Last week we featured Part 3 of our 7-part series on PPC Budgeting Secrets, called Tracking Your PPC Budget II. We explored the Affiliate Custom ID (ACID) Tool, with special tips on how best to leverage this tool.
This week, in Part 4, we’re looking at dividing your PPC campaign budget across different markets.
Once you’ve set your PPC budget and ensured that the tools to monitor it are in place, you must decide how to distribute your budget across the different search engines. Each search engine is open to different markets, and has different market shares within each of those markets. So your PPC budget should be divided according to (1) the markets you are targeting, (2) the search engines that permit PPC in those markets, and (3) the respective market share of each of those search engines.
The first step in targeting a market with PPC ads is going through the top search engines in that market. Figure 3 below shows the top 5 search engines in two major English-speaking markets, the UK and Australia. There are two notable trends: First, Google is the predominant search engine in major English speaking markets. Second, Google is both the first and the second most popular search engine in both the UK and Australia; its country level search engine is number one and its .com engine is number two.
Operators who wish to leverage PPC as an acquisition channel should take note of two key observations from the table above:
Any PPC campaign that targets players in the UK should have the bulk of its budget invested in Google Adwords, because that is where the majority of search traffic is. However, there are also other large search engines in every market, and operators should invest a portion of their PPC budget that’s proportionate to those search engines’ respective market shares.
In markets where Google.com is the number two engine, marketers have to forgo investing part of their budget there. A major caveat to Google re-opening Adwords to online gambling is that it is open only to certain countries, and only to the Google engine specific to those countries – e.g. Google.co.uk or Google.com.au. Consequently, operators can only invest a PPC budget where a version of Google Adwords is open to online gambling ads once they have been accepted in those jurisdictions.
For example, in the UK, Google.co.uk holds about 78% of the market, and Google.com holds about 12%. Since gambling related ads are not permitted on Google.com, UK marketers might consider taking the 12% of their budget that they would have otherwise invested in Google.com, and putting it towards their campaigns on Google.co.uk, Yahoo or Bing.
Next Thursday, tune in to our blog again to find out all about PPC policies as they pertain to an iGaming pay-per-click campaigns.
- Mastering PPC Policies
- Using Adwords for Gambling Ads
- Part 3: Tracking Your PPC Budget II
- Part 2. Tracking Your PPC Budget
- Part 7: Recapping PPC as an Acquisition Strategy
Only one person has bet so far, the action's to you
on this Article
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }