This is a conversation that you won’t have with the typical PPC management company. But it’s one that is important and you should understand before hiring anyone to manage your Google AdWords account.
The heart of it comes down to this…
… a MAJOR part of your success in online marketing, PPC, Google AdWords, etc. doesn’t come down to your campaigns themselves. It comes down to your website. And, more specifically, the conversion rate of your website.
While many PPC management companies will talk about keywords, ads, number of site visitors, etc., far too few (still) don’t mention the importance of conversions and conversion optimization.
Hey, listen, getting a lot of traffic from Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo Gemini, etc. is great. But if you’re not able to convert that traffic into dollars, all the traffic in the world ain’t gonna do you a bit of good.
Now, it’s one thing to say that. It’s quite another to show you with some cold, hard numbers. So let’s take a look at some, shall we?
These are real world numbers taken from a real Google AdWords campaign that I used to manage for a client. The screenshots below have two sets of number.
One from May and one from June (yes, it’s from a few years back but I had easy access to these screenshots and, whether this happened yesterday or 10 years ago, it doesn’t matter).
You can get an overview of them here and then can dig into some more detail…
The first thing to notice is the first few columns: Clicks – Impressions – Clickthrough Rate (CTR). The numbers is all 3 of pretty much identical between May and June. Yes, the number of clicks and the CTR dropped slightly in June, but not a big deal.
The Cost Per Click (CPC) did go up a bit in June compared to May. By about $0.12. It’s not insignificant, but again, not a huge deal in the scheme of things.
Okay, this is where things get interesting. Let’s shift our focus to the last 3 columns. These are Converted clicks, Cost/converted click and the Click conversion rate.
The most important thing to notice here is how the conversion rate went from 9.75% in May to 12.60% in June. We accomplished this through a combination of changes to the landing page/website as well as a few tweaks in the Google AdWords campaign as well.
Now, notice the significant impact that rise in Click conversion rate had on the Cost/converted click and total number of converted clicks…
… The cost per converted click plummeted from $40 to about $32 and the company got 14 more converted clicks in June compared to May.
So, at the end of the day, even though June saw few clicks and higher CPCs, their cost per converted click dropped by around 20% and their total number of converted clicks increased by 25%.
Oh, and here’s the kicker…
… this led to the client brining in an extra $5K to $10K in revenue due to this boost in conversions!
This is why, whether you manage your AdWords account yourself or hire a PPC management company to do it for you, you have to focus on conversion optimization.
And, if after seeing the numbers above, you still don’t get the importance of conversion optimization in Google AdWords and all your online marketing campaigns, I really don’t know what to tell you.
