Help with adword campaign question

by 7 replies
8
Basically, I've been advertising my business on adwords for 2 months. things are slowly getting better, but I noticed something this week that is hard for me to understand. I set my schedule this week to have my bids scale at certain times, 12am to 9 am -90%, 9am-4pm -50%, etc etc. What I noticed is this, I am getting MORE CONVERSIONS when my keywords are ranked last, or not technically even first page bids, and little to NONE while its running at 100%, with no reduction.

Should I pay some kind of special attention to this? It's kind of blowing my mind right now why its easier for me to get conversions during the day when my ad position is so extremely low. On average the keywords are 3$ or so for first 3 spots, I got my conversions today when they keywords were about .55 cents.

Really just having a hard time with this, should I be maybe considering leaving some keywords specifically at really low / dead last ad positions, with the lowest cost possible? IS there any rhyme or reason why people would buy more from me whenever my position is lower, and not higher?

Only thing I can think of, positions 1-3, maybe the people clicking those are more like the true window shoppers of the internet, where people clicking the ads on the side, 3-9, are the more determined buyers who have no desire to jump around from site to site to find a deal?


Sorry for the long post
#search engine optimization #adword #campaign #question
  • [DELETED]
    • [1] reply
    • Hi Lambss,

      Welcome to the wonderfully complex world of AdWords' dynamic ad auctions.

      There are a lot of specific details that we would need to know about your ad campaign to give a reasonably accurate answer to your question. However there are a few obvious reasons that could explain what you are seeing.

      Time of Day - Most niches will tend to have more orders during certain times of the day. In your case, it may simply be that 9-4pm is the time of day that most orders are placed for your niche. So, even though you have reduced your bids, you still see most of your orders during that time because that is when most of the buyers are placing orders. This would be particularly true for most B2B niches.

      Ad Position - While it is generally true that you get more clicks and conversions with higher ad positions, this does vary a bit for some industries and certain niches. It's not unusual to see higher CTR for ad positions around position 4, as well as position 8. The best thing to do is to test to see which ad positions tend to give you the most total profit.

      Mobile Devices - Mobile devices are rapidly and dramatically changing the nature of AdWords auctions. For some niches you might see a very high percentage of your evening traffic come from mobile devices. I have a number of campaigns that have been ranging between 40-80% mobile device traffic during the evening hours. This is a recent trend being driven by the rapid adaption of smartphones and tablets for web surfing during evening hours. Conversion rates are often much lower for mobile devices, especially if you haven't built your website using Responsive Design principles. If your website displays perfectly for desktops, and it isn't built using Responsive Web Design, you are likely to see more orders during the hours that must users are viewing your website on a desktop.

      Daily Budget Limits - If traffic to your campaigns are limited by budget then you will often have far fewer impressions during the periods where your bids are higher, and more impressions, with more clicks during periods where your bids are lower. Allowing daily budget limits to throttle your ads can seriously harm your potential ROI. Try raising your daily budget limit if your ad impressions are limited by budget.

      Keyword Targeting Targeting keywords with low commercial intent could lead to large amounts of traffic from "true window shoppers" as you put it. Eliminate poorly targeted keywords that have low commercial intent by the use of negative match keywords.

      Those are some of the things that could lead to the pattern of conversions you have been experiencing and hopefully this information may help you narrow it down to the true cause. It seems to me that understanding why you are experiencing this could be a very useful insight for your campaign management.
      • [1] reply
  • Don't make any judgments based on stats until you have at-least two weeks worth of constant ads running. My first campaign got now clicks in the first hour so I scrapped the entire campaign. After becoming obsessed with learning more, I learned to be patient and it paid off, set up an identical campaign and waited a couple of weeks and learned my Ad actually does awesome, just during peek hours. The result? I had an Ad for those peek hours and an Ad for the off hours. It pays to be patient.
    • [1] reply
    • I feel my biggest mistake is trying to do this all on a budget. I wont lie, its probably a real bad idea to do what I am doing, but I've had some money to lose so this was a risk I was willing to take.

      Till recently I've been running my ads on a 20$ a day budget, which sometimes doesnt last even 4 hours. I tried to stick to that budget, as I was afraid to just let it go, but I think I am going to lean that route. See how much clicks / impressions I make in a full day, and optimize after a month.

      It's a little scary, but eventually im going to have to pay more money for faster data, maybe its time.
  • Lambss, it's ok, everyone goes through that at first. Have you considered raising your daily spend limit to something outrageous, then lowering your CPC (manually bid)? This doesn't work for everyone, but sometimes you can get more clicks without actually hitting that spend limit. This is also very risky so only consider it after looking into it more. (how daily spend / CPC effects impressions)
    • [1] reply
    • I havent tried that yet, I've played around with it a bit to get more clicks in a day if I reached my limit too soon, but that was about it.

      Would you suggest that if I am breaking even or profiting on every payment I make to google, to just let it run all day?

      Thats basically where I'm at now. I would pay like 120, 140, 300 $ a week and let it run till it was gone. Sometimes 20$ a day, sometimes less. Sometimes 50$. If this money I spend is making me money, even though its only a little, when do you think is the right time to take it to the next level?

      If anyone thinks letting it run all day long already is a good idea, I wouldnt be so against giving it a shot.
      • [1] reply
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed

  • 8

    Help with adword campaign question

    Basically, I've been advertising my business on adwords for 2 months. things are slowly getting better, but I noticed something this week that is hard for me to understand. I set my schedule this week to have my bids scale at certain times, 12am to 9 am -90%, 9am-4pm -50%, etc etc. What I noticed is this, I am getting MORE CONVERSIONS when my keywords are ranked last, or not technically even first page bids, and little to NONE while its running at 100%, with no reduction. Should I pay some kind of special attention to this? It's kind of blowing my mind right now why its easier for me to get conversions during the day when my ad position is so extremely low. On average the keywords are 3$ or so for first 3 spots, I got my conversions today when they keywords were about .55 cents.