Should You Invest in Google AdWords Pt II

Hi everyone,

Clarissa here,

Back with an update on Google AdWords. You can see my original post here.

This time it’s for a client (not CNW Digital) but I thought it would be good to demonstrate results for an entirely different product, and an actual eCommerce business, as opposed to a marketing agency or consulting business.

Google AdWords Previous Recommendations

So if you read our previous post, we provided a brief case study on an Awareness campaign we ran for CNW to determine if investing in AdWords made sense for us and what type of results it generated. As a recap, we concluded the following:

• What I suggest: If your dedicated monthly spend is limited to $1,000 or less, run a campaign for at least 6 months adjusting your monthly budget and optimizing your campaign as you go before you can determine if investing in AdWords is the right approach for your business.
• Ask yourself as you go:
  • Am I seeing a dramatic increase in site traffic?
    • What is your bounce rate along the process? If it’s less than 40% it’s safe to say the site visitors are fairly interested in what you have to offer.
    • If the bounce rate is high, try adjusting your audience targeting, increasing your CPC, or optimizing your ad groups, keywords, and text ad copy. Don’t waste time on underperforming keywords and focus on the ones that are performing well to avoid wasting valuable budget.
  • After the first 90 days, has it led to any conversions?
    • This could include email sign-ups, contact form submissions, or actual purchases. If so you know you’re on the right track and to keep analyzing the results.
• Otherwise consider social advertising instead such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Consider Facebook lead generation ads, boosted posts, or remarketing ads. Boosted posts are obviously the most simple of the three options, however, Facebook advertising has become so advanced that you can implement several types of ads, at a low cost, with a highly engaged audience. Plus you can promote quality content in the form of images or video that stands a better chance of highlighting the brand’s story and products than perhaps a branded search campaign.
• Try the Organic Approach: SEO
  • Start a blog on your site if it’s right for your brand and you have time and resources to do so
  • Ensure your on-site SEO is on point – product page titles, meta descriptions, alt image texts, keyword density, URL structure, and optimize thin content pages or remove altogether
  • Start building your backlinks – partnering with other brands and websites to drive traffic to your site
  • AND remember quality over quantity. Create quality, engaging content that will keep your audience wanting more and coming back

Okay knowing what we know now, let’s take a look at a current client’s results from Sep 17th 2018 to Dec 24th 2018 – approximate 3-month duration.

Google AdWords Case Study with CNW Digital’s Client

Client Background

Without exposing too much information that would breach client confidentiality, the client will remain unidentified. However, here’s what we can tell you: it was a product assortment of men and women’s products with an average order value of $220 with the most popular products in the $150-$165 price range.

Goal

Because it’s a fairly young company with a newly introduced product, the focus was to run an Awareness campaign, not an Acquisition campaign. However, it was really more of a hybrid approach combining both. Technically speaking, Google doesn’t recommend that you set a campaign goal to ‘conversion’ unless you’ve had at least 10 purchase conversions (or at least that’s what a Google representative told me that was helping us manage the account). But for the client > the goal was to drive a ton of traffic to the site during the busiest time of the year (Q4), but ultimately, it always comes down to sales and conversions as an eCommerce business.

Key Performance Indicators

• Conversions
• Clicks
• Cost per conversion
• ROAS

Campaign Overview

In 3 months time it generated 1.76M impressions, 13.2K clicks, with an average CPC of $0.32 and the client spent a total of $4.25K between search and display advertising, with majority focus on search. While at first glance, the numbers may look impressive, don’t be too sure just yet. Let’s evaluate a few more KPIs.

Search Campaign

As we can see in comparison to the overall Awareness campaign, the search campaign accounted for 84% of total impressions, 81% of total cost, and 94% of total clicks to the landing pages.

Overall in those 3 months it generated 23 conversions and $3,736.67 in conversion value, approximately 7-8 conversions per month with a total spend of $3,468.18. The cost per conversion was $150.79, with a fairly low overall conversion rate, and CTR. The average position was 1.2 – 2.2. However, ultimately what matters the most was did we make the money we spent back? Was there a ROAS? Barely with a ROAS of 7.7%.

Last Month – Peak Holiday

Something to point out, was that a large portion of total traffic, conversions, and positive ROAS occurred in the month of December. This is to be expected due to holiday gifting peak time. In total it generated 322K impressions, 3.7K clicks, for a total cost of $1468.07 and $3024.92 in conversion value, for a total of 9 conversions. In which this case the ROAS was 106% > (Profit – Cost = net profit > net profit / initial investment  * 100 > [$3024.92-$1468.07] / $1468.07 * 100 = 106).

Display Campaign (30 days)

Note, the display campaign started much later around November 12th and only ran for 30 days, but here’s a brief snapshot nonetheless. We spent $781 which resulted in 279,943 and 670 clicks, with 0 conversion and the CPC was much higher. In conclusion, it didn’t perform up to expectations, so we did shut if off by 2nd week of December and reallocated the budget to the search campaigns to finish out the Q4 strong.

Conclusion

While the final month of the campaign in December was promising with a ROAS of 106%, ultimately the campaign as a whole did not generate a positive ROAS > we spent $4.25K and made $3736.67 with a ROAS of -12%. Therefore, we shifted our focus back into Facebook advertising (which did generate a ROAS and I will present in an upcoming post – so stay tuned). Again, whether or not Google AdWords is right for you, we will leave that for you to decide. There’s a lot of factors that go into it > your price point, your product or service offerings, and how much you’re willing to invest. As I mentioned in a previous post, a Google rep told me unless you’re willing to spend $10K a month, you’re not going to see a ROAS. Guess they were right in this case. But hey, if you never try, you’ll never know.

Until next time,

Clarissa

Founder, CNW Digital