A new client of ours is locked into a contract with a company, paying them to manage their Google Ads campaign. But what does that really mean and how do you know if you or the company you’ve hired is doing it right?
I “popped the hood” on his campaign and ran my classic 3-point inspection that typically yields a 100% increase in ROI. I was shocked to learn that the company managing the campaign hadn’t done any of this – and the client was paying an even bigger price than the management fee – Ad Spend.
This particular campaign seemed to have everything right, just like most of them I look at:
- Keyword targeting fairly accurate
- Negative keyword list was in place
- Ad copy looked good and they were A/B testing
But after having managed millions of dollars in ad-spend, there are some optimization points that I find consistently overlooked. And these are the kinds of optimization points that can make or break a campaign, especially when dealing with the increasing competition in the paid traffic space.
The Irrefutable 3 Points of Optimization in Paid Search Campaigns
Here are the three points that have the biggest potential to impact your CTR, CPC, CPA and ROI:
- Time-of-day conversions:
Looking at what time of day people are more likely to become a client or make a purchase – NOT JUST A LEAD. Simply put, there are way too many campaigns running 24/7 that have no business doing so. If you pull the data, it doesn’t lie. Check the Day and Hour that your conversions came in, compared to the actual spend on clicks. You might start to see a story unfold.
Log into your account, click on the campaign you want to optimize, then on the left side of the screen, select “AD Schedule” – make sure you have the “conversion” column visible. You can then download in a spreadsheet and start listening to the story:
- Day of the Week Conversions:
This is similar to the first point – but it’s a nuance that needs to be paid some attention. There are way too many campaigns that are not looking at the actual data. And a lot of times it’s because there IS a manual process that needs to be put in place to properly optimize. If your campaign is tracking conversions on a landing page that generates leads, which days of the week are producing leads that actually result in a sale? This cannot be tracked in the Ads dashboard – it’s 100% reliant on your ability and software to track it internally. In other words, if a lead came in on Monday, and the deal closed on Friday, that DEAL needs to be attributed to MONDAY. And it can only be done with the proper attention being given to your advertising channels. You’d pull the same data table as above, but look at it side-by-side with your actual new deals that have come in. Then make the proper adjustment to your campaign.
- Region or State (location data)
This is another huge miss on most campaigns, whether you’re a national services provider or an ecommerce site, or a local service provider advertising in multiple cities or zip codes. The chances are that you’ve been advertising pretty much the same way in all locations. But the likelihood that you have an equal ROI across all locations is pretty much ZERO.
What you need to do – and I know this is another manual and tedious project, is look at your books. Where is the majority of your business coming from? Compare that to the amount of ad-spend in that location – compared to the other locations where you’re advertising.
The data will start telling you a story: STOP advertising in TX and FL, and scale advertising in WA, VA and NY for example. Again, you’ll have to pull out the books and do some side-by-side comparison. But in the long run, it’ll pay of huge dividends because you’ll now stop what doesn’t work and scale what does:
Do this and you are almost guaranteed an immediate impact on your bottom line. Your ads will be more effective and you’ll have ROI on demand.
An Ads campaign that is properly optimized is another business asset, which can be valuated whenever you’re looking to sell the company (if ever), so consider it part of your exit strategy.
And keep testing, testing testing!
THE END
PS. If you want a complementary once-over on your ads campaign, fill out the form at the bottom of this page!