From 2003-2005, I managed several different campaigns for clients on all the major ad platforms - Yahoo!, Google, even an Ask.com campaign. However, since that time, I've been out of the game, and my skills are mighty rusty. In this post, I wanted to show off not only how badly you need an experienced paid search marketer (even if you're a pretty savvy search guy like me), but how big a difference the little pieces can make.
I started a campaign for SEOmoz's premium membership drive in the middle of June and have been refining and rewriting ever since (remember the night I showed our campaign to Mystery Guest?). I bid on terms like "SEO Consulting," "SEO Tools," and "SEO Training," guessing that these were the most relevant phrases related to what the service offers.
The process I generally follow with AdWords creatives goes something like this:
- Author 3-5 ads with different titles and descriptions, generally attempting to prominently use the target search phrase and entice the searcher to click.
- Prune the ads by replacing anything that receives less than 1% CTR (measured after 2-600 clicks, depending on the variables)
- Continue to replace lower CTR ads with new creatives
- Wait until one of the ads "sticks out" or overachieves with much higher CTR than previous ads. That's when I know I've stumbled on something that connects with the audience.
- Take that single ad and refine it with slightly tweaked headlines, descriptives & display URL, testing each against each other (and the original successful version)
- Continue testing, refining and perfecting the overachiever ad forever (you can't rest on your laurels)
- Start the process anew every few months to stay fresh and relevant - even the best ads won't draw clicks forever (and especially not in fast-changing industries like SEO)
I'll show you what I mean with a few current examples from our campaign:
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I'm just starting out with the above ad group. I haven't had much success finding the right headline or creative for "SEO Consulting" so I killed off a few of my worst performers and added some new ones, while keeping my top two CTR ads (I know, 0.74% is pretty sad) in rotation.
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The above example shows me in phase 4 - I've just found one ad that's really standing out from the crowd, so I've created several versions to test against one another. Usually, one of these will be a clear leader and I can further refine (and test new headline & descriptive modifications as well).
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I'm in my final stages - 5 & 6 - above. CTRs over 5% make me pretty happy, but I suspect I can do even better than that, so I'm trying multiple versions of a successful formula. You can see that those tiny little differences in copy can have a monstrous impact on CTR - the only difference between the best and worst performer is the second line of text, yet it's a full 2% CTR difference. Don't let anyone tell you small changes don't have big results.
Obviously, I'm running an exceptionally granular campaign, bidding on only a few terms and micro-managing obsessively. However, in my previous experience, this was how it had to be done - take your eye off the ball or stop testing for a second and you'll find your costs up, your traffic down and your competitors running away with your visitors.
I'll be the first to admit that there are probably better techniques than the ones I employ above, so I'd love to hear your perspective on both the process of testing and refining and the ways in which you've found success.
BTW - Sorry I couldn't share conversion data - it's just too sensitive. In the cases above, you'll have to assume that the conversion rates were all equal (as high CTR doesn't always mean better conversions, though there is often some correlation).
This shows us one again, how "bad marketing" like "become No.1 with our SEO Tools" is the best to get many clicks. What here is missing is the conversion rate in members which convert to paid members, so you get you ad money back. I assume you don´t do it for charity. If you have 1000 impressions and a CTR of 5% with a bad marketing headline, you get 50 visitors, but how many paid members? If you have 1000 impression on a good ad and a CTR of 1%, you get 10 visitors and at least one paid member. So waisting money is much easier then it seems.
totally agree, conversions should be the performance metric rather than CTR as conversions define the ROI
Great examples there Rand. Amazing how the last line can have such a huge difference.
This is one of the reasons I recently declined to manage a current SEO clients PPC campaign. They were spending huge amaounts and it would have been a great payday but they need a company that are experts and have more experience than I.
Just imagine scaling what you are doing to 10,000-20,000+ keywords. I did, and decided I would be doing them a diservice by taking on such a task when my expertise is actually in SEO and Social merketing.
It is commendable that you are honest about your skill set.
Great post Rand...the fact that you are not afraid to be transparent, share your successes and failures with your audience, should be commended!
"BTW - Sorry I couldn't share conversion data - it's just too sensitive."
I guess we can assume the conversion isn't anything to write home about. ;)
Announcing SEOmoz's Landing Page Competition
Good call. Unfortunately, it depends so much on the industry, and the players in it. A few clueless brand managers with big budgets in a given sector can put bid-rates over the top, insuring that no one can make any money. I've got a client or two that I'm close to recommending drop PPC altogether; no matter what they do, they're operating at only about 50% ROI, and a lot of it has to do with their industry (and their revenue model within that industry).
