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!

5 Tips For Writing Google Ads

Chilliwack Marketing Firm Google Adwords Advertising

Have a higher click-through-rate (CTR) on your Google Ads means a few things:

  • more traffic to your website, especially if there are limited people searching for your line of business, because more of your impressions are turning into visitors
  • you can lower your overall cost per click (CPC), because a high CTR increases your quality score.

Increasing CTR is one effective way to pay less for your traffic. You can increase your CTR by choosing keywords that are relevant to your ads (this means having different ad groups for different areas of your business), and by writing ads that are wickedly good!

Here are some tips for writing ads that “get the click”.

Include A Call To Action

Calls to action such as “Hire Us Today!” or “Call Us Now!” tend to get more clicks. Include them in your ads for the best results.

Other examples of calls to action include:

  • Sign up today
  • Learn more
  • Start a free trial
  • Call us today
  • Let’s get started
  • Try us today
  • Save now
  • Subscribe
  • Get our free app
  • Try our demo

Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word

Ad text that capitalizes the first letter of every word tends to get a higher CTR. It’s possible that this might change in the future as the practice starts to make people “ad blind”, but for the time being it’s an effective way to increase your CTR.

What Are Your Biggest Benefits?

If you’re Volvo, then people know you for one big thing – safety. If we were Volvo, our ads would read something like:

“5-Star Best-In-The-Country Safety Rating. Drive America’s Safest Car Today”

Safety is their big benefit, and it helps to drive it home.

So what are your biggest benefits? What do you offer your customers that is really valuable to them? You can even list off a feature or two if you’re feeling to lazy to derive emotional benefits from those features. Examples like “30 minute delivery” or “Free shipping” come to mind.

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion, at its most basic, puts the keywords that the visitor was searching in the text of your ad.

It’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Here’s how it works, and how you can implement it.

Say you had a headline that read:

{KeyWord:Nike Shoes}

If a visitor was searching “Blue High Tops”, and your ad was triggered (because you were bidding on that keyword), then your headline would now read:

Blue High Tops

Now they see exactly what they searched, making your ad more relevant!

So, why did we put the term “Nike Shoes” in there at all? That’s the default text that’s used in case the visitor searches a term that’s too long to appear in the headline. If they search “Blue and green hightop shoes with black laces”, that would be clearly too long for the headline, so the headline would default to:

Nike Shoes

Make sense?

Dynamic ads don’t always outperform regular ads, so try using variations of each. Speaking of variations…

Test, Test, Test

Always create at least 3-4 ads for each ad group. After you’ve received at least 1,000 impressions on each ad, delete the losers and keep your winning 1-2 ads. Then write a few more ads, and repeat the cycle again!

You can even just test different headline variations with different ad text. Test dynamic keyword insertion VS no dynamic keyword insertion.

Any variation you can think of, you can test!

With all of these tips, you should be on the right path to writing halfway competent ads. As your CTR goes up, try lowering your bids. You’ll be surprised that you can get very similar results with bids that are much lower than your original if you have a high CTR.