When you increase ad spend, it's common to discover your CPL goes up or your ROAS goes down. Here's why. Increasing our ad spend means we are targeting a larger audience. * This larger audience is higher up in the sales funnel, which means they aren't as ready to buy, which means they click on more ads and take longer to convert. * This larger audience is dominated by the big players. Competitors with a lot of money have the wiggle room necessary to over-bid on keywords because they're determined to win the click, so competing with them brings our CPC up. * The more we dominate the existing market, the less certain Google's algorithms will be when they show an ad. The algorithm is making educated guesses on when to try to go for the click, but when only a small portion of our audience is made up of low-hanging-fruit now the algorithm's guesswork becomes more fuzzy. We are bidding on less of a sure thing. * We are beginning to add "brand awareness" strategies in order to try to warm up the larger market. For example, a display ad that targets a proactive (meaning not remarketed) audience won't get many clicks, it will only get views for the most part. Big companies do this (for example Pepsi might buy a billboard even though it's expensive and doesn't contribute directly to their CPL), and it's a long-term effort to try to boost us over the competition by gaining familiarity with our brand near the top of the funnel.

When you increase ad spend, it's common to discover your CPL goes up or your ROAS goes down. Here's why. Increasing our ad spend means we are targeting a larger audience. * This larger audience is higher up in the sales funnel, which means they aren't as ready to buy, which means they click on more ads and take longer to convert. * This larger audience is dominated by the big players. Competitors with a lot of money have the wiggle room necessary to over-bid on keywords because they're determined to win the click, so competing with them brings our CPC up. * The more we dominate the existing market, the less certain Google's algorithms will be when they show an ad. The algorithm is making educated guesses on when to try to go for the click, but when only a small portion of our audience is made up of low-hanging-fruit now the algorithm's guesswork becomes more fuzzy. We are bidding on less of a sure thing. * We are beginning to add "brand awareness" strategies in order to try to warm up the larger market. For example, a display ad that targets a proactive (meaning not remarketed) audience won't get many clicks, it will only get views for the most part. Big companies do this (for example Pepsi might buy a billboard even though it's expensive and doesn't contribute directly to their CPL), and it's a long-term effort to try to boost us over the competition by gaining familiarity with our brand near the top of the funnel.

It's common for Facebook remarketing campaigns to struggle to acquire a large enough audience in order to run. Facebook says their minimum audience size for a pixel-generated audience is 1000. This means the Facebook pixel on your site needs to be able to match at least 1000 website visitors to Facebook users. What factors into this? **Match Rate** - Facebook doesn't reveal their average match rate (the rate at which website visitors can typically be matched up with Facebook users), and this likely varies greatly depending on the type of user who visits the site (do they tend to have Facebook accounts? Do they tend to reset their cache & cookies often?) as well as a number of other factors. **Pixel Age** - The pixel is only able to see website visitors in real time, which means it can't see people who visited before the pixel was added to the site. So, if you've had the pixel on the site for 6 months then it will have 6 months worth of website visitors to try to mach to Facebook users (as long as the settings inside the Facebook ad account are set to look back 6 months, which is the maximum amount of time Facebook allows a pixel to look back). So, the best thing to do is get the Facebook pixel onto the site early, make sure the settings inside FB pixel area are set to look back 6 months, and consider sending more people to the website with proactive (aka not remarketing) ad campaigns in order to populate that Facebook remarketing pixel audience.