I have found success in some industries by using dynamic keyword insertion in the title. Having the keywords bolded in the results can really draw more clicks. Due to this, I also test moving keywords around in ad groups and seeing in which groups a keyword gets a better CTR. The ad in one group may not be as targeted for that term as it would be if it were in a different ad group under a different ad.
Another thing that REALLY can drive CTR is the ad position. So many times this is not watched like it should be and this is one of the reasons that I suggest trying out the postion preference or pay close attention to average ad position. Having an ad in the 1st position vs the 3rd will impact the number of clicks it gets, and if you don't know where each ad is showing, then your CTR might not be changing due to the copy but rather due to ad position bouncing around. To test this, set each ad in an ad group to show in the same ad position for a time while you test the ads. Then once you find good ads, try them in a different ad position and see if your CTR goes up or down.
Some ads do better in the side positions than above the organic listings and I feel that there is a difference in how searchers treat the two. Many times I will test the ads in the top positions and run another test on ads in the side positions to find which one has the better CTR and conversions.
keyword inserts are big for improving CTR and QS
Just for clarification... DKI doesn't affect the QS directly. But the QS can be improved indirectly if DKI results in a higher CTR.
Have you seen anything written that supports that? I have heard differently but never seen any in writing.
Congratulations on achieving 5%.
My gut here suggests to me that you are missing an element – if your conversions are stable. If you are getting better CTR but not better conversions you failed to create an ad that best qualifies visitors.
Assuming that your current CTR hold (unfortunately you don’t have enough impressions to tell with high confidence yet) you should start trying out variations with the goal of conversion. Most of your tools are not widely usable without the premium membership, so you may be losing visitors that were expecting free tools.
Also are you dropping visitors directly on the tools page?
I'd actually take your point even farther, inflatemouse. I've noticed that, if I optimize CTR first and then optimize those high click-thru ads for conversion, sometimes it's an uphill battle. In other words, sometimes the high CTRs represent entire visitor populations that are unlikely to convert. So, I've started ignoring CTR to some extent, and focusing on conversion first and allowing CTR to float (as long as it's over 2% or so). I can't say the results are spectacular, but they've definitely been better, and since we're paying for every click, a 5-8% CTR isn't necessarily something I want.
Ooohhh... me too me too!
The important thing you've said is that you are paying for every click so a high CTR is not necessarily something you want.
I run a PPC campaign in-house for a site that sells nothing direct but makes its money by people responding (for free) to items listed on that site (free to access but people pay to get there).
CTR isn't where I look though it is importand - I look at conversions. I have 2 possible conversion types and I watch each like a hawk. I tweak based on them and increase or decrease spend based on them.
However I can also see that a higher CTR campaign costs me less as each click costs less to be number 1 or 3 or whatever.
Difficult indeed
That's true; if CTR gets too low, Google and Yahoo both penalize you, because now they're not making any money. It's a tricky business, to say the least. I try to keep CTR reasonable, but try to avoid it getting too high: I like something in the 2-4% range.
Sorry, I just realized I could reply directly to a person's post.
Cool post Rand. I'm really glad that you break this stuff down for us noobs. I think this speaks to what identity was saying earlier about how it seems as if you aim at an outside-SEO audience (or to both inside and outside audiences). It's refreshing.
I feel like I could go out and launch an ad campaign now :)
A good way to lower cost is having the ads ranked #3 or #4. Not much impact on CTR but big savings. CTR is overrated anyway. Are you spending your entire daily budget? Get good conversions? Then CTR doesn't matter at all.
Position 3 and 4 has a huge drop from 1 or 2 in ppc
Hi KaiB. If you and the others are saying to try and bid down a couple of spots to position 3 or 4 and measure the new results, cool. If you are flat our saying those positions are better or the best, that's not good advice. I'm guessing you mean the first, but I want to make sure that anybody reading these posts knows that we cannot tell them what the best position is, as it changes based upon one's budget, and campaign goals (i.e. brand recognition, direct sale, etc.)
I agree... you need to know that volume drops and possibly quality increases - but it is something you need to track for your site - they are all different.
But be aware that a lower profit but a bigger number of sales is better than a lower number of sales with a higher profit per unit... well do the math and see which is best.
While analytics deals with numbers - sometimes you need to see the broader picture and not jump at something that has a high unit profit but few sales.
Thanks for revealing those great stats. However, one thing I didn't notice, which I thought was a little strange. You mention that you should have 3-5 ads running at once and see which one gets the best CTR rate. But, it seems like you aren't serving your ads equally - if you look in your first test, 2 of your ads weren't even shown at all, thus equalling a 0% CTR. I always consider best practice is to turn off the 'show best performing ads' feature and determine this yourself by gradually eliminating the poorer performing ads. That way you give each ad the most chance possible of getting a good CTR.
