Tips To Maximize PPC profitability

Tips To Maximize PPC profitability

In some cases, adjusting your bids might not be enough for your business. For these situations, you should consider decreasing your sales. This sounds counterintuitive, I know, but hear me out. By making each sale significantly more profitable, you need fewer sales to boost your overall profits and ROAS.

There are two main ways you can actually decrease sales whilst still raising overall profitability. Remember that turnover is vanity, but profit is sanity!

Raising product prices to increase profits

It may sound obvious to some advertisers and alarmingly risky to others, but actually increasing product prices can lead to higher profitability if done correctly.

An ecommerce client of ours was complaining about keeping up with the demand of their main product online, they were very busy manufacturing the product (luxury coats) and had to stop selling certain colors and sizes due to popularity. We raised prices of the coats by 70%, and the number of sales fell by just under 43%, a huge improvement to their bottom line overall.

Clearly, raising prices generates more profitability per sale, but when other costs are factored in you could actually triple the profitability with just a small overall price increase:

Raising prices has a negative effect on the number of sales overall giving a profit vs. price relationship as shown below:

Setting prices too high will stop any sale from happening, too low and you could spend more on advertising and other costs than actual revenue generated.

What we’re after in this case is the magical sweet spot of price profitability vs. conversion rate, i.e., the highest point on the CPC vs. profit curve.

Tweaking prices is, therefore, a great way of optimizing an individual product and you now see dynamic pricing across many limited-service industries such as flights, hotels, and taxi apps.

Raising average order values to increase profits

For some mass manufacturers, B2B product sellers or bulk drop-shippers, there’s a catch-22 situation when it comes to the Google or Bing Shopping platforms:

• You can openly sell products on your website. This enables shopping campaigns, but your product prices must be shown on the website, and you may get many smaller orders from the general public.
• You can sell products only to registered or approved website users. This blocks shopping campaigns from being available (prices must be public for shopping campaigns to exist), but your product prices are hidden, and you can set minimum costs for an entire order.

Our client wanted the best of both worlds. They wanted maximum traffic and exposure on Google and Bing Shopping, but at the same time, they wanted to discourage time-wasters with orders of only one or two products.

Here, product delivery overheads are very similar if a customer wants one item or as many as 20 items, thus making really small orders non-profitable.

The solution to this problem was to increase the average order value (AOV) by reducing bids on keywords, ad groups, and shopping product groups if they fell under a certain level:

Bid adjustments were not applied when the AOV was over a highly profitable threshold (£50 in this case), and they were applied in a negative linear fashion when under the value.

The minimum bid adjustment was set to -80% in order to keep ads within the first page of results more often and to not totally kill off any product bids.

The results from this were impressive in many ways for our client:

• The average number of deliveries decreased, lowering internal delivery costs
• Less administration work was needed, improving the quality and speed of admin tasks
• Total delivery times were shorter, leading to an increase in positive customer reviews
• Average order value increased, raising the average return on ad spend

Read more Good ways to improve PPC quality