After managing $200,000 worth of spending on Google Adwords for an employer, I learned a few things that I would like to share with you.
1) Buying clicks, just to get clicks, is a strategy for building brand-recognition, but won’t convert to sales in most situations. Gifts.com did this to establish a foothold in the online gift buying space and to see what keywords would work. They used 20,000+ keywords.
2) You can really only make judgments about what is working based on numerous clicks. If you don’t have an adequate number of clicks for a keyword, ad, or campaign, expand the date range, but be careful not to include holidays or other extremes, because that would most likely skew the data.
3) On holidays, keywords that previously were underperforming might perform quite well. Understand that buyers will search and convert differently on such holidays.
4) Older, seemingly outdated terms like “Gift Certificates” might perform as well as or better than more modern terms like “gift cards”.
5) If older terms like “gift certificates” are working, what can that tell you about the searcher? Most likely they are an older generation buyer. Or, they might be highly educated and use that term instead of “gift cards” because gift cards is often confused with “greeting cards.”
6) Carefully evaluate Google’s recommendations that you raise your bid level for increased exposure on various keywords. Look at the keyword performance over time and its cost per conversion. If the cost per conversion is $4 and your acceptable level is $8, you may be able to nearly double your bid to acquire a higher volume of sales.
7) Don’t forget misspelled keywords. “Gif cards” and other typos produce a respectable amount of volume. But, only do this for misspelled versions of your higher performing keywords.
8) Your landing page is super-important. Test several. Some will work better at different times.
9) On holidays, people like to see the holiday theme on the landing page.
10) If your product or service requires some level of explanation, try landing them right on the “How it works” page, if you have one.
11) Make ads descriptive enough to dissuade curious clicks. If non-buyers don’t click, that’s great!
12) Test multiple ads. In low click volume campaigns, you’ll need to pause ads so that two ads get an adequate number of clicks so that you can make judgments about what is working.
13) Timing is important. “gift card ideas” might not perform well until the day before a holiday because the user’s gift-buying options at that point are limited. So just pause it and only turn it on right before the holiday.
14) High volume holidays are your opportunity to offset those days when the cost-per-conversion was higher than you’d like. Don’t forget to raise your daily budget level. You don’t want to miss the volume, as long as your cost-per-conversion is acceptable.
15) Don’t freak out the cost-per-conversion seems really high at the beginning of a day. Often, just one or two more conversions will make all the difference. Be patient and trust the historic performance. Some days will be higher and some will be lower. You can’t make judgments on a day’s performance except during high volume periods like Christmas.
If you liked these tips and found them valuable, I have tons more. But you don’t get them unless you engage me to handle your Adwords account. Call me at 816.797.9946 to discuss your needs. Thanks. Eric