You get what you pay for! Well, this is not fully true when it comes to Google Adwords, especially for SME’s. If you don’t do it right, you could be burning your money. On the other hand, if you are really smart about it, you can spend less than your competitors but get more leads. Just focussing on 3 key numbers and continuously improving it can provide you great results.
1. Quality score:
What is quality score and how is quality score calculated? Google display the advertisements in 3 places – above the natural search results, beside and below the search results. There are only 3 positions above the search results which mean your adrank should be within top 3 to have your ad come above search results. As you can imagine, the exposure /visibility for your ads gets less and less as your ad position (ad rank) lowers. In order to rank in the top positions, you increase your bid (maximum cost per click you are willing to pay to Google). It is important to know that ad position (ad rank) is not determined only by the maximum CPC but by combination of maximum CPC and quality score. You can rank higher than your competitor while bidding a lower cost per click if your ads have a much higher quality score than your competitors. Quality score is determined by the relevancy between your keywords, your ad copy and your landing page. Make sure you use the same words and have the same message in the adwords copy and the landing page. Quality score is also determined by how well your ad has performed in the past, i.e how often did users clicked your ad when they saw your ad. This brings us to the next key number to focus on which is the click through rate
Image 1: Ad rank table showing ads with lower CPC but higher position
2. Click-through rate:
It is basically the percentage of clicks your ads receive. For example, if your ad is served 100 times and you got 1 click out of that, your click-through rate is 1 %. Having a good click-through rate means lower quality score and it also means that your ad copy is working. Closely monitor click-through rate and keep improving it. Write good copy. Include benefits for the customer in your ad copy. One technique you can use to continuously improve click-through rate is to have only 2 ads per keyword group and replace the lower performing ad(lower CTR) with a new ad every week or every 2 weeks. Make use of ad extensions to improve your click-through rate. By using ad extensions, you can include addition information like address, phone number, more links to the website, special offer, etc to give more reasons for the users to click your ads. Now, getting lot of clicks does not mean your ads are working well. Your actual result comes only from the action taken by the users once they visit your landing page. This brings us to the third key number to focus on – conversion rate
Image 2: Ads showing special offer extension and additional URL extension.
3. Conversion rate:
This is basically the percentage of users completing your call to action. For example, if a particular ad brings you 100 clicks (visitors) and if only one of them did an inquiry (or bought your product), then your conversion rate is 1 %. It is very important that you track conversion rate at ad level because that tells you about the quality of traffic that ad brings and the relevancy of the landing page to the users search. Have clear call-to-action, make sure your sales copy in the landing page is well written, include all the information the user might want to know to complete the call-to-action and make sure it is quick and easy to complete a call-to-action. One of the most popular methods to improve conversion rate is to split test between 2 different landing pages for an ad and replace the one with lower conversion rate with new or improved landing page. There are some great split testing tools available in the market. Google ‘split testing tools’.
In summary, make sure you closely monitor and continuously improve these 3 key numbers, quality score, click-through rate and conversion rate. Start with small number of ads and small group of specific keywords so you have time to monitor these key numbers. Understand that each of this number feeds back to one another. So, once you start to improve one number, you have higher chances of improving other numbers. The opposite is true as well.
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