SEO is important to everyone. Even if you live in a world dominated by social and PPC; your presence on the search engines is something everyone should care about.

We often use PPC to test SEO, and there are the fun arguments if PPC is better than SEO.  Of course, the actual answer is: Use Both.

When you start looking at SEOs, it can be hard to determine who to trust: some are fantastic and others can get you banned. So, when I wanted to do a couple of radio shows on SEO; I wanted to find someone highly trustworthy who was excellent at explaining information.

It wasn’t hard to find someone, I turned to the Market Motive SEO instructor who I’ve known for years – Todd Malicoat.

Todd is one of the top SEOs in the world. He’s been involved in search optimization for a number of years and has worked on projects ranging from small to extremely large in scale.

I could talk about Todd for quite a while, he is that good – but its best to skip the accolades so you can get to the point – listening to Todd on the radio talk about SEO.

With SEO, there are number of factors, but it usually breaks down into a few categories:

• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO
• Technical SEO

Todd and I did two shows on SEO. One is specially on page factors and the other addresses off page factors. Both of these shows are now available on demand via our Marketing Nirvana Radio Page.

Todd is a great resource to follow, and you can find him at these places online:

• Twitter at Stuntdubl
• Todd’s Blog
• LinkedIN
• Market Motive (you can even study directly with Todd at Market Motive)

I hope you enjoy the shows, you can find them here at Marketing Nirvana.

Learn About SEO With Todd Malicoat is a post from: Certified Knowledge

This is a quote from the agency newsletter:

Sunsetting Product Extensions
Product Extensions will be sunset for all enabled campaigns and will be removed from the campaign creation flow on May 20th. With increased Product Listing Ads adoption, Product Extensions have become a less relevant way to display retail products. If you have Product Extension Ad, it will continue to run as a text ad.

After PLAs were launched, Google removed the image from the extension and changed the extensions so it just showed a line of text and a price. Without the compelling image, and the additional of image filled PLAs – our CTRs on product extensions has slowly declined over the past year.

It looks like you can spend your time working on your PLA structure and making sure you are getting good PLA results as that looks like it will be the future monetization of Google Shopping. 

Google is Sunsetting Product Extensions is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The Default PLA Structure

Google has made sure that everyone can get started with product listing ads quickly: Create a campaign and make sure it has the product extension, add an ad group and put in the catch-all product target All products and possibly an ad. This can be done in five minutes and it’s a good way to get your first PLA campaign on the road. The resulting structure will look like this:

This setup is fairly simple and comes with some limitations. Since ads are assigned to ad groups and there’s only one ad group covering all products, this means that you can’t have different ads for different products. Bids can be applied at the product target level, but since there’s only one product target for all products the result is the same: One bid is applied to all products.

Not everyone needs different ads, but having the same bid for all products is a serious limitation. With only one bid you can’t treat your best selling products any different than your slow sellers. The bid you apply will have to work for the blended average of all products, with the bestsellers’ profits offsetting the losses from the shelf warmers.

Another drawback is that AdWords won’t show any statistics beyond your product targets. You can get some of the information from other sources, but AdWords won’t tell you anything about individual products.

A State of the Art PLA Structure

To overcome these limitations, a better structure is needed. The following setup solves all of these problems:

Here, each product has its own ad group. Inside each ad group there’s a product target that is linked to a single product using the product’s id attribute in the target’s definition.

This setup allows you to bid on individual products, which you can do at product target or the ad group level. It also gives you the most flexibility to tune your ads to your products and it lets you see stats for each individual product.

How to Build a Super-Granular PLA Campaign

To build such a granular PLA campaign, you need access to your product feed and some tools. A good approach is to use a combination of Excel (or some other spreadsheet application) and the AdWords Editor.

These are the necessary steps:

1) Create a PLA campaign and add the product extension. Note: A campaign can hold up to 20,000 ad groups. If you have more products, you will need more than one campaign.

