St. Louis Pay Per Click

Archive for February, 2010

Google AdWords allow you to choose how your ads show; you can choose to have all ads within an ad group rotate evenly or let Google optimize by showing the “better performing” ads more often.  But, Google defines “performance” as the ads with the highest CTR.  This makes money for Google, because they are making money every time an ad is clicked, so showing the ads that get clicked the most makes sense. But, what about conversions? You may define “performance” as ads with the highest conversion rate, not ads with the highest CTR.  There are many reasons why you may or may not want to optimize your ads.  Here are a few pros and cons to help you decide:

Even Rotation

Pro: You have control of your ads and define “performance” how you choose.

Pro: You can fully test which ad variations for many factors besides CTR – also for conversion rate, ad text, landing page success and more.

Con: AdWords looks at CTR when determining Quality Score, and a higher Quality Score means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Optimize

Pro: Because AdWords does a great job showing the ads with the highest likelihood of being clicked, you can quickly tell which ad has the best CTR, rather than waiting to see results with even rotation.

Pro: Continually showing the ad with the highest CTR results in a higher Quality Score, which again, means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Con: You may end up spending money on ads that aren’t converting.

The common school of thought is to maintain full control of your ads and the ability to test them by choosing even rotation.  That said, you may choose to start your campaign on optimize to let Google tell you the ad with highest CTR quickly while improving quality score.  Then, with that information you can tweak ads, based on what worked while on the optimized setting, and then switch to even rotation to fully test all ad variations.

Earlier this year, Google AdWords added another way to track conversions other than the 1-per-click method.  The many-per-click method allows you to see the overall number of conversions occurring, but may cause some confusion.

First, conversions can be many things besides someone purchasing an item from a site.  You can choose an action you would like to count as a conversion, based on what is important to you.  For example, you can track purchases, form completion, or a certain page view as a conversion.  You can also track more than one of these types of conversions simultaneously.

With the 1-per-click method of tracking conversions, a user is only counted once within a 30 day period.  For example, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form and makes a purchase, it only counts as one conversion.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, it does not count towards the 1-per-click conversion number.  So, within a 30 day window, all conversions one user makes only counts as one conversion.

With the many-per-click method of tracking conversions, every conversion a user makes is counted within a 30 day period.  Using the same example as above, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form on your site and makes a purchase, the many-per-click conversions would be two.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, the number of many-per-click conversions would increase by one.  So, within a 30 day window, all the conversions that user made count, adding up to three many-to-click conversions.

If the number of many-per-click conversions seems too high to be true, it probably is.  There may be other things triggering this conversion, other than the ones you intended.  If a user refreshes the page or hits the back button to continue browsing your site after the conversion was completed, this may lead to an increase in the number of many-per-click conversions.  If a user bookmarks your converting page and returns to it within 30 days, this will also result in a conversion, although no purchase was actually made.  There are some ways to improve your code to prevent some of these issues, click here for more detailed information about how to do this.

If you are unsure about what you’re seeing, it’s always best to do a little research and look into Google Analytics to see if everything is matching up.