Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 4: Rotate Indefinitely

You should have 4 ads per ad group running at a time. That way you’re able to:

  1. test which ad gets the best response
  2. delete the losers
  3. and create some new ads to test again. Rinse and repeat.

This process of constantly testing lets you find the absolute best ad for your market, and is absolutely required to get the most bang for your buck.

There is a problem with the way the ads Google rotates your ads. By default, Google Adwords will display your top 1-2 ads more than the others, in an attempt to “automate” optimization.

For the smart marketer, this is a bad thing. Because your ads don’t get equal treatment, you can’t really see which ones are doing the best. You’ll want to make a custom change to enable your ads to rotate evenly, so that you can optimize them manually.

To start:

  1. Go to the campaign you want to change.
  2. Click on the “settings” tab.
  3. Go down to “Ad delivery”.
  4. Click “edit”.
  5. Choose the “Rotate Indefinitely” option.

You will receive a warning from Google saying that Rotate Indefinitely is not recommended – ignore this warning.

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By evenly rotating your ads, you can truly measure which ad provides the best results, and give every ad an even chance.

It’s true that your CTR may go down in the short run (as some of the lower performing ads are allowed to keep showing), but in the long run you’ll be able to increase your CTR far more than if you used the “Optimized” options.

The extra special benefit of doing this is that you can also optimize better for which ads actually convert, even if they don’t receive as high of a CTR.  This means your campaign will be optimized to make money, not just please robots.

It’s true that Google has an option to optimize for conversions, but that holds the exact same problem as the “optimize for clicks” option: you don’t get to see the true potential of every ad you write.

Next week we’ll be covering how mobile ads can increase your CTR.

Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 3: Search Terms

Do you know exactly which search terms are bringing you conversions in your campaigns? If not, you could be leaving money on the table (you’re actually leaving it in your competitor’s pockets, but we’ll try to be gracious with you here).

The search terms are not just keywords you’re bidding on, but the specific terms that are being searched. For example, you could bid on the phrase-match keyword “buy shoes”, but the actual term being searched might be something like “buy shoes for people with high arches”.

Once you know exactly which terms are converting well, you can:

  1. Add them into your campaign as an exact/phrase match keyword
  2. And raise the bid on that keyword to make sure you’re in one of the top 3 positions

By adding the exact phrase into your campaign, you’re able to increase your relevance/quality score for that search term, which helps you pay less for your converting keywords. It also means that you’ll be shown much more often for that search term (due to relevance), and it means that you’ll now have more advanced data regarding that keyword.

Here’s how to find out the exact terms people are searching:

  1. Navigate to the campaign/ad group you want to work on.
  2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Search Terms”.
  4. Sort by conversions. Date range: it’s good to go back to a point where you have at least 20+ conversions recorded if not much more. If that requires you to go back a few months, so be it. If you need to go back a year, that’s fine too.

From here you can see quite a few columns. You’ll want to start by making sure you’re looking at keywords that have conversions, especially any keywords with more than 1 conversion. You can do this by sorting the “conversion” column to the top.

adwords-conversions-3

Once you’ve sorted your columns, the most important column to look at is the “added/excluded” column. This lets you know whether you’ve already added this keyword to your ad group/campaign.

Any promising keywords that are driving conversions should be added to your campaign as phrase/exact match keywords. If they aren’t currently added, then you’re missing out on an opportunity (previously described).

In the above campaign, what opportunities can you see?

There are quite a few keywords in this campaign that are receiving conversions, but aren’t added into the campaign as keywords. If you look at the 2nd keyword on the list, you’ll see that it actually has a very low CPC – this is called “low hanging fruit” because it’s not very competitive, but still drives conversions.

If for some reason you see keywords that don’t belong in your campaign, you can always add them in as negative keywords as well. We’re not sure why you would want to block keywords that are driving you conversions, but depending on the way you track conversions, it might not be equivalent to a true sale.