2) Download the campaign into AdWords Editor. Add an example ad group. Then put in an example product target with id=12345. Select the target, right click, and copy it.

3) Get your product feed and open it in a spreadsheet. Make sure you have a table with all of your products.

4) Paste the product target from the editor right next to the table. This should get you a column Campaign, then a column Ad Group, then Product Target Condition 1, then Product Target Value 1 and some more. This demonstrates what you’ll need.

5) Now use simple formulas to replace the example values with real values. Leave the campaign name. As ad group, use the product’s name (formula “=B2″, for example). For Product Target Value 1 put in the ID (again, use a formula like “=A2″).

6) After you’ve done this for one product, do this for all the other products by copying the line with the formulas down next to all other products.

7) Select the columns with all the product targets and copy them. Go back to AdWords Editor and to the product targets tab. Click on the button Make multiple changes and then select Add/update multiple product targets.

Check the box top left (“My product target information below includes columns for campaign and ad group names”). Paste the columns from the spreadsheet into the field below. Then click Process and accept the changes afterwards.

8) This creates a lot of ad groups as well. Go to the ad groups tab and give those ad groups a bid.

9) Add an example product ad in the editor and use the same process (steps 4-7) to create ads for all of your ad groups as well. Using the same ad text for all products is perfectly fine, but you also have the flexibility to customize your ads.

10) That’s it – you’ve just created a state of the art PLA campaign. Don’t forget to upload everything. Make sure to keep the spreadsheet.

There is one downside to such a granular campaign: you have to keep it up to date. It’s no problem if a product is no longer available: If it’s dropped from the feed, AdWords won’t promote it. But if you have new products, you’ll have to update your targets. You can re-use the spreadsheet to do this quickly when needed.

A good addition to such a campaign is a catch-all target (All products). This way even new products are at least somewhat covered. Put a very low bid on it – much lower than all the other ones – to make sure it doesn’t interfere with your other bids.

Two Bonus Advantages of a Granular PLA Structure

In addition to full bidding control, individual ads, and individual statistics for each product, a granular PLA structure has a two more advantages. The first one is that it gives you the option to bid on the ad group level instead of the product target level. This allows you to use automated rules and AdWords Scripts, which can be applied to ad groups, but not to product targets.

The other advantage concerns the search query report. Especially with large and diverse feeds an account manager often struggles to make sense of search queries. For example, is the query “gel 3030″ relevant or should it be excluded? Having ad groups named after a product can provide some context since, in the report, the ad group’s name is right there next to the query. For example it would be easy to see that “gel 3030″ is indeed a relevant query for the product “Asics Gel 3030 Running Shoe”.

Conclusion

With the AdWords Editor, a spreadsheet and a simple step by step process it’s possible to create a state of the art PLA campaign. The process outlined here can be adapted to suit your needs. For example, you could put additional information in the ad group names, mention brands in the ads, or add custom bids depending on prices or other criteria.

So I hope this helps you build the perfect PLA campaign. If it does, or if you have questions, I’m looking forward to your feedback.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Certified Knowledge. If you would like to write for Certified Knowledge, please let us know.

How to Create a State of the Art PLA Campaign is a post from: Certified Knowledge

These changes also undo many great features that AdWords has made in giving advertiser’s control over the past few years.

To start brainstorming about the changes and how they will affect your, I invited Melissa Mackey to be a guest on Marketing Nirvana where we could discuss enhanced campaigns and start thinking about how this will shift our thoughts around AdWords management.

Melissa is the Search Supervisor at Gyro, the largest independent B2B agency in the world.  She contributes regularly to Search Engine Watch and Web Marketing  Today as a PPC expert.  She also hosts a blog, www.beyondthepaid.com, where she writes on the topics of pay-per-click and search marketing.

You can also follow Melisa on Twitter at Mel66.

Melissa has been around this space for long enough that she’s a great one to bounce off ideas to see where AdWords is taking off. We recorded the show recently, and it’s now available for download or online streaming.

