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Stephen Pazyra is the founder and CEO of 1-800-Bakery. He has 35 years
of retail food service and bakery business, and 8 years experience in the
online marketplace. 1-800-Bakery.com is a virtual bakery showcase marketing
to the B2C and B2B marketplace. Mr. Pazyra has served on the Board of
Directors of Winchester Chamber of Commerce and New England Bakers
Association.

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Features

The secret to our PPC success

Written on
Oct 22, 2009 
Author
Stephen Pazyra  |
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The secret to our PPC success

pps_small.jpgADOTAS – For the first five years we managed our PPC campaigns in-house at 1-800-Bakery. In year six, I decided to hire a third-party PPC firm hoping an agency could help us drive more qualified leads and sales without increasing campaign costs. Instead our website sales results stayed the same and costs per keyword worsened.

The first PPC agency we hired used a third-party keyword tool to discover additional keywords to test in our campaign. Because they used a publicly available free keyword tool, the expanded keyword set was also accessible to all of our competitors. The situation resulted in stiff competition, which translated into high bids for broad terms. Due to the increase in competitive bids combined with the decrease in keyword relevancy, the cost per click (CPC) for our keywords increased.

In addition, the more general keywords provided by the free keyword suggestion tools didn’t help us capture long-tail keyword traffic and analyze high-intent-to-purchase keywords for which we could afford to bid more aggressively. For example, our initial PPC agency partner had us bidding on broad terms like “cake” that were driving a high volume of traffic but little to no conversions.

In contrast, specific long-tail terms for which 1-800 Bakery actually offered products, such as “gluten-free cake” cost us less per click, brought us more qualified visitors and eventually a higher conversion rate on qualified long-tail terms.

When I decided to research new keyword management tools, we ended up attending a WordStream webinar. I was struck by a specific comment made by WordStream founder Larry Kim: “Your specific and targeted keywords are a valuable, proprietary asset.”

It made sense, because if specific keywords are drawing in the traffic you want that lead to the conversions you want, then they are worth money. And that is an asset just as valuable as my more tangible assets such as machinery and equipment.

I decided to give WordStream a try. Once our organized campaigns were set up, I noticed additional benefits. The greatest differentiator for us was the ability to discover the exact keywords that visitors were using to find our site so I was able to bid on the actual keywords most relevant to our products.

Because this information is based on our site’s historical and ongoing traffic data, 1-800-Bakery’s private keyword database becomes more personalized and unique as it grows over time, complete with a long-tail of highly relevant keywords that competitors don’t have access to. Armed with an understanding of the search queries that people actually use to find the products relevant to 1-800-Bakery, we now possessed a critical piece of competitive intelligence.

With the aid of powerful keyword-grouping capabilities, our new PPC management application also helped us create well-organized and close-knit ad groups, critical to long-term PPC success. Rather than a few broad-based ad groups, I created additional groups each week to cover each of 1-800-Bakery’s products. With over 100 different bakery items, this process would have required tremendous time and effort to accomplish manually.

I discovered that the best ROI comes from defined ads targeted to what the customer is looking for. Our new PPC application helped us accomplish this by first capitalizing on these keywords and next organizing tightly aligned keyword groups.

Over time, I also found incredible value in the ability to fine-tune my campaigns using negative keywords. Negative keyword discovery and expansion is another critical factor for optimized campaigns and high PPC profits. Eliminating wasteful keywords and reducing irrelevant clicks can have a drastic impact on overall paid search costs, improving click-through rates and quality scores and lowering cost per action.

For example, I previously was bidding on the keyword “ship birthday cake,” which accounted for a great deal of traffic. I was confused as to why these leads were not converting into sales. What I learned was visitors were actually searching for products such as “pirate ship birthday cake,” which 1-800-Bakery doesn’t sell. Using our new PPC management application’s negative keyword tool to designate terms like “pirate” as negative greatly reduced my ad spend and allowed me to more aggressively bid on the keywords delivering the right traffic.

After fine-tuning our keywords to include more long-tail phrases and more negatives, I was able to reach our goals of more qualified visits and subsequent conversions. Despite the seasonality issues that come with supplying online baked goods, in the month of April, 1-800-Bakery increased its conversion rate by 60% and reduced the cost per conversion by nearly 10%. At the same time, CTR rose by more than 25% from 1.6% in January to 2.02% in April.





Reader Comments.

Hey Stephan,

I’m glad you’ve found success with Wordstream. But I’m not sure the ability to show the exact keyword users are searching for is a key differentiation for them. This type of information is freely available as an inline report in adwords, and available for Yahoo (just have to ask your rep.

I think their bread & butter feature is the keyword grouper.

Posted by Jesse Kanclerz | 4:32 pm on October 26, 2009.

Most small companies do not even have a rep at Google. You are correct but lot easier in wordstream.

Posted by Stephen Pazyra | 8:03 pm on January 17, 2010.

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