. I thought how can this be? Then I remembered my Econ classes from college. Here is a graph illustrating Normal Distribution.
What had happened is out of those 100 same ads there were a few outliers in that 2.2% section. These outliers performed amazing, but slowly started to die down over time with more and more impressions they got closer to where they really belonged. By then I got a ton of cheap clicks making the campaign a success.
This can also be used on PPC engines like Google. When you launch 100 ads, even if they are the same one, some of them will perform very well. Quickly ax the ones that don’t then you can start the traditional split testing.
Anyway, hope this helps someone think bout PPC and GREs in a new light. Leave a comment if you like this post.
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Comments
Great Comparison! I have always looked at it this way, but never thought to relate it to the GRE. Amazing how Google will open up your brain one way or the other.
[…] made a killer post on how important it is to start your ads off with a bang to achieve a lower CPC. Click here to read Alex’s post on PPC Is Like The GRE - it’s quite worth it. 0 Comments Read […]
Nice analogy between GRE exam and ppc..
Amit