Just my two-cents...
Rich Pagehttps://www.rich-page.com
Hey Rambling Rich - you crawled out of your cave. Careful, it's sunny out....make sure to where spf 60.
Thanks for the super-infomative post. One of the great benefits of this site is the information that you are willing to share with all of us out here, especially the newbies like me. Then, with the knowledge and experience of the commenters, questions are answered before they can even be asked. The whole site is one big tutorial.
CTR vs. conversion rate would be great to see, but I wouldn't expect access to that infomation unless SEOmoz was signing my paychecks.
Great article - it was informative and easy to understand. thanks
Ready for a killer tip that I guarantee will blast your CTR through the roof?
Set up an account with Ekomi. This is an approved review agency that actually works with Google AdWords. Once you get 30 real customer reviews, the 4 or 5 star review snippet will start to appear on your AdWords ads. This is assuming your have an average of 4 stars or better on your reviews.
With your regular web pages you can simply implement schema mark up onto your pages and the star review snippet will appear in the meta area when your page comes up in the search results, but with AdWords it is harder to get this review snippet to show up on the search networks. The review snippet will not show up, in search ads, if you have reviews on Google Places or Yelp, but with Ekomi it will work.
There are several other approved sites that you can do this on if you don't like Ekomi. I have them all listed towards the bottom of this page here. (one of my newer sites)
bestbusinessoptions.com/2013/05/07/small-business-loans-online-marketing-plan/
I received this list of sites direct from AdWords.
This post is very old, but still helpful. I hope that Moz comes out with a new post on AdWords very soon. I searched the Moz blog for posts on AdWords and this is just one of the 5 I read, but this was my favorite. If anyone has any suggestions in regards to another really good post on AdWords, then please send it my way. My company is setting up several of our affiliate offices with AdWords accounts, and helping them to market our products, so we are constantly looking for new hot tips.
Hey good post. Always nice to catch a glimps of different folks approaches to things.
Anthony
I'm a little late to the discussion, but ... have you considered not capitalizing every word? It would be interesting to see how capitalization affects your results, especially since that recent blog post concerning the ellipses.
Personally, I find your ads a little difficult to read. I prefer to write ads like this:
Don't Buy SEO Consulting
The search engine traffic you want
is only a heartbeat away at SEOmoz.
But without data, who knows? Maybe they convert better that way. I'll have to run some tests.
Great inputs. Thanks.
You have a secondary goal, expanding readership. Because your direct/bookmark visitors convert at 2x your search traffic you should be tracking your campaigns effect on readership and whether the sign-ups from repeat visitors have increased noticeably. If you are getting positive effect on readership your efforts are of long term value.
I notice that you are bidding #1 for your term – in high competition industries this (is dangerous) can be detrimental for your Cost/Action. You should (be) consider bidding to position #2 to decrease curiosity clicks and lower your overall CPA.
Your last run of ads creates a barrier to entry once visitors arrive on the site.
1. They don’t land on page titled: Tools
2. They can’t see the tools unless they scroll up to 4 screens
3. Because you are not giving visitors an immediate payoff on what they expect to see you are losing trust from the visitor – especially first time visitors
note: I am using the parenthesis b/c the strickout didn't work.
Insightful.... but sometimes what is the best conduit to conversion is not the most obvious.
In our case the homepage converts better then some of the specific pages we are advertising about.
QUOTE:
"I notice that you are bidding #1 for your term – in high competition industries this is dangerous for you Cost/Action. You should be bidding to #2 to decrease curiosity clicks and lower your overall CPA."
This is not sound advice. #2 and #3 could be just as bad, or worse. The right position to bid into is the one which allows you to meet your target CPA.
In my experience, and in my opinion, if you can't hit your target CPA on page one for a particular keyword or key phrase, move on and optimize the ones that you can--the winners. Then when things are going well, and you find yourself with some extra time, you can go back to your underperformers and see how you can make them into winners.
I agree with you that there is not a "right in all cases" position, but in the case of a high competition, high cost keywords the difference adds up quickly. For example (and this depends on your QS):
You can be in the top 3 for "SEO Tools" with a Max Bid of $1-$2 on broad match. At $2max you will skew toward #1 and average around $1.60. At $1max you will skew toward 3 and average around $0.90. That cuts your cost by almost 50%.
Also, your optimal position is the one that has the best return on investment, not just the lowest cost/action.
lol... wish I was working with that level bidding... the top five for currency trading can sit around $20-30
Note that I said target CPA, not lowest. For the sake of the narrowed discussion, I didn't mention ROI, which is always pertinent.
