the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

If you’ve been hesitating on experimenting with the Adwords Conversion Optimizer now may be the time to try it. The Adwords blog team is pushing their case and educating everyone on the process and setting expectations. 2 key points I’d like to point out from their post:

# Keep in mind that if you choose a CPA lower than the recommended maximum CPA bid, you are likely to get less traffic than you did with your old CPC bids. It’s a good idea to start with this recommendation and adjust based on the results you observe.

As we all should know what our acceptable CPA range is, you will get a good idea right off the bat if this will work for your campaign or not. If your recommended max CPA bid is out of line with your metrics, you risk losing traffic if your actual max CPA bid is too low.

However, if those 2 are fairly close and you decide to give it a shot, you do have something to fall back on:

If you choose to opt out of the Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will revert to the previous CPC bids you were using. (So, there’s nothing to stop you from giving it a try!)

Even if it didn’t reset itself to your previous bids, you should be backing up your campaigns via Adwords Editor before any major changes, so you could simply override the campaign changes.

So, there’s the case for giving it a shot, as well as 1 item to look for when you’re going through the setup process.

Yesterday I was developing a proposal for a client entering their 3rd year with us. My bottom line with this client is that they have been successful, but they’ve never really taken any of my onsite advice in terms of building really good, solid landing pages that convert well. In fact, their landing pages are quite poor. I see this quite a bit. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising, but not investing in the landing pages or website. Penny-wise and pound foolish.

I think what the layperson don’t grasp is how inexpensive it can be to have a really talented designer throw together a very nice looking page. I mean, give me $200 and a Sitepoint contest and I’ll have 20 different people begging you to pick their design by the end of the day. 20% of them will be really good designs. I think people are still scared off by those website design proposals they saw in 1997, when everyone was charging $25000 for a 5 page site with rotating gifs and a ‘dynamic’ contact us form.

Anyhow, with said junky landing page, here is a snapshot of 1 month a couple seasons ago:

The top line is actual data. The subsequent lines are the carrot I’m dangling for them. In line 2 you see that if we can increase the conversion rate a measly 4 tenths of 1%, they would have received 14 more leads (12% better) and reduced their cost per lead $8 (11% better).

As it was the following season, by virtue of some PPC kung fu, I knocked that cost per lead down 30%. Still, imagine the numbers with a really good landing page. Obviously, the campaign works as it is running. The numbers make sense for them. Average sale is in the thousands, so if they convert 1 in 5 leads generated from the PPC campaign they are still doing well.

My gut instinct is that if we had a good cache of landing pages I could get the cost per lead down to $12-15.

Anyhow, if you want to use this spreadsheet as a carrot for your clients, you can download it here.

I’m afraid to try this on any of my personal or client accounts, so I will refer you to someone who was brave enough to play the guinea pig.

I think what we’re learning just reinforces what I’ve seen with every single CPA rules based automated bidding solution. THEY DON’T WORK.

Someone please prove me wrong. Point me to an actual case study that I can verify and I’ll be happy to eat my words. Believe me, if I could find something reliable I’d use it.

Google Adwords has just added another layer of sophistication to the Adwords platform. Prior to this step, the only way you could manage an Adwords campaign with CPA based rules was to invest in a rather expensive bid management platform. Even then, what I’ve found in the past several years is that this type of system needs larger data sets to work properly. Google confirms this:

In order to accurately predict your conversion rate and optimize your bids, the Conversion Optimizer requires that your campaign currently uses AdWords Conversion Tracking and has at least 300 conversions in the last 30 days. The Conversion Optimizer tries to keep the cost of each conversion below your CPA bid. However, if the actual conversion rate is lower than we predict, your CPA may exceed your CPA bid.

If you are operating a site that meets this basic requirement you would definitely want to give this a go.

To get started:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Select the checkbox next to the appropriate keyword-targeted campaign or campaigns.
3. Click Edit Settings.
4. Under the Advanced Options section, click View and edit bidding options.
5. On the Bidding Options page, select the radio button next to Conversion Optimizer.
6. Click Continue.
7. Specify your ad group maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bids. If a recommended bid is displayed, we suggest you use that amount.
8. Click Save and Activate.

More details here…

If you have any feedback from your testing please let me know. I’m interested to hear how it works in a live setting.