Death by Default: 5 Questions to Maximize Profitability in High-Spending

AdWords Accounts

Google’s default AdWords settings are great for businesses spending under $1,000
per month. Yet as racecars don’t have automatic transmissions, neither should high
spending AdWords accounts in competitive markets be using Google’s default
settings.

We do AdWords account audits all the time for businesses spending $10,000 per
month to more than $100,000 per month in AdWords. During our reviews we
generally find over 50% of high-spending AdWords accounts are still operating their
account with some profit-draining default settings in place.

Most AdWords accounts can gain at least 20% efficiency (more conversions, less
spend) right off the bat with advanced account management tactics. At least one of
the five questions below should draw out a change for the better within your
AdWords account.

1. Is Google picking your keyword lists based on their own profitability?

Unless otherwise specified, all keywords added to an account without any special
designation are considered broad match. Google has free license to match that to
any keyword they deem at all semantically related. They are obviously trying to
maximize their own profitability, so their default keyword matching is often
uncomfortably costly.

As a general rule, your account should be getting over half of its traffic from exact
and phrase match keywords. These hand-picked keywords will almost always
outperform broad match keywords. Compiling such extensive lists of real-world
profitable search queries takes work, which is why keyword lists in most accounts
are sorely lacking.

2. Does your target market like to buy at 3am?

Your website conversion rate likely differs by time of day or day of week. By
default, your bids are the same all the time even though the average value you
receive from each click fluctuates throughout the day. Google provides a bid
scheduling tool (called “Ad Scheduling”) to increase or decrease bids by
percentages at certain times of the day or week. Your bids should match the ebb
and flow of your conversion rate. Almost all accounts will see profitability increases
by implementing ad scheduling.
 3. Are all your leads & sales worth the same value?

The first step to optimizing based on profitability is to actually track conversions

down to the keyword level. This default conversion tracking is binary… either you
got a conversion or you didn’t. Unless you sell just one product, you’ll probably find
it useful to also track the actual dollar value of the sale, along with the conversion,
so you can optimize based on your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

If you sell products of vastly different margins, you’ll want to go one step further.
Measuring your AdWords profitability based on the order prices alone can be
misleading. Campaigns run most efficiently when you subtract out your wholesale
costs and track the actual profit for every sale. This number is matched to the
keyword, ad group, and campaign that produced the sale. This allows you to bid
according to profit, not just revenue.

4. Are your campaigns serving too many audiences?

While Google is best known for their search engine, their display (content) network
has a vast reach – 80% of US Internet users see their display network ads each
month. All new AdWords campaigns target both search and display audiences by
default. This may be recommended for new advertisers, but running a profitable
display network campaign involves very different strategies compared with
standard search advertising.

As such, you should never target both the search and display network in the same
campaign. Active searchers respond to different ads and require different types of
keywords for targeting than the passive web users found on the display network.

5. Are you telling Google to put your ads in bold?

All things being equal, it would be nice if Google bolded some words in your ad,
wouldn’t it? Bold ads garner more clicks. This won’t happen often with broadly
themed ad groups with tons of keywords all showing the same ads. If you want to
pull this off consistently, your keywords must be matched up tightly with highly
relevant ads. This requires a thoughtfully organized campaign structure with
comprehensive keyword lists.
Of all the optimizations described above, your campaign structure is the most hard-
coded into your account as a whole. This is not a quick fix.

What’s the monthly dollar value of a 20% improvement to your AdWords account?
While initial optimizations tend to bring about great results, your competitive edge
is strengthened with continual optimizations over time. All day-to-day account
management activities (such as keyword research and ad split testing) will bring
better results in an account that is optimized for profitability.

About ROI Revolution

ROI Revolution is an online advertising agency based in Raleigh, NC. We manage

millions of dollars in ad spend in the almost 100 client accounts. We partner with
many types of businesses to turn their PPC channel into sustainable profits for their
company.

Schedule your free 15 minute PPC strategy session to discover hidden opportunities
in your PPC account.