Get success for low-conversion-volume accounts in AdWords

1. Define your goals :The first step to success is recognizing the need to be consistent in your approach and focus. This certainly applies to your campaign goals.

Now, as we all know, the most common goals will be related to conversion metrics (CPA, ROAS, Revenue and so on). However, with a low volume of conversions, we won’t see this as the most valuable metric to optimize to on a day-to-day basis. Instead, look at wider objectives that fall into the two following areas:

Brand awareness. If your main goal is to increase brand awareness, look at how much quality traffic you are attracting to your website. Your key metrics here will be Clicks and CTR. By focusing on nailing your audience strategy and ad copy (more on this later), you can monitor any improvements here.

Site engagement. Another way to optimize toward a specific goal would be to use site engagement as a way to gauge traffic quality. Google Analytics is your best bet here, allowing you to measure performance and optimize by focusing on the various engagement metrics available (see screen shot below). Even better, these metrics are available down to keyword level! This is a more sophisticated way of measuring user quality than just looking at AdWords metrics. For example, if your highest-traffic keywords have a 90 percent bounce rate, landing page improvements or some in-depth search query reports may be needed.

2. Consider alternative ways to track conversions

Okay, so you’ve set yourself some goals that relate to brand awareness and site engagement. Now, what about ways to be more creative with what you do actually track as a conversion?

Offline conversions. One of the reasons you may have a low volume of visible conversions in the AdWords interface could be that the majority of conversions happen offline (or in a place that isn’t trackable via standard AdWords conversion tracking). If this is the case, it’s possible to track offline conversions through GCLID imports from CRMs like SalesForce.

Telephone tracking. There are various ways to track telephone calls and import them into the AdWords interface. One of the best ways is through Google’s free call tracking tag that allows you to track users who call you after clicking through a PPC ad.

Google Analytics goals. You could also set up Goals in Google Analytics and import them into AdWords to track softer conversions like time on site, pages per session and so on. These may not be as valuable as a direct conversion but will give you much more data to play with, helping you discern where your more valuable and interested users are coming from.

3. Use campaign-level audience lists: What about audience targeting? I hear you ask.

If you’ve ever tried to have a granular Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) structure for your lower-volume accounts through applying multiple lists of different time durations and segments across your account, I’m sure you came across a similar problem. You decide to start applying bid adjustments across remarketing audiences, but you have no significant data to work with, and traffic is spread so thinly across your audiences that it’s impossible to rely on the data you’re seeing.

Luckily, Google has released a feature that I’m sure had been requested thousands of times: Campaign-level audience lists. For those of you with low-volume accounts, this is a life-saver, as you can now set up audience lists with catch-all long duration (max. 540 days) at campaign level, rather than at ad group level.

You may have very granular structures for your larger accounts (e.g., “Visited but not converted in the last 24 hours,” or “spent 2 minutes on site in the last 30 days” type lists), but this won’t fly with low-volume accounts. For a start, you need at least 1,000 users in a list to target them in the first place.

Once you have audiences applied at campaign level, you may need to wait awhile to see meaningful data, but be patient. Eventually, you’ll start to see clear trends (e.g., Do returning visitors have a better CTR? Are they more likely to perform softer conversions?), and you can then begin to apply calculated bid adjustments on these lists.

4. Use creative testing methods

I’m not going to lie here — everything is trickier with a low-conversion-volume account, but testing is especially difficult. Even on a high-volume account, I would expect a test to run for at least a month before generating significant results. Now imagine this on an account with only a handful of conversions each month and generally quite low traffic. I can feel myself aging just thinking about it!

You have a few different options here to make testing possible and slightly more manageable for those tricky low-volume accounts:

Controlled testing. The most obvious answer here would be to accept that a test may need to run for a long time before reaching significance.