It's common for Facebook remarketing campaigns to struggle to acquire a large enough audience in order to run. Facebook says their minimum audience size for a pixel-generated audience is 1000. This means the Facebook pixel on your site needs to be able to match at least 1000 website visitors to Facebook users. What factors into this? **Match Rate** - Facebook doesn't reveal their average match rate (the rate at which website visitors can typically be matched up with Facebook users), and this likely varies greatly depending on the type of user who visits the site (do they tend to have Facebook accounts? Do they tend to reset their cache & cookies often?) as well as a number of other factors. **Pixel Age** - The pixel is only able to see website visitors in real time, which means it can't see people who visited before the pixel was added to the site. So, if you've had the pixel on the site for 6 months then it will have 6 months worth of website visitors to try to mach to Facebook users (as long as the settings inside the Facebook ad account are set to look back 6 months, which is the maximum amount of time Facebook allows a pixel to look back). So, the best thing to do is get the Facebook pixel onto the site early, make sure the settings inside FB pixel area are set to look back 6 months, and consider sending more people to the website with proactive (aka not remarketing) ad campaigns in order to populate that Facebook remarketing pixel audience.

It is nearly impossible to increase your budget without thinning your profit margin, at least temporarily. This is because you're expanding the audience size, targeting less low-hanging-fruit, and pushing the algorithm to go into uncharted territory where it doesn't know who to target yet. We often recommend temporarily "leaning out" your account when trying to scale. Activities like this are helpful to preserve your profit margin while you're waiting for the algorithm to adjust to a higher ad spend: * Pause brand awareness campaigns like video shopping * Scale back brand campaign by reducing budget and or changing bid. * Find brand keywords that are taking money in the other search campaigns It becomes even more difficult when your account has maxed out its spend (meaning it reached its entire market/audience), because at that point the only options available to us is using a lower-spend outbound campaign (such as YouTube or display) can increase brand awareness and introduce your offering to a new audience. We recommend starting these campaigns with a lower budget to see how it affects the overall campaign performance. Your main campaign conversion driver campaigns should become more active as result of running these outbound campaigns, thus allowing us to increase the budget on the outbound campaigns incrementally.

It is nearly impossible to increase your budget without thinning your profit margin, at least temporarily. This is because you're expanding the audience size, targeting less low-hanging-fruit, and pushing the algorithm to go into uncharted territory where it doesn't know who to target yet. We often recommend temporarily "leaning out" your account when trying to scale. Activities like this are helpful to preserve your profit margin while you're waiting for the algorithm to adjust to a higher ad spend: * Pause brand awareness campaigns like video shopping * Scale back brand campaign by reducing budget and or changing bid. * Find brand keywords that are taking money in the other search campaigns It becomes even more difficult when your account has maxed out its spend (meaning it reached its entire market/audience), because at that point the only options available to us is using a lower-spend outbound campaign (such as YouTube or display) can increase brand awareness and introduce your offering to a new audience. We recommend starting these campaigns with a lower budget to see how it affects the overall campaign performance. Your main campaign conversion driver campaigns should become more active as result of running these outbound campaigns, thus allowing us to increase the budget on the outbound campaigns incrementally.

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities. Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience. The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules. ### Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed. ### Mobile Responsive This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website? Pretty annoying, right? Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience". Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales). ### Site Speed This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000. It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now. Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them. Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences. If you would like to check your current site speed and get suggestions on how to boost the speed, check out [this article](https://faq.sol8.com/faqs/how-important-is-it-to-have-a-fast-website-and-does-that-affect-ads). ### Privacy Policy A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category. Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information. ### Have A Physical Address On Your Site This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet. The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales. ### Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions. However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page. If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference. ### Have An Email Address Listed On The Site Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email. Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it. ## eCommerce Websites These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items. ### Have A Published Return Policy A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores. Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you). A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken? ### Have A Published Shipping Policy People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed. It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers. That was a lot! Don't worry though... These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors. Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities. Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience. The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules. ### Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed. ### Mobile Responsive This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website? Pretty annoying, right? Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience". Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales). ### Site Speed This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000. It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now. Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them. Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences. If you would like to check your current site speed and get suggestions on how to boost the speed, check out [this article](https://faq.sol8.com/faqs/how-important-is-it-to-have-a-fast-website-and-does-that-affect-ads). ### Privacy Policy A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category. Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information. ### Have A Physical Address On Your Site This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet. The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales. ### Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions. However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page. If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference. ### Have An Email Address Listed On The Site Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email. Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it. ## eCommerce Websites These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items. ### Have A Published Return Policy A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores. Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you). A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken? ### Have A Published Shipping Policy People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed. It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers. That was a lot! Don't worry though... These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors. Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.

