The Finch Blog

• 

Details

Published on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 17:18

Written by Jason Lowry

Bjorn Espenes was recently featured as a guest blogger on Certified Knowledge, a website covering online marketing topics. Bjorn didn’t pull any punches when he wrote about the controversial topic of click funnels.

In short – Bjorn gives 4 reasons why click funnels, also known as assisted clicks, are a waste of your money and that it’s better to dedicate the money toward something that has been proven to work – pay per click optimization. If you have extra money to spend for clicks, then just raise your CPA/CPV targets.

Read the article now on the Certified Knowledge Blog.

 

• 

Details

Published on Thursday, 16 February 2012 03:00

Written by Finchbot

If Finch is the smartest PPC company, then who is the smartest PPC guy at Finch?

Did you say Bjorn Espenes? An excellent guess! Bjorn understands how profitable pay per click management can greatly improve your bottom line. Bjorn is a pay per click expert, and he also understands how a business is run. Bjorn has founded and run several businesses.

Did you say Eric Maas? Another excellent guess! Eric is a serial Internet entrepreneur and is the brains behind how Finch delivers its amazing performance. Eric has been the CTO and chief architect of systems capable of automating millions of online transactions.

The smartest PPC guy at Finch isn't actually one of the founders: It’s Finchbot! Finchbot is the artificial intelligence that powers Finch’s pay per click management software. Finchbot can analyze millions of keywords daily to accurately predict the cost of your next click – resulting in the most conversions possible. Plus, unlike Bjorn and Eric, Finchbot never sleeps, never takes a break, and never takes time out for a beer.

 

• 

Details

Published on Thursday, 09 February 2012 09:34

Written by Jason Lowry

Just like Filipino-native and world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao knocks out his competition, Finch delivers a beating to other pay per click engines and is now in the Philippines.

Another video presentation from Pan Asian Ventures explains the following:

• How Finch’s pay per click management services work
• The information you’ll receive as part of the complementary audit of your pay per click campaigns
• What to expect from Finch after signing up

 

• 

Details

Published on Monday, 06 February 2012 09:45

Written by Jason Lowry

Have you heard of Balut? It’s a delicacy that you can get in the Philippines. Guess what else you can get in the Philippines? Finch - the automated solution for PPC optimization, not some kind of exotic dish. Thanks to Terry Haas and Pan Asian Ventures, Finch now has an authorized reseller in the Philippines.

Pan Asian Ventures put together an introduction that sums up what Finch PPC bid management software does into a short 2-minute video. Enjoy!

 

• 

Details

Published on Friday, 27 January 2012 10:30

Written by Bjorn Espenes

How do you make clicks profitable, and how do you multiply profits? So simple to say, but so incredibly hard to do. Or is it?

When it comes to the performance of your budget for Google AdWords campaigns, there are endless theories, strategies, and philosophies published and religiously followed. Many of these (like click funnels) are logical explanations of what happened in the past, but damaging to act on. (A separate blog post on why click funnel is the friend of the consultant and the enemy of the advertiser is coming soon.)

There are some factors that have a lot of impact and many factors that simply don’t make a difference. One of the things that can potentially be a game changer for you is overlooked by close to 100% of the new clients we meet. That one thing is Cost per Value optimization (Value may be revenues, gross margin, profit, or whatever else you choose to track with the Value variable). Clients may know the revenues resulting from the ad spend (If you don’t, time to wake up and smell the coffee!) but have no means of acting on it to make it better.

Here is an example using CPA (cost per acquisition):
A travel site is measuring the success of their campaign by CPA.

• Their target is EUR 50 per conversion.
• The prices of their products vary from EUR 50 to EUR 11,000 (from discount airline tickets to complete travel packages).

With their target at EUR 50 per conversion, every sale is worth EUR 50 to them. See the problem?

• When they sell a EUR 50 product, they lose money.
• On the flip side, they are most likely not bidding enough to get impressions for the keywords driving sales for the EUR 11,000 product.

By setting a fixed CPA target when you have a huge variance in prices on your site, you will, by default, favor selling more of the non-profitable products. In this example, the travel site is willing to pay 100% of their revenues to sell the low-end product with these likely results:

• They are very competitive for the low-end products.
• They do not get access to the traffic that buys the high priced items.

Unless you are tracking correctly within AdWords or Analytics, you most likely don’t know that this is happening. Your performance may look OK, but one part of the campaign may be subsidizing the other. Imagine what would happen if you take the poorly performing budget and apply it to the part of the campaign that is performing well? A real game change!

How do you act on the above? By tracking Value. You can use Value to calculate how much you are willing to pay per click, and you can re-allocate your budget to the performing part of the campaign. We call this Cost per Value (CPV).

