Wealthy Affiliate Blog

Impact of Dollar Swings on PPC campaigns

October 30, 2008 – 11:11 am

As you may know, the USD has gained great strength against many of the other major currencies in the past months with fear of exports, global recession, commodity prices and other factors. A changing dollar can have major impacts on your PPC campaigns, so we though we would give you a head up as to how you can prevent this from negatively affecting your campaigns.

First off, a swing this quickly is not typical by any means. Carson and I both reside in western Canada, and the Canadian dollar has dropped 30 cents to the American dollar is just the last 60 days. Pretty amazing when you think about it!

Our once “par” dollar is no longer par, in fact it is worth much less.

Here is what this means in terms of our PPC campaigns:

A $1.00 bid is now only worth $0.78. Since Google and other SE’s deal with their PPC listings (on a competition basis) on the USD, fluctuations in other currencies can negatively affect ad position.

A once strong dollar would have gotten much better positioning when it was actually worth a dollar, not $0.78. Although your campaign may have a “great” Quality Score status, this has caused many positioning drop-offs within campaigns.

What should you do?

(1) Well to increase your ad positioning to its old “state”, you will need to increase your PPC prices. This has caused many advertisers to move positioning, so make sure you adjust your PPC prices in smaller increments ($0.05 - $0.10 at a time).

(2) Continue improving Quality Score. Quality Score is having more and more of an impact on your ad positioning. A great Quality Score can make the difference between a 1^st page listing and a 2^nd page listing. Obviously you will get much more traffic on the 1^st page!

(3) Compare your current position to that of your listings a month ago. Then work to gain your results back. If you are noticing a lower CTR, this is because your ads have moved down on the page. The 1-5 listings within the paid search results yield a much higher CTR than that of a lower listing. A low CTR means a low Quality Score…this can have some serious affects.

Here is some real data from one of my PPC campaigns.

Before: Sept 1-2nd campaign data:

Keyword 1, ad position 4.6 CTR 4.61%
Keyword 2, ad position 5.7 CTR 2.99%
Keyword 3, ad position 3.8, CTR 6.21%

After: October 27-28^th campaign data:

Keyword 1, ad position 6.3 CTR 2.22%
Keyword 2, ad position 6.5 CTR 0%
Keyword 3, ad position 4.8, CTR 3.42%

This is an average ad position differential of 1.23 and an average CTR difference of 2.72%. This is a HUGE difference and will definitely have an impact on our Quality Score and overall conversions.

There is some good news to take from this despite the higher PPC charges. The fluctuations are not exact to how much you will earn online. If you have a profitable campaign, you are now much more profitable. Since most affiliate companies and networks pay out in US dollars, it impacts your bottom line in a good way.

Now when I take $10,000 USD check to the bank, it is worth $13,000 CAD. This is a significant increase in earnings and outweighs the high click costs!! Just over a month ago my $10,000 USD was only worth $10,000 CAD!

Also, some great news if you are from the USA!

On the other end of the spectrum, as a dollar gains value, so does your ad positioning. If you have noticed a jump in traffic and a jump in CTR, this is because your ad positioning has been given a boost by the power of the US dollar.

This is a definitely a good thing. Traffic should be marginally cheaper and your ad positioning has likely increased by an average of a full position!

Lower CPC, higher ad positioning and higher CTR = Higher Quality Score and more money in your pocket!

PPC is a crazy world and the more you understand the “ins and outs”, the greater your chance of succeeding. We understand PPC and with over 2 million clicks from my Adwords account alone, I think I can safely say I understand a thing or two about PPC and how to optimize campaigns (Carson has an account just as large!).

In saying this, we are just a few weeks away from launching something within Wealthy Affiliate that is going to create expert PPC marketers. In this economy, there is still a lot of money to be made within the PPC world (don’t listen to naysayers) and we are going to help literally 1,000’s of people become PPC success stories.

Stay in tune with the PPC world and take advantage of what we teach at WA and you will become a success story too!

====> http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com

Have a great weekend and we will speak with you soon.

Take Care,

Kyle (& Carson)
The Wealthy Affiliates