You can stream the show at WebmasterRadio.fm or download in iTunes.

There are many past episodes you can also see on the Marketing Nirvana page.

Learn About Enhanced Campaigns with Melissa Mackey is a post from: Certified Knowledge

We have three upcoming workshops around the world on AdWords.

I’m going to include information on the new Enhanced Campaigns so you can make your transitions easier and take advantage of some of the new features.

The basics of the agenda can be seen below; however, I try to leave a bit of ‘wiggle room’ for in-depth Q&A and/or to add a topic at the end of the day (favorites so far have been Remarketing, pivot tables, large scale organization, and team organization; and I’m sure these will get into Enhanced Campaigns).

The upcoming workshops will be:

• San Jose (with SMX West) on March 14th
• Sydney, Australia on April 5th
• Munich, Germany on April 8th

The Workshop Agenda

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match type’s usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages. Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

More Info

Lunch will be included. The presentations will be available for download during and after the presentation. The WiFi should work (you can never make 100% guarantees when you don’t own the venue).

You can learn more about the conferences here:

SMX West in San Jose, March 14th:

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

SMX Australia in Sydney, April 5th

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

SMX Germany in Munich, April 8th

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

I’ll be around all 3 conferences for a few days, so if you’d like to chat during the week or after the workshop, please just let me know.

Hope to see you there.

Last Chance to Register for the Upcoming AdWords Workshops is a post from: Certified Knowledge

• Writing new ads
• Turning on one of Google’s ‘optimize’ features
• Letting Google serve your ads
• Writing new ads
• Let Google serve your ads
• repeat…

However, I find this is a very common testing method. There’s a big problem with this method: there’s no delete. Just by deleting ads, you can increase your account efficiencies significantly.

I recently saw a few accounts where just by picking winners, their traffic and conversions increased from 30% to almost 300%. That’s right, hitting the delete button was the best optimization that could be done in the accounts.

How Google Serves Multiple Ads

First off, you must choose how Google is going to rotate your ads. My personal preference is rotate indefinitely as I’m a testing control freak. However, there are times that using one of the ‘optimizes’ is a good idea.

Now, if you have more than one ad in an ad group; and you are using Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for conversions; then Google will start to show a winner more often. You can see this under the % Served in the ads tab.

However, Google will never show an ad 100% of the time if you have multiple ads in an ad group. They will also show the other ads some percentage (even if its small) to make sure another ad shouldn’t be displaying more often based upon your settings.

Therefore, if you are just creating ads, and never deleting them, your losers are still showing – potentially a lot – if you have lots of ads.  Therefore, I wanted to show two quick examples of where deleting helped accounts more than any other change to their account.

Quick Case Study

The first account averaged 19 active ads by ad group. Some ad groups had more than 50 active ads in them.

The account’s goal was simple, get the most clicks possible. They were a publisher and they monetized their site with CPM ads and paid content subscriptions. Because their bids were lower than their CPM take, every single click was profitable. Therefore, they wanted to get the absolute most clicks possible for their target bids.

When you look at the ad percentage served (this is ad group level), the absolute best ad was only being shown 14.88% of the time. The second best ad 4.10%, and the 3rd best 3.37% and so on. That means the top 3 ads in terms for CTR, their main goal, are being displayed about 22% of the time.

In this ad group, the CTRs ranged from 6.8% to 1.2%. Ads with under a 2% CTR were being shown roughly 30% of the time. Ads with a CTR higher than 6% were showing roughly 24% of the time.

So by deleting many ads, this single ad group almost tripled in total clicks. As every click was profitable, that’s a lot of money to be had just by hitting the delete button.

In this case, the goal was traffic, but it could just have as easily been conversion rates, Profit Per Impression, or another metric that’s important to your overall success.

Misaligned Ad Serving Goals

The other big issue that occurs is that your goal is conversion focused, but you are using Google’s default settings for optimizing for clicks. In that case, the ads with the highest CTRs will be shown more often and not the ads with the highest conversion rates or the lowest cost per conversion.

