Reviewing my Adwords Strategy
-
Before I started working on Organic SEO, I did Adwords. Being that I am entirely self-taught with adwords, I am concerned that about what I might not know. From time to time I have looked for outside advice, but I never got very far. It seemed that I would be talking to a salesman, someone who knew less than me, or someone who was horrified that I had 7,500 tracked words. So I am presenting my methods here for comment.
Each keyword I have used is placed into an exact match campaign, phrase match campaign, and broad match campaign. Exact match gets the highest bid, broad match the lowest. Every week, I cull new keywords from phrase and broad results. I also create negative keywords each week based on searches that are obviously not looking for my products. Over time, I get very few searches triggered from broad matches. Keywords are kept in ad groups that generally have less than 6 keywords. Acceptable conversion costs are decided based on product category. I have made an assumption that first position adwords results are too expensive (idiots overpay for them). I automatically reduce my bid 10% on any ad that has an average position of greater than 1.5. I automatically reduce my bid 10% on any ad that has a conversion cost greater than my target. I delete keyword that have a CTR below 1%. I generally require 300 clicks to make a determination.
All ads have been endlessly split tested to the point I don’t split test them much now. I judged ads for both click through rate and conversion rate.
End result: After 4 years of doing this, conversion costs are below target costs. Not sure what else I could do to improve it, but looking for ideas. Management of the system is pretty easy now, as well.
Anything I am missing?
-
Hey Eugene! Yeah that is a common problem with Retargeting campaigns...it can be tricky to set them up properly so that you are removing people from your cookie pool once they convert. I'd say only about half of all advertisers do this correctly so that is why you continue to see ads even after you convert.
With keeping that in mind, I still believe that the benefits of retargeting far outweigh the negatives. I can tell you that the majority of the people who sign up for free trials with us every week have at least been exposed to one of our retargeting banners. Not all of them will directly convert off of the banner but the brand impression has a value that shouldn't be underestimated.
-Justin
-
Thank you for your reply. I gave a more extensive feedback to the previous message. I have seen the retargeting options and had not tried them. I will look at these closer. I always must remember that the way I search is not the way the average person searches. I get retargeted by ads and usually find it funny that I am being marketed for services I have already received. I personally make buying decisions within 48 hours of my initial search. Targeting ME after that is a waste of time.
-
Thank you for your reply.
I have generally found much more cost effective conversion rates when I am not trying to get the first position. I still GET the first position a lot, I just reduce my bid on it until I average below 1.5
It is an interesting idea to me to delete keywords based on quality score instead of CTR. I had not done this because I have had some low quality score words that were converting well. I understood that CTR effected quality score and that overall account CTR can have an effect.
I have not done much with conversion optimizer. I seemed to have trouble with this as I had so many keywords that getting statistically significant data was tough.
I have only use GeoTargeting for the regions I sell to. I have not used day parting. I guess it is possible that behavior changes based on the time of day, I am just not sure why it would do so. I have tried display campaigns, but only using contextual keywords. I will look at this again. I n the past, I was not able to get good conversion costs on contextual ads. I have wondered if display ads can create a branding effect that is not measured.
-
I agree with most of John's points. I always hesitate to start thinking in absolutes when dealing with PPC campaigns since they really should be something that you are constantly managing and tweaking. Remember that searchers can experience fatigue if you are no longer testing ads and may ignore your ads over time if they just see the same thing over and over. I like to constantly be testing to make sure that you are running the best possible ads.
One other thought...are you doing any retargeting/remarketing? If not, I would definitely recommend it. A retargeting campaign that is set up properly will be a great compliment to a PPC campaign. It gives you a chance to get your display ads in front of non-converting clicks from your PPC campaign.
Hope that helps!
-Justin
-
First, have you tested whether first position ads convert well enough for you? You described that as an "assumption", which you could test to see if it's true or not. Even if the cost per conversion is higher, the larger volume of customers may make up for it. Generally, if there are people competing for the top spots, they are making money off the ads.
I'm a litle wary of having hard and fast rules for changing bids and deleting keywords. For changing bids, I like to look at a fair amount of historical data to see how the conversion rate has been trending. It could just be a bad week or a bad month? After doing this for 4 years, you probably are aware of any seasonality that exists in your business that may apply to different keywords or ad groups. For deleting keywords, I look a lot at the quality score. There are some queries that users for whatever reason don't like to click on ads, so CTR might not be the best indicator that a keyword is bad, if it has a decent quality score.
