When to Use an AdWords CPM Campaign
1) If your product is both brand new and unlike anything that’s already on the market, an AdWords CPM (not CPC) campaign can help you establish initial market awareness. Remember at this initial stage that your goal is awareness, and try not to get hung up on click-throughs and conversions.
Later, you’ll probably want to migrate to a CPC campaign. As part of that process, you can dual-purpose your CPM campaign to compare the pulling power of different versions of your marketing message. At this second stage, you’ll want to pay close attention to clicks.
2) If your web site was constructed poorly (hard to index) or your page content was composed without advance consideration of keyword selection and placement, you may need to use a CPM campaign to buy your way onto your prospects’ computer screens until you can get it fixed.
When to Use an AdWords CPC Campaign
AdWords CPC campaigns have two key advantages over AdWords CPM campaigns. First, CPC campaigns deliver campaign-specific keyword performance data, which can be used to improve the performance of your keyword selection, bid settings, ad copy, landing page, and overall site. Second, they can deliver stronger ROI, because you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. Use the data from your initial CPM campaign to construct the best CPC campaign you can, then let the data inform refinements aimed at optimizing ROI (Medicinal chemists will recognize this intersection of art, science, and iteration.).
Use CPC campaigns when you already have some CPM data to work with, and you can reduce your conversion event to a small transaction. If your conversion event is to schedule a demo for a $450,000 core facility megasystem, you won’t get many conversions. If your conversion event is to get an e-mail address in exchange for a written comparative cost analysis of the three most popular ways to prepare samples for such megasystems, your CPC campaign will be much more productive.
Take It In Stages
Getting an AdWords campaign to deliver strong ROI is harder than it looks. Of course Google wants your AdWords campaign to succeed, but their tutorials and other documentation are fractured and fragmented, and a lot of the information presented doesn’t even relate to the current AdWords interface. Getting your offer, your landing page content, your ad copy, your keywords, your negative keywords, and your bids in productive sync takes creativity, testing, analysis, and revision. And if you start with a CPC campaign, the relatively low search volume for life science products can make it difficult to collect enough useful data on impressions, click-throughs, and conversions to get an optimized campaign up and running quickly, even if you throw a ton of money at it. So don’t expect AdWords to start delivering cheap, qualified sales leads for your life science product on day one of your campaign.
Focus On Your Organic Search Results First
When you’re using any form of advertising to communicate to life scientists, you’re already starting at a deficit. Many of our customers in the life sciences like to think they already know what’s good for them, and that they’re too smart to be influenced by any form of advertising, including AdWords. Skepticism and resistance begin the moment they see your ad. The experience is much different for them, and much better for you, if your product information comes up in Google’s organic search results as a result of their own search activity. Put your on-page and off-page SEO practices into play before turning your attention to AdWords.
For help with life science laboratory product marketing, contact Matthew Wygant by calling (408) 905-7630 or by sending e-mail to matthew@wygant.net.
