PPC/ AdWords - My New Job

Hi Nico,

Yes, there is plenty that you can do to increase your chances of getting conversions.

Basic marketing principles apply.

Optimizing your campaigns based your conversion data is definitely the best way, long term, to maximize goals like total profits, or revenue growth. Yet, the conversion data isn't all that useful at this stage of your campaigns. The good news is that you do have other data, aside from conversion data, and you can begin optimizing your campaigns to a degree based on the data that you are currently gathering.

To make things even more challenging is that since you are so early in the process you may have relatively little data on many of your targeting segments. With small sets of data the likeliness of the results being totally random are very high. You are not able to make valid conclusions on such small amounts of data. Having said that, I am not a proponent of waiting weeks, or even months, before making any adjustments at all.

Micro-Conversions to the rescue

Typically, there are a number of action steps that users take along the path toward the primary conversion objective. These steps along the path toward your conversion action can be considered "micro-conversions". Each micro-conversion step can be setup as a conversion goal that can be tracked and measured. You will have a lot more micro-conversion data available for optimizing your campaign performance so this gives you actionable data faster.

You can track events like page views of key pages, clicks on add-to-cart buttons and other click events. Just setup a goal for each track-able event that can be found along the path toward a completed conversion. This will allow you to see traffic sources that are bouncing early on the path to a conversion and begin optimizing based on user behavior that is likely to lead to a conversion.

Even though you will be gathering more data, and getting it faster, you are still going to have too little data to make statistically valid conclusions for many of your targeting segments.There is a technique that can help you begin optimization while waiting for enough data to make statistically valid conclusions.

Make frequent minor adjustments.

When you analyse your result data some targeting segments will have above average performance as compared to the aggregate data, and some segments will be below average. Make small incremental adjustments each day, increasing ad spend on segments with above average performance and decreasing ad spend on segments with below average performance. By making very minor adjustments you reduce the risk of adjusting too much in the wrong direction.

Over time your ad spend adjustments will gradually improve your overall campaign performance moving constantly towards a more optimal ad spend level for each individual targeting segment.

Since making many frequent adjustments can end up being a lot of work, I recommend that you setup automatic bid and budget adjustments. There are multiple options available for automating your bids, and I'm not referring to the automatic campaign optimizations in AdWords, I find that feature doesn't work well unless you are already having daily conversions.

HTH,

Don Burk