Putting this into place should help to increase your ROI. If you wanted to really limit costs, you could even bid on exclusively the keywords that are bringing you sales, and eliminate everything else. You probably wouldn’t receive as much traffic, but your costs would decrease significantly (while your profit stayed very similar). Not a bad trade if you ask us.

Next week we’ll be covering how to rotate your ads like an agency.

Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 2: Hour Of Day

By looking at which times of the day your conversions receive the most ROI, you can eliminate the hours that don’t convert well.

  1. Start by going to the campaign that you want to improve. Don’t go into any ad groups though (you can check it ad group by ad group later).
  2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Time > Hour of Day”.
  4. At this point you should see all the hours listed from 0 (midnight) to 23 (11pm).

Just like part 1 of this series, you want to look at your conversions for each hour. Are there any hours that don’t convert (or convert poorly)?

Pay attention to your “cost per conversion” as well. If you have some hours that have a very high cost per conversion, you’ll want to pay attention to that and adjust accordingly (possibly removing that hour from your schedule).

Let’s take a look at an account and see which hours work well, and which haven’t. The identity of the advertiser has been hidden for their privacy.

<p”>Google Adwords Conversion Optimization

  • Although many of the early morning hours (1am, 3-5am) don’t have conversions, they also don’t spend very much. It’s simply a lack of traffic, so we don’t have to worry too much about limiting them.
  • Conversions at 3pm (1500 hours) cost quite a bit, around $342/conversion. It might be a good idea to remove ads at this time to help lower cost per conversion. The same goes for 1700 hours and 2100 hours, though they only have 1 conversion so it might be worth waiting for more data on all of these fronts.
  • 1800 hours (6pm) has VERY cheap conversions at only $68/conversion. This could be a lucrative time to increase the bid using an automated rule, and then decrease the bid afterwards. You might even increase your budget just for that hour of the day.

You can also pay attention to CTR if you’re wanting to increase your quality score (QS). By eliminating hours that have a very low CTR, you can increase your overall campaign CTR, which helps to optimize your campaign even further and get a better QS.

From there you’ll want to modify your ad schedule so that it excludes certain hours of the day. This will be on top of the “day of week” schedule that you did in part 1. If you’re not sure how to make an ad schedule, start with this Google support tutorial on custom ad scheduling.

<p”>This post is a shorty, so why don’t you spend the remaining 3 minutes you would have spent reading a longer article on analyzing your “time of day” data? In part 3 we’ll be covering the search terms dimensions report.

Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 1: Day Of Week Testing

When designing this adwords series, we put a bit of thought into what would be the biggest focus.

We could have focused on click-through rate or Quality Score, which both indirectly contribute to your ROI (return on investment).  We decided to focus on ways to directly increase your ROI from your Google Adwords campaigns instead.

That’s why this whole optimization series will be focused directly on conversions, although you will be able to use these lesser-known skills to get yourself boosts in CTR (click-through-rate) and Quality Score too.

Check Your Day Of Week Dimension

By checking which days of the week provide the cheapest conversions, you may spot an opportunity to eliminate a day or two from your schedule, and spend more of your money on the remaining, more profitable days of the week.

  1. Start by going to a search campaign that you want to focus on.
  2. Once you’re in the campaign (you should be seeing the names of each ad group), click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Time > Day of Week”.
  4. At this point you should see Monday through Sunday listed. They may not be in the right order, so sort them by the “Day of the Week” column.
  5. Check the date range and make sure it’s the times you want to measure. If you have a large account with hundreds of thousands of impressions a month, try to keep it at the last 30 days. Otherwise you may need to reach further back in time for useful data.

Now it’s time to evaluate. Do you notice any trends? What is the cost per conversion for each day? Do you notice any particular days that cost far more than the others?

adwords-optimization-part-1

In the sample account above, we can see that Monday, Friday, and Saturday all yield no conversions, yet cost a similar amount as every other day.