Here is an example using CPV (cost per value):
The Travel site above has a 1% conversion rate on their site, so they are willing to pay EUR 0.50 per click to stay inside a EUR 50 target using the CPA model. Now let's see what happens if they move to a CPV model and are willing to pay 10% of sales for each conversion.

• For the low-end EUR 50 product, their cost for conversion goes down to EUR 5 (instead of EUR 50).
• The EUR 50 product gets a Max cost per click (CPC) of EUR 0.01.
• (With the CPA model, the Max CPC was EUR 0.50.)
• For the EUR 11,000 product, they are now willing to pay EUR 1100 for their high-end product (instead of only EUR 50).
• The EUR 11,000 product gets a Max CPC of EUR 11.
• (With the CPA model, the Max CPC was EUR 0.50, just like the lower end product.)

They are staying inside their cost target of 10% of the sale, and they are able to bid far more aggressively on the higher priced items.

What is the outcome? Increased profitability and increased revenues.

Take it one step further and leverage match type data into the equation, and you will most likely find that an Exact match click will convert 3-10 times more than a Broad match click. Maybe the max CPC for an Exact match click for the EUR 11,000 product will now have a max CPC between EUR 33 and EUR 110.

Additionally, in Travel as in most other highly competitive verticals online, the affiliate channel is driving a large percentage of the transaction volume. Affiliates usually do not have the ability to track Value and are paid on click-out or per conversion basis, making the competitive landscape and bid setting evolve around CPA. Imagine if you can re-write the rules and start acting on hard revenue data behind your bidding vs. flying half blind?

The above is a great example of why you want to optimize for Value if you can track revenues, gross margins, or profit from your Google AdWords campaigns. Doing this manually is not practical since you want to split out for match types, day of the week, or other variables that impact performance. The fact that keywords may drive both sales of EUR 50 products and EUR 11,000 products complicates things but is an even bigger argument for using a bidding engine like Finch for Google AdWords campaigns.

Want a game change for your AdWords performance? Do something that will have a big impact, and stop worrying about assisted clicks and other theoretically logical but challenging to act on strategies :)

 

• 

Details

Published on Wednesday, 25 January 2012 16:04

Written by Jason Lowry

Causality is a tricky thing. Causality tries to explain the relationship between the cause and effect of things.

After a recent snowstorm in Utah, a video of cars sliding down a steep hill went viral to be seen by over 1.4 million people in the first 4 days. In the video you’ll see the resulting slides, bangs, and crashes. First watch the video:

This video caused me to reflect on pay per click bid management and Google AdWords daily maximum budget.

This crazy event will result in an uptick of auto-related search queries over the next few days, weeks, and months. Look at the types of businesses that will be affected:

• Tow trucks
• Auto body shops
• Auto parts
• Mechanics
• Rental car agencies
• Tree trimming
• Fence repair
• Physical therapy
• Auto insurance
• Last, but certainly not least: Lawyers!

Every industry listed is a candidate for AdWords. And every industry already has competitors who are smart and are advertising on AdWords to help grow their business.

Back to causality: When an event like this occurs, is manually adjusting your daily maximum budget the first thing you think about? Of course not! My point is that you can’t see what’s causing the spikes; but you certainly don’t want to lose out on the additional business these spikes bring.

Rather than focusing on setting a daily maximum budget that can limit your potential, focus on understanding the cost targets that it takes for you to be profitable – then ditch the budget and allow Finch to get as many conversions as possible at those cost targets.

 

• 

Details

Published on Thursday, 19 January 2012 17:17

Written by Eric Maas

You probably noticed that Wikipedia recently had their 24 hour blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. If you're wondering what SOPA and PIPA are all about, I recommend that you read these 2 articles on techdirt: The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas and An Updated Analysis: Why SOPA & PIPA Are A Bad Idea, Dangerous & Unnecessary. These articles are very detailed and present a very solid argument against SOPA and PIPA, so I am not going to try to re-explain what these acts are and why they are generally a bad idea (since I agree with the stance the author is taking). What I want to do instead is explain why I personally take affront to SOPA and PIPA by talking about how it goes against everything I have ever done in my professional life.

I started my first Internet company while I was still in college. During the decade and a half since then, I have gone on to start 2 more Internet startups which have employed hundreds of people. I worked very hard on these three companies, but I have done nothing else professionally. In fact, I never even once considered interviewing or taking employment in another company. I have always felt lucky to have been born just at the precise moment that getting a computer science degree could be put to great fruition by creating business revolving around the magical Internet, which was just invented. This is what I was born to do, and it has always driven me.

I understand that my path is not a typical one. While there are a lot of people who have started companies like me, there are an even greater number of people who have not. The reason I just shared my professional history is that it directly relates to my perspective on why these acts are very scary propositions. I see SOPA and PIPA as an attack on the essence of what I do.