Sequential testing. Another option that is less scientific/foolproof than controlled testing would be to run sequential tests (i.e., a control group for X amount of time and an experiment group after this for the same time period). Before anyone panics about this unscientific approach, I know that it’s not comparing like-for-like, and you will need to keep this in mind when analyzing results. However, if you are struggling for volume, this could be a good way to make some headway. Set your groups to the same time period, and make sure you’re not expecting any large changes in traffic or demand to avoid skewed results.

5. Optimize based on analytics data

I mentioned this earlier in the article, but Google Analytics will be a great support here. As well as the basic metrics available in the AdWords interface, you can use Google Analytics to access a huge range of data on your website’s users that you could apply to your PPC campaigns, too.

For low-volume accounts, it can be nigh on impossible to collect enough valuable data to apply ad scheduling, location bid adjustments, or even device bid adjustments. Rather than ignoring these or basing your decisions on an unreliable amount of data, why not hop back into Google Analytics and use some of the custom reporting metrics available there?

You can look at custom reports for all site visitors by hour of day or day of week, and then use the learnings to apply to your AdWords campaigns. For example, all site visitors convert best on a Tuesday morning, so let’s add an increased bid adjustment here in AdWords to capture these valuable users.

Again, it’s a little bit like sequential testing — it’s not totally scientific, but it can be a great way to optimize your account when you have low traffic or conversion volumes from AdWords itself.

Anuj Kumar : - Google adwords strategist & Consultant - www.click-adwords.com | PPC Expert India

Create a Profitable Google AdWords Campaign & Double Your Profit

Getting targeted traffic to visit our websites is the tricky part of internet marketing. We can have a brilliant product and an impressive website but it will all be for nothing if our site receives no visitors. We may have written the greatest sales letter in the history of marketing, but if nobody reads it, all our skill and effort will have been in vain. The number one issue here is simple; if we can bring targeted traffic to our website we will make money.

The most successful websites, the ones that draw the most money-spinning traffic, are the ones dedicated to a very specific and clearly defined niche. The traffic that arrives at such websites is often made up of people who arrive in the ideal frame of mind because they are driven by a very specific desire or need. The more precise your niche and the more precise your promotion the more precise will be the expectations of your website visitors.

It is often said that it takes money to make money; that you need to speculate to accumulate. When considering internet marketing strategies the one area where financial investment will definitely help, is in your promotion and advertising. Advertising makes people aware of your business and draws people to your website. If you get your advertising strategy right it is possible to bring a high volume of traffic to your website. Let's say that 3% of your site visitors make a purchase of your product which sells for $37. If the number of visitors is 100 you will sell 3 items making $111. If you have a flow of 500 visitors over that same period your income will be $555. It is obviously worthwhile spending some money on paid advertising to achieve this. Even if the advertising costs you $100 you are still $344 up on the deal.

Generating targeted traffic with Google AdWords, in the eyes of many marketers, gives the best value for money when it comes to generating leads. It is a scheme which gives complete control over expenditure as we can set the parameters of our sales strategy and ensure that we never stray inadvertently over our marketing budget. The system involves two steps; the first is to use the Google AdWords Tool to select the best keywords to use in our advertising. The second step is to set up the Pay-Per-Click advertising.

The amount each click will cost depends on the keywords we choose. We want to see our websites ranked as highly as possible on Google's search pages; the higher the ranking the more clicks we will get. More clicks equals more visitors; more visitors equals more sales and more money in the bank. The ideal is to get our sites on the very first page of Google. It is all a trade-off (as advertising always is). The price of our products has to be balanced against our advertising outgoings so that we end up in reasonable profit. It is possible to advertise for nothing via free articles (an approached I have used a great deal over the years) but bringing in targeted traffic with Google AdWords will do the job much more quickly.

Ensure that your keyword research is thorough and well thought out in order to get the best from the pay-per-click. Never skimp on this aspect of the process if you want to get the very best targeted traffic flowing to your website.

Google Adwords Consultant & Strategist Anuj Kumar : www.click-adwords.com | PPC Expert India