Does strikeout not work anymore?
I love playing with PPC campaigns... they are so direct and immediate.
We usually take the top ad and run it at least 50% of the time - though most groups once we have an established leader get 75%... we then test with the remaining traffic... usually 3 other ads.
You can do this simply by removing optimization of the ads and doing repeats of the main ad...
for 50% run three of the same ad and three different new ads... play with the numbers but it is a good way to go.
Rand,
Good stuff. Having a dedicated PPC Manager is definitely worth while, especially if you want to get the maximum return.
I'm sure you've probably already heard of Better PPC, but I have to give the tool the due props it deserves--I'm very jaded when it comes to such apps.
We run a pretty large Google campaign with several ad groups and saw some very amazing results. Running a 5 week test (pre, test, post) we were able to maintain the same number of "new customers" on average, but effectively reduced our CPA by $2.00 across our entire campaign. Sure, some categories saw HUGE, positive changes, and a few fixable opportunities were revealed, but by far and away the tool worked great.
Good luck on the campaign.
Eric Itzkowitz
Hi SpeedyPin, first - that's a pretty annoying voiceover on that site. <mute>!
Second, I'm looking for something like this that works well for small agencies (we're currently using a mixture of engine-provided tools and stuff we've written in-house). I couldn't find pricing info on their site. What does it cost?
Will,
Yeah the intro is a bit "loud." I think you can tell them you'd like to test it for agency useage, and I bet they'd give you a free trial for one ad group for one week; they did for us.
Regarding pricing, I think individual pricing is $300/mo for unlimited (one domain). We only needed it one month, so the price is very ideal.
Heck, ask them for a demo.
Best of luck!
Eric
Will, I came across this service at a conference last week: MediaBoost.com
I haven't tried it yet, but it might be something you could find a use for. Their fee is 2.8% of your ad spend, which can be pretty economical for small campaigns.
Thanks ghoti. I'll give it a try.
Another hint. During this optimization process I suggest setting the Ad Serving option to "Rotate: Show ads more evenly" instead of "Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often". You'll get a better distribution of data.
Google's "Optimize" refers to CTR, not conversions and is not particularly helpful for conversion optimization.
As I read the ads, I feel like they are targeting search marketers... I don't mean this to be an ego feeder, but I have a hard time imagining many people in the industry who are not aware of SEOmoz, and therefore, aware of the tools and Premium membership.
So it makes me wonder whether the target is those directly within the SEO community, or those outside; who either have their own site and are looking improve and take on these tasks themselves, or who are in a company and have been tasked with SEO/M for the company.
The last set perhaps talks to both targets, which maybe explains why those appear to be the most successful, at least on CTR. But of course, there still needs to be a connection between target, message, and solution.
As I see it, 5% is a very good figure especially considering the fact, the people who clicked on the ads basically knew it was an ad and they knew a bit about SEO too, and as most of us suffer from ad blindness. I defintely believe the conversion rate is always higher when you get your target audience to click through to you, which could have happened in this case.
Gr8 Post!!
One frustrating management task is day parters. Often 50% of adwords campaigns shut down after 5:00PM. This artifically bumps your ads up and skews CTR data.
Rand - I'm not sure if it appropiate for the keywords you use, but I like to include the keywords in the heading and text of the ad. That usually yields better click troughs.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a nice feature to use when you have a lot of keywords to manage.
In my experience, PPC is all about how granular and well organized is your campaign, monitoring and testing. Based on your comments, it seems that you are in the right path.
I like to use fear as a motivator for increasing click-thru rates. For example:
"Warning to All Marketers"
I've had those headlines increase a CTR by 2-3x over ones that appeal to a person's vanity (Become an Expert) or strictly benefit headlines (Tools that Rock).You have to craft the headline and first paragraph language on your landing page to match the tone to match,
Interesting post Rand.
I've been wanting to add in some statistical relevancy to my PPC campaigns, to be sure that the results I'm getting can be relied upon.
Can anybody shed any light on how to go about this?
I'm guessing it's possible to use the Adwords stats, put them into a tool and find the relevancy...
Rob.
Hi Rob, you can manually use things like this or you can use one of the expensive tools. I'm in the process of writing something internally actually - the maths is harder than I expected (G-tests etc.) - I wrote a little bit about the process on the Distilled blog.
Will optimising for conversion be covered later? This is surely more important for some (most?) sites.
Rand -
Thanks for sharing some of your PPC work with the community. I was reading some of the above comments regarding the use of fear in your campaign. Though it is a good strategy in some cases, I would guide you in a different direction for your campaign. Here are some approaches I would consider:
Cheers,