The part that gets to me the most about these acts is not what it could do to existing companies; including Finch (Yet I do not think these acts would directly affect Finch). I get most upset thinking about the business ideas that do not exist yet. Yes, I have only started three companies in about 15 years. The thing you have to realize though is that before each of them started, there were countless ideas explored by the co-founders and myself. There certainly were many, many more ideas explored than just three! I believe this is typical and that any Internet business founder will tell you: Lots of ideas are explored and tried before deciding on the one that is run with.

This period, the genesis of the startup, is a very fragile, creative time that is full of unknowns and wild imagination. Speaking as one who has been there before, this is a very difficult process as you are trying to pre-determine many things that are impossible to know yet: Do you have a viable idea; is the problem you are trying to solve the right one; are you on the right track with the solution to solve it; does the market exist or can it be created; can you monetize the idea into concrete and timely revenues; can you find the right people to help scale the company – the list goes on and on.

Right now the Internet is a wide-open medium providing almost infinite possibilities. My biggest problem with the SOPA and PIPA acts is that they suddenly limit the realm of possibilities. Starting a company is hard enough as it is. Imagine if every new idea you come up with now has to be considered against the implications of SOPA and PIPA. The way the government is proposing to deal with the Internet through these acts puts a huge damper on any new idea. You now have to be paranoid that the government or some corporation will squash you and your idea. This could happen in the beginning, or even scarier is that it happens later when you grow into something hugely successful, like YouTube.

I understand why the media companies support SOPA and PIPA. But just as LPs gave way to 8-tracks, which gave way to cassettes, which gave way to CDs, which gave way to MP3 – music has now evolved to the Internet. Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, and others like it are now the leaders. They make your life better through innovation on the Internet, whereas the old school media companies still want you to get in your car, drive to the mall, and buy a CD. I am a capitalist at heart and believe in the right to grow your business; however this should be done by providing the better product, not via strong arm tactics such as the SOPA and PIPA acts, which do nothing but protect entrenched businesses and their inferior products.

If you want to read more about the SOPA and PIPA acts and sign a petition against them, you can find more information on Google.

 

• 

Details

Published on Monday, 16 January 2012 17:47

Written by Greg Thoenen

Whether you are using a great PPC optimization solution like Finch or not, one thing that is absolutely essential to measure when doing online advertising is what revenue or value you are getting for the money you are spending. The most common way to do this is to implement some sort of conversion tracking on your website. In order to optimize our client’s accounts, Finch’s automated PPC tool looks at conversion tracking information from AdWords, including Google Analytics goals that are imported into AdWords.

There are a number of differences in conversion tracking between Google Analytics and AdWords, many of which Google has outlined at http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55610. Because of these and other differences, the conversion numbers from AdWords and Google Analytics for the same website rarely match exactly. One important difference not mentioned in that article, but mentioned in various blogs and support forum posts, is that Google Analytics attributes a conversion and its associated value to the day that the conversion occurs, while AdWords attributes the conversion and its value to the day of the last AdWords ad that was clicked by the user. If the user converts on the same day that they clicked on the AdWords ad, then things can appear the same. However, people will frequently come back at a later date after clicking on the ad in order to make their purchase, in which case you will see a difference in the AdWords and Google Analytics UI for the conversion numbers on those days.

When you think about why Google does this differently in their two tools, it does seem to make sense. The purpose of AdWords conversion tracking is to measure ROI on your AdWords ads, so recording the conversion alongside the click of the AdWords ad makes it easier to directly see the results of the spend on that click. On the other hand, Google Analytics is measuring the results of visits to your website, so attributing a conversion to the day of the visit on which the conversion occurred is a reasonable thing to do.

One aspect of this that we have not noticed anyone writing about (including Google) is what happens in this respect when Google Analytics goals (in this case, conversions) are imported into AdWords. As mentioned above, the two tools can attribute the same conversion and its value to different days, so when AdWords imports Google Analytics conversions, one might wonder (as we did) who wins, so to speak. Does Google import the Google Analytics data as-is, or does it perform some translation in order to report conversions the way the AdWords documentation says its conversion tracking works?

What we have noticed with our clients is that, at least at the time of this writing, Google translates the Google Analytics conversion tracking when imported into AdWords so that it matches AdWords’ way of attributing conversions to a particular date. When drilling down to the details of conversions from individual keywords both in AdWords and Google Analytics, we have seen many cases of a conversion occurring from a PPC ad for a given keyword showing up in the Google Analytics UI on a particular date, but showing up on the (earlier) date of the ad click in the AdWords UI after it is imported.

This is nice functionality from our perspective, as it means that taking conversion lag information into account as Finch does its Google AdWords optimization is the same, whether the conversions are being tracked in AdWords directly or being imported from Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with conversion lags and are not paying attention to them, please see our FAQ at http://www.finch.com/en/faq/16-faqitemproduct/26-whatarelagconversions.