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AdWords Experiment Update

Several weeks ago I posted Advertising Conversations – An AdWords Experiment. Now the budget has been exhausted and the results are in. Our initial strategy proved costly. We used a lot of quite broad keywords, had a high average cost-per-click (CPC) bid (relative to our budget), opted to use both managed and automated ad placements, and had a high daily budget allocation. The fact  that we were using free money (thanks Google!) probably didn’t help motivate us to formulate a more economical strategy from the outset. However, we always had the intention to make mistakes so others wouldn’t have to. You can thank us later…

Most of our impressions (and about 40% of clicks) came from the automatic placement network. The managed content placements we used had next to no traction at all. There is a lot of material going round stating the risk of allocating much of your budget to the automatic content network, check out this Internet Marketing Blog. Like many others I would advise to err on the side of caution (at least initially) when it comes to the auto content network. Focus on optimising your keywords first.

Content placements drastically reduce your click-through-rate (CTR), which in turn adversely affects your quality score. This means your ads are less likely to appear at the top when your keywords are searched for. Bummer. Unless you have a lot of money to allocate to AdWords campaigns (enabling you to frequently outbid the competition), I would suggest giving the auto network the flick. Sure you can get a lot of impressions and possibly clicks, but are these people really interested in what you do? The majority probably wont find what their looking for. Hello high bounce rate, bye bye budget!

Give us the stats already!

Ok for our $95 we got 134 clicks, 286,874 impressions, and had a click through rate (CTR) of 0.05%. Our most successful keyword was “Co-creation” with 23 clicks (CTR of 0.91%), followed by “marketing tips” with 20 (CTR of 0.59%). Interestingly the term “join the conversation” had the highest CTR of 2.59%. We burned through most of the budget in less than a week on when our daily limit was $20! In an attempt to gather more information with what money remained we adjusted our campaign settings. This enabled the ads to continue running for about one month all up. What it also did was make us consider the most efficient and effective way to manage our ads.

That is about the best advice I can offer. Keep tinkering with your keywords. Add more, remove non-performing ones and keep a close eye on those that are generating rubbish traffic. Consider using negative keywords where you think people may be inadvertently clicking on your ads. We noticed a pattern of searchers looking for Facebook login info so we added negative keywords that were associated with this search.

Overall the AdWords experiment wasn’t hugely successful in terms of getting people to “join the conversation”. More people visited the site for sure, but as for getting the community to contribute, well I guess that is still a work in progress… What it did teach us was that the saying “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply to AdWords. Build it (your ads), they will come, leave quickly, and you’re left out of pocket in a hurry. Build it well on the other hand, adapt you keywords and ad text to what the searchers are looking for; and you will increasingly improve your R.O.I

If you have any AdWords advice, stories or questions please comment below or contact us at @iThnk.