One of the most common mistakes when running online advertising campaigns is how to effectively measure success. What areas should be focused on; impressions, click through rate, or number of clicks? Typically, the most effective way to measure a campaign’s success is through conversions.
Within AdWords (and most other cost per click platforms), you are able to set up certain page view as goals. These goals can then become measurable as what to strive for within the campaign. For e-commerce companies, typically you would want the order confirmation page as your primary goal. For service based businesses, you would want your “Thank-you” confirmation page for forms or other types of lead generation queries as your goals.
It’s an important practice to make sure every goal type has its own unique code (pixel) attributed to it. This way, you can see which goals searchers are completing (whitepaper vs contact form submission). These can be set up within the AdWords interface with the destination URL that you would like the searcher to reach at the end of the search cycle.
Once set up, you can begin running campaigns and evaluating the results of the campaigns. Using the goals will allow you to see the conversion rate of each campaign as well as the cost per conversion. With this data, you can make more intelligent decisions on which keywords and campaigns are more successful and profitable for your business.
Are you interested in increasing the number of conversions on your site as well as decreasing your cost per conversion (also known as cost per acquisition or CPA) for your Google AdWords campaigns? If so, Conversion Optimizer is the solution for your Google AdWords campaigns.
Google says that on average, campaigns that adopt Conversion Optimizer achieve a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing their CPA by 14%.
Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion tracking history to figure out how often each type of auction leads to a conversion and based on this past performance, Conversion Optimizer creates a prediction model to guess which auctions will perform best for you in the future. Then, it adjusts your bids on an ongoing basis so that your money is efficiently used in each auction. It will generate an ad rank by your CPA bid, quality score and predicted conversion rate.
With Conversion Optimizer, you can set a maximum CPA (the most you are willing to pay for each conversion) or a target CPA (the average amount you would like to pay for each conversion). In addition, you can set a different maximum or target CPA for each campaign. So if you have a product line that you are willing to spend additional funds on in order to get a conversion, you can bid a higher CPA for that campaign compared to a different line of products.
Please note that you must have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days from a campaign to implement Conversion Optimizer. In addition, you can not enable ad scheduling for campaigns that are using Conversion Optimizer.
Google AdWords has released a new automatic bid management feature, called Enhanced CPC, which is designed to increase your ROI on Max Cost-Per-Click (CPC) campaigns, while maintaining or even reducing your overall Cost-Per-Conversion.
How it works:
Google analyzes your CPC campaign’s historical conversion tracking data along with factors such as user search query, geography, time of day, web browser or operating system. Then, when your ad is eligible to appear, it will automatically raise or lower your Max CPC bid based on the probability that your ad will convert. If your ad has a high chance of converting, your bid can be raised as much as 30% over your Max CPC bid, and lowered if a different ad has a higher percentage of converting.
Unlike other optimization efforts from Google AdWords, this new automatic bidding feature works with ad scheduling, position preference and demographic bid multipliers. Enhanced CPC also works on Google Network Partners (AOL, Ask, etc.) and Content Advertising. However, the feature is not available in AdWords Editor.
As a Campaign Manager, I have started using Enhanced CPC for some e-commerce clients and have seen an increase in transactions without any other changes. For one client, I experienced a 39% increase in transactions with a 45% decrease in Cost-Per-Conversion, along with a 9% decrease in advertising spend.
Enhanced CPC gives you the winning formula for your ad to receive more conversions, without increasing your Cost-Per-Conversion, and eventually increasing your ROI.
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