Amy Bishop says, “Paid search is an industry that’s grounded in data and statistics, but one that requires practitioners who can exercise a healthy dose of common sense and intuition in building and managing their programs. Trouble can arise, though, when our intuition runs counter to the stats and we don’t have the systems or safeguards in place to prevent a statistically unwise decision.

Should you pause or bid down that keyword?

Consider a keyword that has received 100 clicks but hasn’t produced any orders. Should the paid search manager pause or delete this keyword for not converting? It may seem like that should be plenty of volume to produce a single conversion, but the answer obviously depends on how well we expect the keyword to convert in the first place, and also on how aggressive we want to be in giving our keywords a chance to succeed.

If we assume that each click on a paid search ad is independent from the others, we can model the probability of a given number of conversions (successes) across a set number of clicks (trials) using the binomial distribution. This is pretty easy to do in Excel, and Wolfram Alpha is handy for running some quick calculations”.

Coaxing smarter paid search bidding decisions out of sparse conversion data

Marketing Land

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