When I started playing football
back in 1989, I distinctly remember how proud I felt when the coach gave me my
first trinket on my helmet. It was a star because I contributed to one of our
wins that year. I also remember my older brother who had dozens of trinkets on
his helmet (similar to Ohio State players who have buckeye trinkets all over
their helmets) and I dreamed of the day I’d have a similar helmet.
Unfortunately, that day never
came… My youth program stopped giving kids trinkets because they said it wasn’t
fair to the kids who didn’t earn any trinkets. In other words, everyone on the
team had to be treated fairly regardless of their performance on the field.
Hey, I’m all for equality and fairness, but in sports, it doesn’t make any
sense. Teams must pay more attention and give more reps in practice to their
best players if they want to win. It’s that simple.
And the same
is true when it comes to managing Google Ads (AKA Google AdWords) campaigns.
You simply can’t treat all your campaigns equally. Instead, you have to be
ruthless if you want to maximize performance, and I’ll highlight this point
with a case study of one of our clients.
The Challenge & Our
Initial Analysis
One of our clients, a dentist
near Boston, MA, came to us after working with a previous agency for several
years. Performance was OK, but not great and they were shopping around to see
if we could improve their results.
As always, the first step was
to review the account to see if there were any opportunities for improvement.
Right away we saw a big
problem. There were 13 campaigns and the daily budget was exactly the same
for every single campaign. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like a big
problem except when you find that the number of conversions and cost per
conversion for each campaign was drastically different. That means the
campaigns were being treated equally, despite the fact that some campaigns were
outperforming other campaigns!
That would be like benching Tom
Brady for half the game in order to give his backup an equal amount of time on
the field. Again, that kind of fairness doesn’t make sense in sports or in
Google Ads management.
Plus, we saw lots of broad
match keywords, even though many of the conversions were being generated from
specific keyword phrases.
And lastly, we saw devices were
being treated equally because there were no device-specific bid adjustments.
That gave us the confidence we
could show some big improvements pretty quickly with this account.
Our Approach
You can probably guess what we
did, but just in case I’ll walk through the 3 primary edits we made.
First, we allocated the budgets
separately across the campaigns to ensure we were giving the most budget to the
best performing campaigns. This sounds so simple and obvious, but it’s often
overlooked because most people’s first inclination is to spread out budgets
evenly across campaigns.
Second, we identified the
keyword phrases that were generating conversions and added them to the account
as exact match keywords. This gave us even more control so that we could bid
more aggressively and tailor the ad copy specifically for these phrases. In
other words, we could pay close attention to our top performers and spend less
time and budget on the keywords that aren’t generating as many conversions.
And third, we added
device-specific bids. For some campaigns, we had to reduce the bids for
computers and/or tablets because mobile devices were outperforming them.
The Results
The graph
below tells the story far better than I ever could…
|
As you can see, the conversions
increased and the cost per conversion decreased as soon as we implemented the 3
changes highlighted above.
The month before we took over
the account, this client generated 10 conversions for a cost per conversion of
$152.46. The month we took over, June, our client generated 16 conversions for
a cost per conversion of $44.28. That’s an increase in conversions of 60%
and a decrease in cost per conversion of 71%!
Of course, you see fluctuations
month to month, but the general trend after we took over has been an increase
in conversions and a decrease in cost per conversion. This was primarily the
result of being ruthless in our ad management. Instead of treating all
campaigns, keywords, and devices equally, we systematically weeded out the
under-performers so we could focus our time and ad budget on the
top-performers.
Need Help with Google Ads?
Click here to request a quote for
Google Ads management services
No comments:
Post a Comment