In this case, you can delete the losers, or even just be lazy and change the setting to show ads with the highest conversion rate the most.

In this account, the ad with the highest ad serving percentage, had one of the lowest conversions rates.  However, because it had the highest CTR, Google was showing it more than any other ad. The ad with the highest conversion rate was being served less than 10% of the time. Just by hitting the delete button, this account raised its total conversions quite significantly. It was a very profitable day by just hitting the delete button.

If the Default Setting Isn’t Right For You – Change It

The default ad setting is to optimize for clicks. If you are looking for the most traffic, this is a good setting. However, if you are a testing guru and want to make sure that your ads rotate evenly so you can use Conversion Per Impression or other testing metrics to determine your winners, you will want to use the rotate evenly setting. If you want the most conversions possible, and are not going to closely watch your ad tests, then use optimize for conversions.

Each setting has its place. If you are serious about testing, you will use rotate evenly the most. However, if you realize you want to be serious but you don’t have the time, then just make sure you are using an ad rotation setting that is in alignment with your overall goals.

Wrap-Up

You must test ads – that’s a PPC requirement for any account that wants to grow and improve.

Even if you have a large account, enterprise ad testing can be easy once you have a strategy in place.

However, most companies don’t have a good strategy in place for testing ads regardless if it’s a small account or a large one. It’s time to put a strategy in place, and when you do create it, make sure that ‘deleting losing ads’ is one of the steps in your testing workflow.

You Must Choose a Winning PPC Ad is a post from: Certified Knowledge

I recently polled a large group of marketers and asked them of these ads, which one was the best.

Take a moment to decide which you think is the winner.

Here were the responses:

7.3% thought there wasn’t enough data to determine a winner. Those are the ones who are correct.

The Current Metrics Are Flawed

When you consider all the stats needed to determine a winner; you need to work from these numbers:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CPC
• Cost
• CTR
• Conversions
• Average sale amount

From those metrics, the most commonly generated stats to determine a winner are:

• Conversion rate
• CPA (cost per acquisition)
• ROAS / ROI
• CPI (conversion per impression)

Each one of those metrics has a fundamental flaw.

Conversion rate does not take into account impressions, click through rate, or average sale amount.

Cost per acquisition does not take into account volume (impressions and clicks) or average sale amount.

ROI / ROAS does not account for volume (impressions and clicks).

Conversion per impression does not take into account average sale amount.

It Starts at the Impression

Assuming your campaign is targeted towards sales (we’re going to leave the branding discussion for another day); you should be measuring from the impression.

You choose a keyword. Someone searched for your keyword. That combination creates an opportunity for your ad to be displayed. It also creates an opportunity for a conversion.

Yes, every single impression has an opportunity to generate a sale. Therefore, your measurements should start at the impression as well.

Clicks Through Rate vs Conversion Rate

One of the problems with testing is that you have two big metrics you’re often examining: CTR and conversion rates. However, which of these scenarios is better?

• High CTR, low conversion rate
• Low conversion rate, high CTR
• Mid range CTR, mid range conversion rate

It’s an impossible scenario to measure unless you are using a metric that incorporates CTR, costs, conversions, and average sale amounts into a single number. That’s what Profit per Impression will do.

Profit Per Impression

I first started using this metric in 2002 and first started writing publicly about it in 2006. I’m still amazed at how little adoption this metric has since it is the overall best metric to use for testing and its very easy to calculate.

To calculate this metric, all you need to do is take the original stats from above and add a few pieces of data:

• Revenue (this might take some effort if you are doing ecommerce with variable sales amounts and product costs, but it is worth the effort)
• Profits (simple: Revenue – cost. I’m ignoring the complex aspects here of adding lighting, salaries, etc)

With those metrics, calculating PPI (profit per impression) is easy; just divide profit by impression:

It turns out the ‘best’ ad is not the one with the lowest CPA, the highest CTR, or the highest conversion rate.

