One of my favorite metrics to show to a Client is how a penny can save someone’s job, give people a bonus or help the company be a lot more profitable. Now with that said, the thing I am leaving out is that you have to be running a fairly substantial Google Adwords account with a decent amount of traffic. Suppose you are the person in charge of the PPC campaigns at your company. You walk in knowing that the company needs help with saving some money but they cannot pull out of their ad spend because that is what is driving in their sales. So what can you do behind the scenes that will not only help them to save money while keeping the same or increasing traffic volume and also possibly help to save someone’s job by the additional savings? Look at your quality score in AdWords.
If you are driving over 1,000,000 people a year (This could be a lower volume if you have more expensive keywords. 1,000,000 is an easier number to look at so that is why I am using it for this example.), each penny costs your company $10,000. Many companies are driving more than that or are spending more per click on their adwords campaigns because of obvious flaws within their strategies that cause them to have lower quality scores and in turn have to pay more for each click. If you’re driving over 1,000,000 clicks each year and you can reduce the spend by a few cents while keeping sales consistent or increasing your quality score by adding in more relevance and better landing pages, you’ll not only be saving the company $10,000 per penny, but that could help keep someone employed because of the savings. The other option is that it could give you and your company some extra budget to invest into another high performing channel which may result in more sales and then helping to keep multiple people employed. So how do you go about increasing your quality scores and beginning to reduce your spend. This will depend on who you talk to.
A Google rep. will always talk about your click through rate because Google wants your money! Screw the click through rate in the beginning because if you are not converting than why increase the traffic? You’ll lose more money and Google will make more which is good for Google but not always good for you. That helps no one but Google. Here are some of the things that I look at and work with when I need to increase my quality scores. (This is not everything, just a few of the places I start).
1. Your actual ad groups.
One of the most important things to look at are your adgroups. Do you have a ton of terms in them or are all of your terms off of the same base root words? By using words that all have the same root, then ensuring that they can all be written into your ads and pulling out keywords that don’t have that root phrase you begin to add some relevance and quality into your group. Try to use the root phrase without too many extensions and build out a separate group for those other terms which are similar but not virtually the same. Then you look at your ad copy.
2. Your ad copy.
Does your ad copy relate to your ad group? Try to tie in each keyword from your ad group into your ad copy. This not only ads the relevance to the keywords, but it also helps to bold them so that they become more visible when a search for that phrase is done, if you want them to be visible. The thing to remember is to not keyword stuff or make an ad that reads funny. You should try to keep it user friendly as well and may want to avoid dynamic inserts, especially on the top line.
3. Landing pages.
Take a look at your landing pages. What is working and what isn’t. Do your keywords appear on it? Do people click through or leave? What causes them to leave? Does the imagery match your ad copy and keywords? What could be causing it to not convert. By getting your landing pages to convert better you’ll not only be ready to work on your click through rates but you’ll also be making more money or getting more sign ups with the increase in conversions. You’ll also want to look at your load time, etc…
4. Click through rates.
Since the Search Engines make more money when more people click through, Click Through Rate plays a large part in your quality score. What you need to remember is that even if your click through rate increases substantially, if your traffic isn’t converting than you are not making more money and may be spending more for a sale. On the other side though, in the short run you may be spending a lot more but if your average CPC is reduced enough because of the increase in quality score when your history catches up, you may actually be spending a lot less per sale in the long run. This is going to be a hard one to explain to your company when they are losing more money and spending more to get the same results. You’ll need to pull up other examples, etc… to help show how history has to build before your CPC drops enough to spend less per sale even though you are spending more right now. You also need to have proof that your competition is paying half or even less per click than you are so that you can show your boss what the goal is and what the results you are shooting for are.
5. History.
Adwords is all about delivering a great user experience. If the users aren’t happy then they try other engines which means you aren’t able to show as many ads since you are causing the search engine to lose traffic. You need to give your campaigns some time to build upon themselves in order to show how the end users are reacting to them. You may have to spend a lot at first but as your quality score increases and your conversion rates grow, your campaigns will build history and tell the search engines that your campaigns provide a great user experience and that the search engine should show your ads more often and for less money because you are providing relevant ads and products to their search terms. History can take a while to build and if you are constantly adding new groups or modifying and changing your current groups, you could damage your history You’ll need to keep a record of your changes, besides the view change history, so that you can show your clients or boss what has and does not have history so that they know what they should be looking at and what is not relevant to this argument right now.
One penny can make the difference between someone getting hired or fired or people getting a bonus. If you have a 6,000,000 visitor a year campaign and you can decrease the cpc by one cent, you have now saved your company $60,000.00 per year. That is a salary or money that can be used to run new marketing channels to increase sales and increase the company’s bottom line. Think about how you can help to save the company that one cent and maybe you’ll be the next hero when management meets to talk about budgets. One penny does make a difference, especially when you are talking about PPC Marketing.
