Let’s have a dream scenario.  You have created a successful PPC campaign which is making you money and is cost efficient too. It is guiding you relevant people to your landing pages and is generally benefiting you making you profit. However, week by week, the number of clicks and conversion rate start to decrease and CPC increase. Why? You had a perfect PPC campaign but now it’s nothing? These are the the external factors which may affect your PPC campaign. Hopefully, alerting you of the following external factors will help you reduce the risk and chance of these factors affecting your campaign.

External factors are factors which you don’t have any control over. They can happen at any time and last for any amount of time too. For a PPC advertiser, they are a PPC campaign’s worst nightmare.

In previous weeks, I have spoken about how you can improve your campaign with small tweaks here and there. AKA, tell you how you can affect the internal factors to make your PPC experience that bit more successful. Yet, any external factor below can cause your campaign some serious harm so be prepared for the unexpected!

• Increased competition – This applies to those entering a niche market mostly. Increased competition will cause CPC (cost per click) to rise. There is not much you can do to stop this unfortunately. All you can do is budget for this change. When starting your campaign, budget a few extra cents or pence on your CPC to cover any varies or increases CPC may have.
• Decreased Demand – If demand for your keywords have decreased, you will get a lot less clicks even if CPC may have decreased as well.  Demand varies especially if your business evolves around the four seasons (i.e. an ice cream parlor won’t sell much in winter). The rule of thumb  is that demand always increases around Christmas time, so take advantage of it!
• Economy – This will sound unrealistic but the state of the economy will affect your PPC campaign. It all boils down to money. If people have less money, they will look for cheaper alternatives. The internet has been given a stereotype for being much cheaper than retail shops causing many people who would go to a shop to go online instead. This means, if people have money, they will go offline. Therefore, with the current economic climate, advertisers online are getting more traffic from those that are tight for cash. To be able to deal with this, you should prepare your campaign for those looking for a better and cheaper alternatives.
• Anomalies – These are glitches in your campaign which cause random results be it beneficial or not. Most of the time, there are no particularly accurate reasons for these ‘dips’ . You have to remember that as much as you want your campaign stats to be consistent, they never will be, make sure you are aware of that.

External factors link with an easy to do method of analysis which you can perform to improve your campaign. Grab yourself a pen and paper and try to answer the following questions about your PPC campaign:

PESTEL

• Political – Will your campaign be affected by political movements or changes to politics?
• Environmental – With people more worried about global warming and climate change, will this affect you?
• Social – Will changes to the social environment and society cause any disturbance to your campaign?
• Technology – With technology expanding rapidly, may that affect your business and advertising?
• Economic – Already explained above but will inflation/deflation affect you when it comes to PPC advertising?
• Legal – Will any legal rules affect the way you perform your advertising?

PESTEL is one of the most used ways to analyze the top external factors that can affect your business, in this case, your PPC campaign. If you can answer the above questions with a big fat no, you can be happy. But, the truth is that we are all constantly being affected by external factors be it little or large. Your reaction to change is what makes your PPC campaign successful or not.