Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

Google Adwords Campaign Management Proposal... Example

Introduction

We are specialist SEO and PPC managers. In terms of PPC we focus on using Google Adwords rather than other competing PPC channels such as MSN and Yahoo. The reason is simply that Google has a much greater reach and in our experience is more than enough to consume advertisers’ budgets.

We have been managing Google Adword campaigns for ourselves and clients since 2004. A partial list of clients for whom we have managed campaigns is shown at http://www.seoza.com.

Proposal

The basis for this proposal consists of 3 separate parts:

1. The cost for setting up the campaign

2. The cost for managing the campaign on a daily basis and on an ongoing basis including full reporting to a frequency requested by the customer.

3. Advising on the appropriate landing page and other website strategies to maximise sales conversion resulting from Adwords clicks.

Setting Up the Campaign:

This starts with in-depth keyword research to explore a company’s online market in considerable depth. This initial keyword research typically results in many thousands of keywords being discovered Of course many of these keywords will prove to be quite unnecessary and will be deleted from the campaign over a short period of time. However there is no substitute for this research since it unearths important keywords that would be otherwise missed.

This very long list of keywords would probably be reduced to something between 500 and 1,500 active keywords over the space of the first week of the online campaign.

This list would be further refined as the management of the campaign progressed. Ultimately the list will probably be whittled down to 200 to 500 really useful keywords that generate traffic in significant numbers and of course generate clicks to the company’s website.

Upon completion of the keyword research phase attention is then diverted to using this information to set up numerous individual campaign categories based upon important keyword groupings (for example Wedding venues, wedding photographers, wedding gifts, wedding dresses, wedding cakes, wedding caterers etc. Each campaign would also include many different sub-groupings so that smaller niche categories within the main sub groupings can be monitored, exploited and controlled (eg wedding venues Johannesburg, wedding venues Cape Town).

For each sub category copywriting skills suited to PPC advertising will be used to create appealing ads linked to the sub category specific groupings in order to maximise click through rates to the company’s website.. Typically this results in hundreds of ads being written and modified as the campaign progresses and feedback is achieved using Google’s powerful reporting mechanisms.

For international businesses campaigns would be set up to reflect specific geographical areas to be targeted based upon the company’s requirements (eg South Africa, USA, EEC, Asia and so forth

Once this work has been completed the campaigns will be set to go live and everything will be adjusted to the company’s daily Adspend for the campaign. It’s very important during the first week of a live campaign that the spend be sufficient to get rapid feedback so that adjustments can be made early and objectively.

The cost for this phase for a large campaign would be R5,000 plus VAT. For smaller campaigns a good estimate would be R3000 plus VAT

Ongoing Management of the Campaign Subject to a Minimum of 3 Months Management

We are confident enough in our abilities to believe a customer would be happy with our results and would consider using our skills on an ongoing basis. However we would require a minimum contract period of 3 months before starting any campaign.

Google Adwords campaigns need intensive management especially in the first 4 weeks to be able to minimise cost per click consistent with optimum positioning in the search results and traffic generation to the company’s website.

After this initial period a degree of daily management is required to maintain a competitive edge against competitors and continue the ongoing optimisation process.

Ongoing management fee may be up to R5,000 + VAT per month depending upon campaign size. This cost is a function of the time I need to spend in daily management. The greater the complexity of the campaign the greater the management time required.

Conversion of Clicks to Sales

Simply generating large numbers of clicks is completely unsatisfactory. The real challenge of any PPC campaign is twofold:

1. To generate clicks that are tightly targeted to the product offerings at a minimum yet optimized cost. Called “Click Through Rate… CTR”

2. To convert the maximum possible number of those clicks to the required conversion (sales). Called “Conversion Ratio”.

The ultimate measure of Google Adwords success is the return on investment (ROI) of the PPC campaign. This ROI optimisation is part of any professional PPC managed campaign and is the ultimate objective.

This optimisation also involves advising the website owners of critically important changes to be made on the website landing pages. This advice generally involves small but vitally important changes. This advice can make the difference, to a large extent, between running a satisfactory campaign and an excellent campaign.

Our cost for this service is related to the page changes that we advise on.

The cost would be R100 + VAT per page optimized.

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy. Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.