Scaling Your Profit

Now that we found love profit - what are we gonna do with it?

You have done a LOT of work to get to this point. And "this point" is where you ran your campaign yesterday (or last week) and it produced conversions. And you measured the marginal income from those conversions, and it was MORE than the cost of the clicks to generate those conversions.

Let's call this campaign your: baseline profitable campaign (BPC).

How many conversions? 100 would be nice. But we'll settle for 25. Some population of conversions and conversion types that are significant. In most cases, you'll be dealing with one conversion type (because your campaigns are so specific!), but maybe not.

Now. What are we gonna do with that profit? We're going to take that mini-success and see how we can scale it as far as we possibly can. We're going to leverage our success to as many Google searches - so long as it still retains it's profitability.

Carefully assess your success

The first step: Congratulate yourself and your team. That is a real accomplishment. It is akin to starting a new business and getting your first profitable day or week. A day (or week) of profitable conversions is a big deal.

While you're congratulating yourselves, take some time and analysis to understand what is working. Do a lot of research to understand the customers you've connected with (the ones with conversions). Maybe even contacting some of them individually to get as much feedback on what went RIGHT as possible. Are they new customers - or have you tapped into your existing customer base?

Talk to your customer service people. Your webmaster. Anyone involved. You have to work very hard to create this kind of success. You want all the details you can get. Look at the timing. Look carefully at the search terms (if you can get them from your Google reports). Look carefully at locations. Understand all the steps that happened on the way to your successful conversions.

Expand or Clone that Success?

We are trying to take that success and apply it to as many Google searches as we can. We can do that by expanding the campaign or by cloning the campaign. When we use the word "clone", we are referring to an exact copy of the campaign that has been modified to cover a market not handled by our baseline profitable campaign. We HIGHLY recommend cloning that BPC. And pursuing your "scaled profit" through the clones. Keep running your BPC pretty much as is so you can clearly track it's performance.

There are several reasons for this, but the most important one is that we want to continue to run that campaign exactly as it is and use it as a baseline for performance against which to compare our "clones". If we start making changes to our baseline profitable campaign, we will not have a way to see how that campaign performs over time. Without modifications.

Now let's try to scale that clone

Let's say your baseline profitable campaign (BPC) was designed for the Cleveland market. You create a clone for Chicago. Or you create separarate clones for the top 100 markets in the US. (CampaignBuilder makes these clones very easy to create and manage).

How do those campaigns compare to the baseline? Profitability continuing? Run it in all the markets. Not so sure how well it's doing in the south? Keep running clones for major markets and decide which ones are going to work well enough.

Geography is the (fairly) easy play when trying to scale a profitable campaign. Let's look at some others that require a little more thinking and campaign design.

• Ad Schedule: try running the clone campaign during different hours
• Keywords: try running the clone campaign for broader keywords that enable more matches
• Device types: try running the clone campaign for desktop and tablet