Tons of information has been posted on how to increase your CTRs or conversion rates or how to improve your ad text and quality scores. I would like to share how I was able to increase my overall account status from under-performing to over-performing. See if my plan of action could possibly help you. It was successful for me.
* The goal: to reach 15,284 clicks with a CPC of $0.22 for the month. Then I would have to stay within the budget of about $3,362.48 for the month of April.
* The problem: My CPC was $0.47 and we were only projecting 6,302 clicks for the month. I was also projecting that I would be slightly under budget. My daily spending limit was set in Google, and I noticed every day that the account was hitting their daily spend by 9 a.m.
1. Lower Bids: First and foremost, I had to get my CPC down. Since we were hitting our daily spend at 9 a.m., I realized I had to lower my bids, then I could increase our daily spend so the account would show ads throughout the day. The results should be more clicks at a lower CPC.
a. I aggressively lowered keyword bids that were raising my CPC average.
b. I subtly lowered keyword bids that were just a little too high. I knew I didn’t have to be in positions 1 to 3 to get clicks.
2. Raise Daily Spend: Since I was bidding lower, I decided to raise my daily spending limit so the account could run past 9 a.m.
a. The overall average CPC did decrease within about a week, and my clicks were beginning to increase at a lower CPC.
3. Inactive Keywords: Lowering some bids did cause some of my high-traffic keywords to become inactive in Google. I spoke with a Google rep who said it’s inactive because of a low quality score.
a. He suggested I break out my campaigns into more-specific ad groups and ad text.
b. After about a week, I began to notice that some of my keywords that were inactive had become active once again. Clicks began to increase even more, but I still wasn’t meeting my goals entirely.
4. Add Keywords: The second plan of action was to thoroughly scan the site for additional keywords I could bid on.
a. I found tons of new keywords I could add to my campaigns from just reading copy within the site more carefully.
b. By doing this I was able to add 10 new ad groups with new keywords to drive more traffic. This worked extremely well. Clicks were continuing to rise.
5. Test Ad Text and Increase Click-Through Rates: The third plan of action was to increase my CTRs through ad text testing. I always have at least two ad texts for each ad group.
a. Settings in Google were set on accelerated and I made sure the Rotate>Show Ads More Evenly button was checked. In turn, my CTRs went up, and so did clicks.
I checked on the account every day to see when it was hitting its daily spending limit. As our CPC kept lowering, I was able to keep increasing our daily spending limit and keep our ads showing longer.
Conclusion: I’m exceeding my goal by 24% in clicks, 24% in our CPC, and I’m under budget. Below is a chart that shows you how I progressed within a few months.
Impressions Clicks CTR CPC Cost
January 2,451,011 6,508 1.03% $0.36 $2,942.11
February 3,428,574 6,273 0.94% $0.12 $2,885.27
March 4,159,612 11,505 1.54% $0.19 $2,562.78
For the month of April, I am projecting 19,078 clicks with a CPC of $0.17.