Technically, you’ll start to see results right away; however, it takes about 90 days for a campaign to “normalize” to the point of understanding how it will perform long-term. In other words, we pour a whole lot of strategy into building your campaign — but the magic really happens after a few weeks of data analysis and optimization. You're probably already aware that we are very transparent on how long it takes to see results from your PPC campaign. Our goal is to provide you with realistic expectations, rather than selling you the moon. This is for the benefit of both agency and client to ensure both a highly effective and professional working relationship. ### The 90 Day "Rule of Thumb" ### All PPC campaigns that we run start broad, on purpose. We start by identifying every possible keyword, ad copy and landing page destination that is relevant to your goals. We gather this data from performing a competitive analysis, research and traffic amount estimates by keyword. While we may not know what is going to be the perfect ad copy, keyword, landing page, etc., it's our job to make sure that we include and test each asset and work to optimize the assets that are producing the most amount of conversions for the lowest cost per conversion. During the first 90 days, we will be gathering data in the form of results. Some Ad Groups and Keywords are going to generate conversions and some are not, this is why campaign optimization is so important. ### How do we "Optimize" the campaign? ### When you hear the term "optimization" that means that we are going to work towards generating more conversions for less cost per conversion. These results will be more frequent the more data that we collect. We work off of a base 100-point data set when performing optimizations. What this means, is that when there are 100 points of data for an action, whether that be impressions, clicks, conversions, or simply the most appropriate data point for a particular campaign, we make a decision on what to do with that asset. For example, if we see a group of keywords in an Ad Group that all have 100 impressions, we are going to look to see what has the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) and place more spend towards those higher-relevant keywords. Then, once each keyword generates 100 clicks, we are going to look to see which keyword resulted in the most amount of conversions, and place more spend in the keywords that have generated the most amount of conversions. There are many more data points that are taken into consideration when talking about optimizations, but this will help you understand how optimizations work in the most basic form. We also listen to every phone call that is generated from the campaign to ensure that when the phone rings, its a relevant person ready to talk to you on the other end. The results of these phone calls, directly affect the optimizations of your campaign, since we manually count those as conversions so we can identify which campaign is generating the most amount of relevant phone calls. ### What You Can Expect In The First 90 Days ### Within the first few days of the campaign launch, you will experience real results, however, it will not be the most optimized results. The conversions may be a bit more expensive in the beginning, or they may not be as frequent as you may like them to be, but rest assured, with each passing day, the campaign is going through changes to see those results increase. The first second month will be better than the first and the third month will be better than the second. We will be reaching out to you very frequently and checking in on the quality of the conversions, plus giving you insight as to what optimizations have been made and what future optimizations we are planning to make in the near future. Each month, you will receive a detailed report, extracted directly out of your AdWords campaign that we will review together. We review all data together so that you can offer your feedback regarding our strategies. There may be times where we rely on you as a subject matter expert and we truly value your input. ### In Summary... ### While there are very few campaigns that launch perfectly optimized, we do need time to assess where the conversions are coming from and make changes to the campaign to spend more ad spend in the Campaigns and Ad Groups that are performing well. Our goal is to deliver to you a very high performing campaign within the first 90 days. If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