There are a lot more features to Adwords you may or may not be taking advantage of. Have you tried any geo-targeting, language targeting, device targeting, or day parting? Have you tried conversion optimizer in any campaigns? Do you have any display network campaigns? There are lots of different targeting options for display campaigns beyond contextual keyword targeting.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Partial Website Translation - Strategy Debate
Hi We have a travel site with over 3000 pages in English. Of these around 200 relate to products and the rest are content articles, most of which with very low traffic. Certain products and pages appeal directly to users in different languages (around 20-30 out of 200 for each language). We are debating how to go about translating these pages... If we did "oursite.com/es/product", "oursite.com/de/product", etc then users entering the site on these translated pages from Google would be limited to seeing a very cut down site, bearing in mind most speak English and would also be able to interact with our English language content we are probably losing out. Also, if we detected user language on entry, we would show effectively hide most of our product and content from users. Any suggestions or ideas about how to go about this without losing engagement/conversions/creating a mess?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ben100010 -
Best Practices: Mobile & Desktop Ad Design for Adwords?
Is it possible to have Google Adwords display different page versions according to whether an advertisement will be displayed on a mobile or desktop device? We are a commercial real estate brokerage based in New York City. Most converting website use desktop rather than mobile. We are considering advertising on Google Adwords. Is it possible to have Google serve a more elaborate form of desktop landing page but have Google serve a stripped down version to mobile users? The stripped down version would be created using Instapage. From a technical perspective how would we create a more elaborate desktop version and have Google distinguish between the two? In our experience, mobile converts much less. How much less should we bid for keywords displaying on mobile? Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Using my Adwords budget
Hi, I have a huge budget for adwords but I only seem to be using about 1/10 of it daily. How to I go about using more budget but also keeping my conversion costs and % around the same? And should each campaign have its own set of unique keywords? Should these keywords never appear in more than 1 campaign? Any tips on maximising budget and increasing conversions would be great. Thanks
Conversion Rate Optimization | | YNWA1 -
PPC Bid Strategies for Adwords PLA Campaign
I am managing a Google Adwords Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaign. The campaign is granular and specific in that each product is targeted via its corresponding ad groups. The structure of the campaign is : Campaign->500 Ad Groups (each ad group targeting a unique product selected by "product_id". I would like to get some ideas and feedback on bidding strategies. The granular structure of the campaign allows me to set a different Default Max CPC and a Max CPC for each unique product. I am unable to find within Adwords a column that shows what the competition is bidding. Is there a methodical procedure to extract this bidding information? I have recently enabled "Search Impression Share" and "Search Impression Lost (IS Rank)", but there is not enough data yet for those stats. What do the PPC experts have to say?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | amitramani0 -
Inheriting Adwords account and establishing baselines
Hi guys! I'm a complete newbie to the Adwords/PPC world. Right now I've been put into the situation where I'm in charge of my company's adwords account, but I'm trying to figure out the baselines and KPI's. I'm currently going through PPC Hero's resources, but I just wanted to reach out to the SEOMoz community for those people who are doing paid search in-house for their own companies. Right now, I haven't done much to our account other than add/delete a few keywords, and pause few campaigns that weren't relevant anymore, as well as some light reporting. What have you done in terms of an action plan to start moving the meter for your own respective companies whilst inheriting accounts? Would appreciate any resources that have helped you get a stellar ROI for your own companies! Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | will_lam0 -
Adwords Tracking
Hi, With Adwords conversion tracking is it worth allow Analytics data in as well? Does that confuse the adwords tracking data? Does it only include Analytics data that has been set up for conversion tracking? I hope i am asking the right questions 🙂
Conversion Rate Optimization | | wood1e19680 -
Question On Product Review Video Production
We are looking to make reviews of many of the products we have on site (staff reviews). The only problem I am having is our products are not stored at our office (nor can they be as they weigh hundreds of pounds and are super expensive to ship). So what would be a good solution to show in the video? Should we just do a slide share of still shots of the products with a voice overlay or try something more of a hybrid that uses a whiteboard? The products themselves cater to gardeners and the DIY crowd so it doesn't need to be super involved.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Would a feed of reviews from Tripadvisor be duplicate content?
I have a hotel directory. I am thinking of adding a feed that takes reviews of hotels from Tripadvisor and puts them on my site. I know that Google are cracking down on duplicate content with the Panda update. Would these reviews be seen as duplicate content and could it harm my site if I do this?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | mascotmike1