It turns out that 4.2% of the original voters were correct (or 11.7% if you count those who voted that there wasn’t enough data); but since they didn’t have the correct data it was most likely due to a good guess.

To prove the PPI theory, let’s see the extrapolated stats as if every ad actually received the same number of impressions:

As you can clearly see, ad 1 is a clear winner in terms of total profit.

If you happen to be wondering why these stats seem so high on the revenue basis; its because the revenue is not based upon a one time sale. It’s the lifetime value of the customer. Always take into account lifetime values. Here’s the stats if you base the numbers off of just first month revenue:

While ad 1 is still the clear winner; from a single month basis the highest CTR ad is actually losing money and doesn’t appear to be profitable. To get a clear picture of your actual revenues, if customers buy from you more than once a year, which includes subscription products, then you need to calculate PPI from the entire customer’s revenue and not just the first time sale.

The Quality Score Wrinkle

There are some times when I won’t actually pick the best PPI ad; and that is often due to Quality Score. If the second best PPI ad has a much higher CTR than the best PPI ad, then I will often pick the 2nd best. Because CTR is such a huge quality score factor, if you pick an ad with a much lower overall CTR: you could cause your Quality Score to drop which in turns means you average position will decrease or your average CPC will increase (or both).

If in this test, ad 4 (with a CTR almost double all the other ads) didn’t have a $0.39 Profit per Impression, but was instead in the $0.43-$0.45 range; then I would have declared it the winner instead due to the Quality Score wild card. Or, I would have set up an ACE (AdWords Campaign Experiments) test between the two ads to see if I could get some Quality Score insights between the two ad and keyword combinations. However, it was enough lower in total profits that its not the winner by a large margin; and therefore, I would pick ad 1 as my true winner.

Conclusion

Testing is easy. Pick at least one ad group and:

• Write a few ads
• Wait
• Measure the results
• Learn from the losers
• Delete the losers
• Write another ad or two
• Hit save
• Wait
• Measure
• Repeat

There’s nothing difficult about testing. However, if you are using the wrong success metrics in your test; then your time and efforts will be wasted. By using Profit Per Impression metrics, you can be assured that you are pick the ad in your tests that will bring you the most profit for your paid search account.

Ad Testing: Are You Using the Wrong Success Metrics? is a post from: Certified Knowledge

We have three upcoming workshops around the world on AdWords.

I’m going to include information on the new Enhanced Campaigns so you can make your transitions easier and take advantage of some of the new features.

The basics of the agenda can be seen below; however, I try to leave a bit of ‘wiggle room’ for in-depth Q&A and/or to add a topic at the end of the day (favorites so far have been Remarketing, pivot tables, large scale organization, and team organization; and I’m sure these will get into Enhanced Campaigns).

The upcoming workshops will be:

• San Jose (with SMX West) on March 14th
• Sydney, Australia on April 5th
• Munich, Germany on April 8th

The Workshop Agenda

Comprehensive Keyword Research: The absolute center of every PPC campaign is keywords. Learn the effective methods to discover and research keywords. While keywords are the lifeblood of PPC, perfecting your match type’s usage while controlling your negative keywords can drastically increase your overall revenue.

Writing Compelling Ad Copy: You will learn how to sync your ad copy with both your keywords and buying cycle stages. Testing ad copy is essential to any AdWords account’s success. You will takeaway several ideas for ads to test by the time you leave the session.

Demystifying Quality Score: Quality Score has a larger effect on your account’s visibility than any other setting inside of AdWords. Quality Score can be a challenge to increase. Receive step-by-step instructions in how to prioritize Quality Score improvement, and what actions to take to increase your Quality Scores.

Increase your Reach Through the Google Display Network: Consumers spend about 5% of their time with the search network. The rest of their time is spent on content sites. Learn how to effectively reach users beyond search with contextual ads, placements, and enhanced campaigns.

