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If you find yourself wondering,

“What’s the best way to calculate PPC bids, so I neither overbid nor underbid on a term?”

and you have three minutes to spare, here’s a video for you.

The recipe:

  1. Predict the sales from each click on a given term (accounting for current daypart, seasonality, copy, matchtype, etc).
  2. Determine what fraction of sales you want to invest in advertising.
  3. Multiply those together.
  4. That’s the upper cap on how much you can bid on that term right now, if you want to stay within your efficiency target.

Despite what I say in the video, the rocket science and secret sauce is in step 1, not in the multiplication.
smiley

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  • George Michie: Art, your observations about negatives are very interesting. Hopeful the selection bias will get people to read before they click,...
  • George Michie: John E., thanks for stopping by! You make an excellent point over as SEL, but I think what will happen is a positive selection bias....
  • John: I too am concerned about the long tail effect. Users are going to have to “wade” through competing websites to find anything...
  • John Ellis: As a paid search marketer, I am little concerned about the long-tail effect. Hopefully, I am wrong. FYI – See my thoughts here:...
  • Jc: Yeah when you’re talking about Google, they already have a large set of randomly sampled statistics on user behavior from their tests...
  • Art: Here are some observations I have so far. 1. Example: In my daycare campaign I have “jobs” as a negative phrase match keyword. When I do a...
  • George Michie: Dale, it will be fascinating to see how this plays out. I have to believe that it won’t result in a greater propensity for...
  • George Michie: Another interesting possibility: If users no longer scroll, but “just keep typing” does that mean that the click volume...
  • Dale Stokdyk: For me, it’s hard to believe the 3 second rule is enough — in my gut, I suspect impressions will increase. Also, I...
  • George Michie: Great point, JC, They made the comment during the press conference that they think* users will conduct more searches around the...
  • Jc: I think it will be very interesting what will happen to impressions and CTR. Based on the assumption that whatever Google does increases their...
  • George Michie: Dale it’s a great question. I wonder what fraction of searches actually happen from Google.com vs toolbars vs an iGoogle...
  • Dale Stokdyk: George, I use the Google Search Bar 99% of the time — I wonder about others? Was fascinating to watch the search results change...
  • George Michie: :-) Somewhat less so…Yahoo?…don̵ 7;t get me started :-)
  • Jc: Now my question is, do you share the same level of faith about Bing? Haha.

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