7 Ways to Get More PPC Conversions without Increasing Your Budget
Are you really satisfied with your current Cost per Acquisition? Are you sure that it’s as low as it could be? If you feel that way then you might be surprised as every account I’ve EVER looked at had areas that could be tightened down!
Who doesn’t want more sales or leads without increasing your monthly budget? Most of the time I see wasted money with the way that the campaigns are set up, bids managed, strategies used, etc. Honestly speaking, I’ve seen a large variety of people setting up AdWords accounts for major businesses all the way ranging from seasoned professionals down to first timers. Most of the time the first timers are the bootstrapping kind of business owner trying to do everything themselves.
I’m going to assume that your account has been set up properly for the most part and that you are currently maxing out your budget each day. The purpose of this post is to solely help you get more bang for your buck whether you sell products or collect leads for your service.
Your Bids Are Set Too High
This one may sounds obvious but the cost per click difference between position 3 and position 1 can be huge. In a budget-constrained account, it is smart to aim for spot 3 instead of 1 or 2. If you are already maxing out your budget, it just makes sense to decrease your cost per click which will allow more clicks within the same budget. You would want to look into your conversion data and consider only decreasing the click per click for keywords that have not converted historically.
You should consider creating some automated rules or scripts to help you monitor average position. I like to set up daily rules using data from the previous day to increase bids on keywords with an average position worse than 3 and decrease bids on keywords with an average position better than 3 by a given amount. This keeps the keywords in a slim limbo between slightly below 3 to slightly above 3.
I’ve gotten as many as twice as many clicks for the SAME EXACT keywords within a certain budget simply by decreasing the bids. You won’t know until you try.
Not Checking Your Segments
Times of a day, days of a week, desktop computers vs. mobile devices, search campaigns alone compared to search campaigns with search partners, etc. all play a role in optimizing your spend. I’ve seen times of the day cost as much as 6x more per conversion than other hours. You might find “hot spots” of a day or all the time.
You will likely also identify certain days that perform better. In certain industries you’ll want to only show ads on weekdays from 9-5. You may also find lower costs per acquisition in the middle of the night. As long as the leads and sales are good for you who cares what time of the day they occur. I know many ecommerce companies that get several sales between the hours of midnight and 8am.
Ad Delivery and Rotations Are Not Set To Optimize For Conversions
For search campaigns you have 4 choices:
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Optimize for clicks
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Optimize for conversions
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Rotate evenly for 90 days, then optimize
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Rotate indefinitely
If you’re already gotten AdWords conversion tracking set up you should pick option 2. There is a caption under option one of “Ideal for most companies” but I say, “NO, not a good option!”
Very few companies come to me asking for as many clicks as possible within a given budget. They want as many leads or sales. Getting a bunch of clicks to your site means NOTHING if they don’t perform a desired action.
You’re Targeting Countries That You Don’t Want To
Google takes the liberty to set their default campaign location settings to the United States and Canada. This may be fine if you are ecommerce and ship to the U.S. and Canada but otherwise you’ll want to change it. Even if you do ship to Canada you’ll likely want to create a duplicate campaign and direct one to the U.S. and the other to Canada.
If you’ve been accidentally targeting Canada when you don’t want to just be glad that you’re not accidentally targeting the whole world (I’ve seen that a few times in my decade’s worth of PPC Management.)
Maybe you ARE an international company and want to target many countries. I would recommend create a duplicate campaign or sets of campaigns to target them individually. You may find that you are insanely profitable with some countries and not in others. At that point you will want to adjust bids appropriately.
Not Changing Bids Based on Actual CPA Compared to Desired CPA
Let’s do some math for this easy enhancement. Let’s say that your desired CPA is $25. If you have 11 keywords that each have a CPA of $100 and their average CPC is $5, what should you do? Most people would pause or delete the keywords to have the funds go elsewhere (possibly to keywords that haven’t been tested yet.) I would recommend decreasing the bid a proportionate amount to make it work for your needed cost per acquisition.
The new bid would be $1.25 instead of $5. You certainly won’t get as many clicks with that bid but by decreasing the bids each click will be less expensive, and, if conversion rates stay the same, you will meet your mark.
This isn’t an exact science and you should continue to monitor these keywords as well. It very well could be that your new bid will put you down to an average position of 7 and it’s possible that most people clicking that many ads to get to yours are just price shopping. This would be good if your prices are competitive and/or your service or product is better than the rest but not if they are high and substandard.
Not Taking Advantages of Other Languages
Why not target people in the United States, UK, or anywhere really that have their google account default language set to Spanish, German, Russian, etc.? From my experience, for people living in an English speaking country, even if they have their default language set to something besides English, they likely know enough English to complete an online order, fill out a lead submission form, make a call, etc.
The only area where things could get tricky is if you receive a Spanish call and nobody in your organization that can work that call. I’ve seen incredible decreases in cost per click and cost per acquisition when targeting additional languages as it’s not an area that advertisers usually think of placing their dollars.
If you’re ready to try it out, create a cloned campaign or set of campaigns and apply all languages except English so that you can benchmark their performance.
If you find that some or all the other languages perform well, consider hiring professionals to write ads for you in other languages as well as making landing pages or even your whole site with additional languages to better suit the new visitors.
Consider Adding Bing/Yahoo PPC
If you’re not already advertising on Bing Ads shame on you! Most of the time my cost per click is around half that of AdWords when all I do is directly import the campaigns from AdWords. Sometimes I see better or worse conversion rates, but you should definitely try it out at least. I’ve had some clients want to completely pause their AdWords campaigns and only focus on Bing due to the lower competition on that network.
Even though many find Internet Explorer painful to use, loads of people still use it because it comes on their computer, their windows tablet or phone, etc. Because of this, many users are older and perhaps have more money (especially the ones that don’t know how to download Firefox or Google Chrome.) Bing searchers are generally in the 35+ age range http://www.aborg.com/2014/08/google-vs-bing-which-one-are-your-customers-using/ so if that matches your target demographic, even better.
The Bing Ads interface is more difficult for most people to work in but it does mostly the same things. Forget about setting up any automations and linking Google Analytics goals to see data in their dashboard as they have not yet implemented such features.
Be sure to go into your Bing Ads settings and turn auto-tagging on (they have it not on by default.) If you don’t do this you will see all the traffic from Bing Ads in Google Analytics saying bing / organic as the source / medium.
Do yourself a favor and create new Bing Ads accounts directly from Bing and NOT Yahoo, as you’ll run into problems getting the “Yahoo” account into a Bing Ads agency account.
Get Out There and Make It Happen
Check your settings and put these tactics into place to lower your cost per acquisition. It’s all about coming up with new ideas and testing them. Some will work and some will likely not work so great as each business and offering is unique. You and your boss will be happy you did when you begin to see your CPA drop like never before.
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