We also can see that Tuesday’s conversions cost a particularly large amount ($145/conversion) compared to the other days (approx $50/conversion). It might even be worth it to turn off ads on tuesday as well if the client doesn’t mind receiving a few less conversions. This will give more budget to the cheaper days of the week.

This type of analysis is a “quick win”.  In the above example, we were able to lower the cost per conversion from $103 down to $59/conversion. That’s a 42% savings, just from this simple 5 minute fix!

By making a quick change to your ad schedule, you can eliminate days that are costly to your conversions, and increase your ROI by quite a bit. The bigger your account, the bigger the waves you’ll make with this.

Next week we’ll talk about another dimension that’s almost as exciting as the day of week! It’s a secret, so you’ll have to wait until next week to find out!

What Is Copywriting?

Simply put, copywriting is when you write words to sell something. In the business, we just refer to it as writing “copy” though.

When you read a billboard, the words on it are “copy”.

When you see an infomercial, the sales spiel before asking you for your credit card is “copy”. In fact, the whole infomercial is “copy”.

Any time you’re writing with the intention of those words turning someone into a customer, you’re copywriting.

Benefits Focused

You’re a salesman selling jackets. You tell the customer “this one is made out of Goretex”.

Pop quiz: is that:

  1. a feature? OR

  2. a benefit?

Think about it for a moment. Don’t read any further until you’ve reflected upon the question.

Do you know the difference between features and benefits?

The answer is: (a) – a feature. The jacket is made of Gore Tex, but that doesn’t really describe “what’s in it for me” to the customer – that’s what benefits describe!

If you were going to sell a Gore Tex jacket, you’d want to take the benefits of the jacket, not the features. So you might say that the Gore Tex jacket is:

  • waterproof (you won’t get wet in it!)

  • wind-resistant (so it acts like a windbreaker)

  • breathable ( you won’t sweat as much in it)

  • lightweight (you’ll feel like you’re wearing a feather)

Copywriting is benefits focused, NOT features focused. Features are nice for techies, but for the everyday consumer, they want to know how it will affect their life.

They don’t need to know that the jacket is made of Gore Tex, they need to know that it will make their sunday-evening hike easier because of how light it is.

AIDA – The Principles of Selling

Invented in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, the AIDA concept represents how to sell to someone, and any good copywriting follows the principle in some fashion or another.

It stands for:

A – Attention

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action

The last step of course is the one you really want – they buy from you (ACTION)!

The process starts by getting your ever-distracted customer’s attention. This doesn’t mean they care about your product yet, it just means that they noticed it. This often comes as a result of placing your ad in front of the right people (perhaps a full-page ad in Gore Tex magazine is the right place to sell those jackets!).

Attention is a result of advertising in some way. Occasionally an advertiser will use a very shocking ad to get people to notice (take this Old Spice ad for example). In most cases you need only design a headline or ad that really speaks to your ideal customer to get their attention.

Once you have their attention, you need to create interest in what you’re selling. This means that they want to know more, and it’s accomplished by positioning your product as the solution to your customer’s problem. If you can’t solve a real problem that a decent amount of people have, then you probably won’t be able to make many sales.

Before you can close the sale though, you need to turn that faint interest into a real emotion of desire: the act of leading your customer to think “I WANT THAT”.

Copywriting puts these fundamental concepts in place to lead your customer into buying something. It is benefits focused, clear, and it understands your target customer very well.

Take Nike’s slogan: Just Do It. This is the result of understanding their target market very well – athletes. They’re people who spend less time “thinking about doing”, but instead just “do”.

Not only is Nike able to relate their brand to athletes through this phrase, but it’s also conveniently subliminal (you know you want to buy our Nike shoes, Just Do It!).

Any time you have written sales material, it will benefit far more if a copywriter writes it (or at least reworks it).

The idea of copywriting can take place in a 5,000 word sales letter, or it can be as simple as the 3 word slogan “Just Do It”.

It’s a vast subject that encapsulates the idea of selling in words. When you read words that are meant to sell, you’re reading copy.