Optimising Your Google Adwords Campaign

So, you’ve set up a campaign, and now you want to start fine-tuning it? Understandable, though depending on your business, optimisation may mean slightly different things…

For the majority of businesses, their ultimate objective is profit. Making as much money as possible. And for most of these, the purpose of their PPC campaign is the same.

There are a few cases where this isn’t true. If you have a store somewhere, you may run a PPC campaign to get people to visit you. This would make a lot of sense if you’re selling something that people aren’t likely to buy online, such as a second-hand car.

Alternatively, if your website is designed to give information, such as how to stop smoking, why you should convert to a new religion or who you should vote for in the next election, then you may have no objective, other than to be heard.

In the first case, which would include just about every online retailer and most tradesmen, then you have a clear idea of what a conversion is - it’s the thing that you want people to do on the website. You want them to buy something, or contact you for a brochure, or request a quote for some work.

There are three aspects of optimising - one is true for all of these, and two are only true when you are trying to make as much money as possible from the site. I mentioned two of these on the first page - you want to maximise your conversion rate, and improve Google’s opinion of your campaign (in terms of its relevancy) as far as you can. You also want to adjust your bids until you find the position in the search results that generates the most profit (higher = more sales but a higher bid, lower = less sales, but each one costs less).

Profit Per Conversion: £30
Converstion Rate: 5%

Cost/Click Clicks Conversions Profit
£0.20 20 1 £26
£0.40 30 2 £33
£0.60 50 3 £45
£0.80 80 4 £56
£1.00 120 6 £60
£1.20 170 9 £51
£1.40 230 12 £23
£1.60 300 15 -£30
£1.80 380 19 -£114
£2.00 470 24 -£235

The conversion rate only really has meaning when you have a ‘conversion’ process on the website, with a clear, calculable value.

The relevancy statistic, which Google calls the Quality Score, is of importance to anyone advertising on Adwords. This determines how much you have to bid to appear in any given position in the results. For example, if you have a very good Quality Score, a bid of £0.50 may put you in third place, but if you have a poor Quality Score, the same bid may put you in ninth place for the same keyword. The higher your Quality Score, the higher the position that makes you the most money will be, and the more money you will make.

The cost per click that you are bidding should be the bid that makes you the most money, if that’s your objective. If making money isn’t your objective, then you should set your bid in order to get as many clicks as possible for your budget, or as many clicks as possible at a certain cost each - that’s something you’ll have to decide.

Without an objective, you can’t optimise. Make sure you know what yours is before you go any further.

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:08 pm.

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