Image via CrunchBaseIf you have been reading this blog since the start then you will know that I sell electronic goods (mainly computer related ones such as the Wi-Fire). I do so mainly through my own online store (hosted by BigCommerce), although I also have an eBay Store and an Amazon Store.
Marketing is mainly via Google AdWords though I have dabbled with eBay's version (initially known as AdCommerce). Now as anyone who has ever run a Google AdWords campaign for the first time, it is fiendishly complicated and enough to turn the most sane person into a mindless and emotional wreck. It's not just the steep learning curve of doing it yourself, it's also the veritable plethora of 'experts' out there offering to make it all simple and effective, all for a King's ransom of course.
So I did what a lot of people do and read a lot, especially blogs and online articles, especially Google's own. In addition I dabbled with running my own campaigns and tweaking them in an effort to improve my click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate, whilst keeping the cost of each click as low as possible.
Now, it doesn't take a genius to realise that I made many mistakes. Expensive ones too. However, I have certainly learned a lot and improved my performance. In the early days I was seeing CTR's in the region of 0.1 - 0.5% (yes that low). However, by the end (I recently finished my last campaign) I was seeing CTR's in the region of 2.25% on some keywords. (I saw CTR's at times of up to 100% on some keywords but I am not counting those as their total impact was minimal due to very low number of clicks).
As to what I learnt and how this improved my performance, here it is for what it's worth.
- I kept search and content campaigns separate.
- I only had 2 adverts per ad group and only 2 keywords per ad at the start.
- After each keyword has reached at least 100 impressions I stopped the worst performing one and added some more.
- Once a keyword passed the 100 impressions level I kept only the best performing ones and paused the rest, adding new keywords again and repeating the experiment.
- Likewise with adverts in an ad group, I would check which was the best performing one and pause the other. I would then duplicate the winner and tweak it slightly and wait and see whether this improved or worsened it's performance. Once it was obvious which was the better ad I repeated the process, all the time trying to up the performance of each ad group and ad.
- I kept my budget low initially, at about £10 a day, only increasing it to about £15 a day once my CTR starting climbing.
I am no way an expert but I think I have learnt some valuable lessons and so I wanted to share them here. I feel that come my next campaign I have a much better idea of what to do and that my limited funds will go that much further. I intend to post later about my experience with Google Analytics, once I get the hang of setting up conversion tracking.
No comments:
Post a Comment