Control Your Ad Display with Location Targeting: Do you think that geographic targeting isn’t relevant to a national business? Think again! Whether you are a brick and mortar local business, or a global e-commerce site, learn how geographically targeted campaigns can create additional connections with searchers.

Increase Your Landing Page Conversions: The first impression to a potential customer is the landing page. With only a few seconds to engage the buyer this may be more important in your conversion funnel than anything else. This section of the course will not only go into best practices and usability, but how to test landing pages in a simple and effective method.

More Info

Lunch will be included. The presentations will be available for download during and after the presentation. The WiFi should work (you can never make 100% guarantees when you don’t own the venue).

You can learn more about the conferences here:

SMX West in San Jose, March 14th:

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

SMX Australia in Sydney, April 5th

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

SMX Germany in Munich, April 8th

• Information
• Registration
• AdWords Workshop Details

I’ll be around all 3 conferences for a few days, so if you’d like to chat during the week or after the workshop, please just let me know.

Hope to see you there.

Attend an AdWords Workshop in San Jose, Sydney, or Munich is a post from: Certified Knowledge

When CPA bidding first rolled out in 2007; you needed at least 300 conversions in the past month for it to work. Over the years, Google has improved the algorithms to the point in 2010 that you only needed 15 conversions in a campaign over the past 30 days to enable this setting.

However, I always found that no matter Google’s minimum conversions, the tool failed more often that not if you didn’t have roughly 150-200% of the minimums needed – until very recently. Now, I’m seeing a different story with CPA bidding.

Small Account CPA Bidding Case Study

I was working on an account where most campaigns were averaging 15-20  conversions per month. The data was sporadic and inconsistent. One month certain words would get a conversion and the next month a completely different set of words would get a conversion. There were very few words that would receive a conversion every single month; and the words that did have these consistent conversions were often higher than the target CPA for the account.

Typical Month

The target CPA was $65 per conversions. Only one campaign had exceeded this CPA. Every single other campaign was significantly higher than this goal.

To turn this account around, I went through several steps:

Step 1: Build a New ‘Optimized’ Campaign

The first step is to take all the data and create a very granular organized campaign that used the best features of the data from the past several years. This was to be a benchmark campaign of what was possible.

Due to some very high bids that were risky to try in a new campaign and items working ‘well enough’ in the other campaigns, some of the other campaigns were tweaked a little to show the difference between well organized and the typical campaigns; but were left to continue running to mitigate any transition risk.

This is why many columns talk about organization and they are right to do so, just going through this step increased the total conversions significantly (50 to 112).

Month 1 Data:

Tweaking some settings, such as adding negative keywords, removing poor keywords, finishing some ad tests, moving some budgets around, etc resulted in the account more than doubling it’s conversions; and lowering the CPAs. However, the ‘new campaign’ with the ‘proper’ organization immediately hit the CPA goals while brining in an additional 18 conversions, which is a large increase since the account only had 50 conversions in the previous month.

Step 2: CPA Bidding

In the second month, some minor tweaks were made; but the biggest change was turning on CPA bidding for a few campaigns.

Month 2 Data:

Once CPA bidding was enabled, the conversion rates went up by 0.7%; which is a nice; but not huge increase. The CTR dropped a touch, which is not uncommon to see. However, the total conversions increased by 40 with a $10 reduction in CPA. That’s what CPA bidding can often do for smaller accounts. No longer are the conversions hovering at the 15-20 range where you might not be able to use CPA bidding, but they have increased enough where Google does have more data to work with.

Step 3: Ad Rotate: Optimize For Conversions

I’m a huge fan of ad testing, and usually use one of the ‘rotate’ features for testing purposes. However, this was a small account and I wanted to see how good the ‘optimize for conversions’ would be in a small account. In addition, I had consistently heard from people who had tried these small CPA tests before that it was often working for a few weeks; but then the volume dropped so much they had to stop using the biding option. In order to keep building the conversion numbers so that wouldn’t be a trap; I then enabled ‘Optimize for Conversions’ in the ad settings:

Now beyond that; other things were being done inside the campaigns, such as adding negatives, removing some very very poor performing words, testing extensions, and so forth; but the largest change was the ad serving.