Technically, you’ll start to see results right away; however, it takes about 90 days for a campaign to “normalize” to the point of understanding how it will perform long-term. In other words, we pour a whole lot of strategy into building your campaign — but the magic really happens after a few weeks of data analysis and optimization. You're probably already aware that we are very transparent on how long it takes to see results from your PPC campaign. Our goal is to provide you with realistic expectations, rather than selling you the moon. This is for the benefit of both agency and client to ensure both a highly effective and professional working relationship. ### The 90 Day "Rule of Thumb" ### All PPC campaigns that we run start broad, on purpose. We start by identifying every possible keyword, ad copy and landing page destination that is relevant to your goals. We gather this data from performing a competitive analysis, research and traffic amount estimates by keyword. While we may not know what is going to be the perfect ad copy, keyword, landing page, etc., it's our job to make sure that we include and test each asset and work to optimize the assets that are producing the most amount of conversions for the lowest cost per conversion. During the first 90 days, we will be gathering data in the form of results. Some Ad Groups and Keywords are going to generate conversions and some are not, this is why campaign optimization is so important. ### How do we "Optimize" the campaign? ### When you hear the term "optimization" that means that we are going to work towards generating more conversions for less cost per conversion. These results will be more frequent the more data that we collect. We work off of a base 100-point data set when performing optimizations. What this means, is that when there are 100 points of data for an action, whether that be impressions, clicks, conversions, or simply the most appropriate data point for a particular campaign, we make a decision on what to do with that asset. For example, if we see a group of keywords in an Ad Group that all have 100 impressions, we are going to look to see what has the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) and place more spend towards those higher-relevant keywords. Then, once each keyword generates 100 clicks, we are going to look to see which keyword resulted in the most amount of conversions, and place more spend in the keywords that have generated the most amount of conversions. There are many more data points that are taken into consideration when talking about optimizations, but this will help you understand how optimizations work in the most basic form. We also listen to every phone call that is generated from the campaign to ensure that when the phone rings, its a relevant person ready to talk to you on the other end. The results of these phone calls, directly affect the optimizations of your campaign, since we manually count those as conversions so we can identify which campaign is generating the most amount of relevant phone calls. ### What You Can Expect In The First 90 Days ### Within the first few days of the campaign launch, you will experience real results, however, it will not be the most optimized results. The conversions may be a bit more expensive in the beginning, or they may not be as frequent as you may like them to be, but rest assured, with each passing day, the campaign is going through changes to see those results increase. The first second month will be better than the first and the third month will be better than the second. We will be reaching out to you very frequently and checking in on the quality of the conversions, plus giving you insight as to what optimizations have been made and what future optimizations we are planning to make in the near future. Each month, you will receive a detailed report, extracted directly out of your AdWords campaign that we will review together. We review all data together so that you can offer your feedback regarding our strategies. There may be times where we rely on you as a subject matter expert and we truly value your input. ### In Summary... ### While there are very few campaigns that launch perfectly optimized, we do need time to assess where the conversions are coming from and make changes to the campaign to spend more ad spend in the Campaigns and Ad Groups that are performing well. Our goal is to deliver to you a very high performing campaign within the first 90 days. If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

FAQs - Solutions 8

Why is my profit margin becoming thinner as we scale?

When you increase ad spend, it's common to discover your CPL goes up or your ROAS goes down. Here's why.

budget strategies CPL profit margin ROAS

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Why isn’t the Facebook remarketing campaign running?

Facebook remarketing

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How do we spend more without diminishing profit margin (i.e. lowering ROAS or increasing CPL)?

Here's how and why we often recommend "leaning out" an ad account.

increasing budget Patience FAQs profit margin Why Sol8

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Is my website ready for PPC ads?

Here are the top 10 things to make sure your website complies with in order to prepare for running ads.

conversion rate optimization website website speed

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How long will it take to see results? / What does a "90-day learning phase" mean?

Technically, you’ll start to see results right away; however, it takes about 90 days for a campaign to “normalize” to the point of understanding how it will perform long-term.

learning phase Optimizations Patience FAQs Why Sol8

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How long will it take to build my campaigns?

10-12 business days.

Patience FAQs Why Sol8

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Why is my profit margin becoming thinner as we scale?

Why isn’t the Facebook remarketing campaign running?

How do we spend more without diminishing profit margin (i.e. lowering ROAS or increasing CPL)?

Is my website ready for PPC ads?

How long will it take to see results? / What does a "90-day learning phase" mean?

How long will it take to build my campaigns?