Can you afford Google Adwords? Measuring your returns & value.

Can you afford Google Adwords?

Measuring your Returns & Value using

Adwords Tools & Analytics.

"You pay £250 and we buy some clicks.
Feedback? We tell you when it's spent and we need another £250." A Dogbert inspired competitor.

"Our results for Leisure Batteries, were excellent; over 10% CTR for 9p/click. The returns were too low so we stopped the campaign." Rob McGonigle.

"When your Adwords convert high-margin sales, you should have NO marketing budget cap. "

Perry Marshall

`"With your 50+% quote request rate for this Ad group you 're murdering your competitors converting 5% at best. Keep those Ads showing in the conversions sweet spot". Rob McGonigle, July 2010.

The 'Traffic Lights' for your Adwords Spend
is your Return On Investment, ROI.

When you pay for a service you expect to see results. If you don't see results you should beware and stop paying.

Many pay Google directly. They may learn to optimise their Adwords using Google's reports but without tracking returns they just pay Google more efficiently.

Our amber example wasted time & cash but not a lot. Many ideas are worth a try; the trick is to fail the bad ideas fast!
Are you already paying Adwords? Get you free Adwords Audit.

Conversion Tracking using Adwords
Google allows advertisers to track their conversions by adding small tracking scripts into pages that would represent the desired outcome; a sale, contact details. You can assign a value to each conversion type or pass the value of a sale.

Using conversion tracking you can start to measure your ROI.
If your ROI could be better you need to look at your website.
So it is not surprising that Google introduced Analytics to their Adwords clients first.

Conversion Optimisation with Google Analytics

The tracking code gets added to every page so you can track the paths that visitors take. Other web stats solutions existed and for quite a time were a lot better.

But Google kept improving without you having to do a thing!

Now you can visualise your conversion pipe, split off different traffic segments with corporate level control and generate executive summary reports.

Website Optimisation
Finally Google created code that swaps around your page copy and images just as it swaps and tests your little text ads.

Is all of this too Complicated?
Google are starting to build a network of Partner Companies to provide Analytics services; there are 3 in the UK.

Look at our Why Adwords page to see two other things you can do that are more important. Adwords needs watching, see right, and is very suitable for out-sourcing.

Ensure that your Adwords Service provides regular reports.
The data contains a lot of market intelligence you can learn from and they should be keen to add Analytics to your site!

What has happened to Adwords since 2008?

Against the dramatic backdrop of the banking crisis, turmoil on the worlds stock markets, loss of consumer confidence and tales of a long and deep recession; what has been happening on Google Adwords?
You'd expect that competition on Google Adwords would reflect this volatility.
Instead we've often seen the picture below on campaigns with spending caps.
With fixed budgets the cost-per-click has increased in a
straight line as the clicks drop.

Linear pattern seen on fixed budget Adwords campaigns in 2008

Competition on many keywords has increased dramatically with over 440 ads vying for 'cnc machining'. Many businesses abandon broadcast & glossy mediums and turn to search marketing.

The advantage of search marketing is that you can measure your results then improve or turn off poor campaigns, ad groups or keywords. The ads showing for 'cnc machining' show little evidence of this.

Google's Changes
The biggest change by Google is that they no longer disable your keywords. Rob's blog covers
Google's new quality scores & their impact.

Google's budget optimiser has been improved to return more clicks for your daily limit. It does this by showing ads outside office hours to avoid competition from ads using scheduling!

React by bidding higher and this will cost you.
Twice the clicks can cost FIVE times as much!

Monitoring your Adwords Campaigns is Vital

It has been termed a 'search marketing laziness tax' but whilst Google manages and adjusts their dynamic ad brokerage they also provide tools and alerts for advertisers.

The campaign summary, below, has all the signs of active management. In fact there were no changes during this period.
So what caused the hike in impressions at the turn of the year?
What caused the CPC to go up notably during the summer?
This campaign had plenty of budget headroom and these changes reflect moves in the marketplace and changes in Google's algorithms.

Dramatic changes seen on one campaign this year.

Adwords-Secrets.co.uk Limited.

PPC Marketing with the UK English voice.