Recently I had the good fortune to be on ta team that produced quite a turn around for an Ecommerce account. In 1 month sales grew by 39.4%. This was during a time when month-over-month sales trend downwards due to seasonality. Below is a brief summary of our to-do list from that month.
1. Check your funnel to see what percent of cart abandons you have.
- If above 80% abandonment = review checkout process and test alternatives such as reducing steps, removing main navigation from the checkout process, and changing button colors and text.
- If less than 79% abandonment = don’t worry about it, for now.
2. Filter your keywords to show all that are 20% below your CPA goal or greater and have converted 3 or more times. Bid them up by 15%.
3. Filter your keywords to show all that are 20% higher than your CPA goal and have converted 3 or more times. Bid them down by 15%. (This won’t grow sales, but will create wiggle room to push sales other places that may convert at goal).
4. Turn CPA optimizer off, and adjust bids based on the following formula (obviously do not change the bids of the keywords you changed in 2 and 3. The easiest way to do all this is in one bid excel doc and using filters):
1 / Keyword CR for last 7 days = Clicks to get 1 close
(CPA goal x 1.10) / Clicks = Max CPC
Example:
1 / 3% = 33
($30 x 1.10) / 33 = $1 max CPC
CPA optimizer does something more complicated, but similar. Although this will allow you to insure you push every keyword you want to based on how it is doing for the last 7 days. CPA optimizer often has more lag than that.
5. Add 500 keywords modeled after your top converters. To do this, take your top converters and put them into a handful of keywords tool like Google’s Keyword Tool and Word tracker. It will kick out a handful of relevant keywords that you can put back into the keyword tool and get even more options.
6. If you are only using exact and phrase match keywords, expand to modified broad match. If you are only in broad match keywords, start new campaigns with exact and phrase. Either way, find balance and make sure you’re testing what works best for you.
7. Conclude ad tests and leave your top ads running. Determine your top ads as explained in this post on ad testing. Start running only one ad in each ad group, this top-performing ad.
8. Add remarketing, and bid it high to start. CPA will start poorly but an overall lift will be felt and CPA will drop over time (hopefully).
9. Run a report in Analytics to see if any geo targets provide very high ROAS for you. If they do, break them in to their own campaign and push bids even higher.
That was it. It took about 20 hours worth of work, for a significant lift in leads at a CPA that was below goal.