The ‘optimize for conversion’ setting had an unexpected result – it not only increased the conversion rates, it increased the CTR in a few campaigns:

Month 3 Data:

The ‘well organized’ campaign amazingly went from a 5.64% CTR to a 10% CTR with optimize for conversions. Other campaigns increased in CTRs as well; however, not to quite the same levels. This seems so strange to me that I’m still testing this setting in some other campaigns to see if this is somehow a  common side effect. As CPA bidding is suppose to just set bids on keywords, and ‘optimize for conversions’ is suppose to just serve ads; it seems very odd to see a CTR difference of this magnitude.

The overall conversion rates went from 3.24% to 5.09%; with the ‘well organized campaign’ going from a 2.97% to a 4.99% conversion rate.  That’s a very nice increase since it only takes 30 seconds to change the ad rotation setting from one option to another one.

The other dramatic change was the PLA campaign went from a 5.77% conversion rate to a 11.30% conversion rate. That’s an amazing difference in a PLA campaign where very little work is being done on the management side.

The Results

This is the overall results of one good campaign (the other campaigns weren’t touched outside of some basic items such as adding negative keywords and manipulating the budgets) and conversion optimizer during a 90 day period:

• Conversion rates: Increase from 1.94% to 5.09%
• CPA: Decreased from $101 to $44
• CTR: Increase from 3.21% to 3.46%
• Total budget: Increased $4,600
• Total conversions: Increased from 50 to 216 per month

Most of these campaigns are also limited by budget, so the next step is to open up the budgets and see with just budget manipulation if the total conversions can more than double again (at the same CPA). After that’s done; it’ll be time to reorganize some of the older campaigns, test serving the ads on more hours of the day, and of course, do some landing page testing.

I’ve now tested CPA bidding in a few smaller accounts; and I’m seeing similar results. Even with 15-20 conversions, conversion optimizer is working more often than not; and if it works early on, then the total number of conversions often goes up causing it to be even better in later months as it has more data in which to work.

CPA bidding being successful for small accounts is a huge change from last year when it failed more often than not . No longer do the advanced tools such as CPA bidding have to be relegated to just large accounts (where it almost always consistently performs well) – small accounts can try some of these more advanced tools as well.

The total amount of time put into this account’s rise to success is roughly 20 hours over 90 days. Even if no other changes were made in the account to help conversions, the account is looking to spend about double in 2013 than in 2012; but with over quadruple the conversions. That’s a pretty good 20 hours of work; and its mostly due to proper organization, an execution and testing strategy, and Google’s CPA Bidding option.

If you have struggling small accounts, test CPA bidding and ‘optimize for conversions’ ad serving, the results might surprise you.

Case Study: Quadrupling A Small Account’s Conversions in Just 90 Day is a post from: Certified Knowledge

We’ve received excellent feedback about our PPC Tips Newsletter. It’s grown quite fast and we’ve already sent out more than 40,000 emails.

Just to clear up some confusion, the PPC Tips newsletter is not these blog articles; it’s a weekly newsletter sent directly to your inbox covering a variety of PPC topics.

There are two versions of the newsletter:

For premium members: The tips will be easy-to-read and implement, and often complimented with links into premium videos to learn more about the concept as a whole.

For free members: The tips will also be easy-to-read and implement suggestions, and will usually be complimented with additional content into either articles we’ve written that are still relevant today or some of our free lessons.

While anyone can signup for the newsletter, you will get the most out of it if you have at least a free account so that you can always view additional information referenced in the newsletter.

For current premium and free members, you should already be receiving your newsletters.

For those who wish to sign up; you can join for free,  sign-up for just the newsletter, take a 7 day Trial and see the premium version of the newsletter, or learn more about memberships options.

Don’t Forget to Subscribe to the New PPC Tips Newsletter is a post from: Certified Knowledge