Leveraging Your Time
The 80/20 rule is universally applied to almost everything… And on the Internet – it’s more like 95/5! This lesson is designed to improve your “campaign management” time by providing areas to focus that can really have an impact on your success.
Looking at the Data
Seeing is believing, so let’s get started:
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Choose any Campaign.
- Sort all of the Ad Groups in descending order by “impressions..”
It will be obvious what’s working, and what’s not, when you see the numbers drop off as you go down the list.
The same will be true for your Keywords – the top few in each Ad Group will account for the majority of the impressions. Accounts will always perform with a “curve” and sometimes it can be dramatic.
Choose What Matters
As you think of expanding your account, it makes sense to start where it matters – with the top performers.
Pick your top twenty percent – the keywords that are performing and put them into separate groups; write a separate ad for each one (and consider a separate landing page too); publish the group and watch your traffic.
You could micro-optimize your account too. Begin with your top keyword and optimize it using the above steps. Once you’ve surpassed any hurdles (quality score, ad position, increasing clicks, and ramping up traffic), move on to the next keyword.
This type of optimization takes patience, but the results can be outstanding.
The Process Outlined
- Start with one [exact match] keyword which has the most impressions and/or most clicks.
- Split test the major ad copy factors including headline, body and display URL.
- Adjust your ad position to find the best ROI.
- Review the various key performance indicators we’ve discussed including quality score, CTR, conversion rates, the bounce rate, average time on site, and other factors. If you see problems, make sure you have keyword to ad copy match (especially with the headline), and that the landing page content (and the related content on the entire website) is relevant to the keyword you are bidding on.
- Identify which ad version returns the lowest cost per conversion. This may be different than the version that provides the best CTR, and you may need to try an altogether new ad variation to see if you can strike a good balance.
- Once the winning combination is determined, repeat the whole process for the next most important keyword.(More advanced: You can do the same process over multiple campaigns or ad groups if your ad copy tests are nearly the same in each ad group. It will also help you reach statistical significance to view this kind of aggregated data: simply go to “Ads” in Adwords and download your ad copy results into excel and then filter by ad element. If you’d rather do it within the Adwords UI, that’s ok too!)
What’s Your 95/5?
This is always the interesting part… I find that the keywords I thought would be the top performers (based on research, KEI, traffic numbers, competition, etc) are usually not. As your performing keyword research and analyzing data, remember, keyword tools can only provide a starting point – not dead on accurate results.
- Some keywords will not drive traffic.
- Other keywords will not convert to sales.
Every keyword has a market of it’s own.
Remember that the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors may not drive traffic (or sales) for you. This is the results of several factors including:
- Ad message
- USP (unique selling position)
- The look and feel of the landing page (and website)
- Marketing Approach
- And the other intrinsic factors
The 20/80 Approach
Perform the same optimization techniques in reverse and slash your ad costs.
- Identify your poor performing keywords – the ones that bring in less than twenty percent of the traffic.
- Reduce their bid prices to as little as 1/5 or 1/10 of their level.
A drop in sales will result from this process, but it’s unlikely your sales will drop as much as you’ve cut your bid prices (1/5 or 1/10).
Example
Let’s say you look at keyword “A” and determine that it’s in your bottom 20% of performing keywords. You are currently bidding $10.00 for this keyword and decide to cut your budget to 1/10 or $1.00. As a result of the lower bid price (and less visibility), this keyword loses 50% of it’s traffic, but that traffic only accounted for 20% of your overall traffic. You’re now paying 1/10th the previous price so you’ve actually increased ROI.
Tip
Filter through your Google account and reduce the bid price on every keyword that has not returned one sale in two to six months. If there are keywords on this list that should have had sales – ask why aren’t they converting?
Give them the attention they deserve: write new ads, create new ad groups, create new landing pages, etc .
More 20% Optimization Techniques
You can apply these same principles to all areas of your AdWords campaigns…
- Ad Groups
- Keywords
- Display Network Placements
- Landing Pages
- Websites
- Advertising campaigns
- Clients
- etc
Begin the process by generally reviewing your data and then move into specifics. As you begin looking at the individual elements of the ad campaign, you will see what’s working and what isn’t. More than 80% of your losses will come from less than 20% of your campaigns and as you examine those specific campaigns, 80% of your losses will come from fewer than 20% of the ad groups in that campaign. If you look closely at the ad groups, you’;; find the same pattern with your keywords.
By optimizing your campaigns in this manner, you’ll be able to resurrect losing campaigns and turn them into winners.
The 80/20 Optimization Summary
- The 80/20 Rule is a universal law and on the Internet – 95/5 is more common.
- 80/20 shows you where to spend your time in order to make a real difference.
- Start with a new campaign getting 60-80% of your final traffic with just 5 +/- keywords.
- For greatest leverage, start with just one exact-match keyword in the entire account.
- All major ad copy, bid price, landing page changes start from that top 5% list.
- Your 80/20 is different from everyone else’s 80/20!
- Keyword tools can never predict which keywords will be the most successful.
- You’ll know for sure what one set of keywords will be your top producers when you set everything up.
- You’ll know whether the best-quality traffic will come from search or content after both have been running.
- Your top-producing keywords will be different from your competitor’s top producers.
- The paying customers that become your top 20% will be unique to you.
- If your campaigns are not showing the 80/20 trend, you can still use the rule to spot what’s mostly right (or wrong).
- There should be a top 20% of keywords that are outperforming everything else by 10:1, 20:1, or more.
- If you’ve had any impressions at all, ranking your keywords ‘Avg. pos’ can tell you what should be at the top.
- You can make the 80/20 and 95/5 Rules work in reverse.
- On your bottom 80% of keywords you can pay as little as a tenth of the price while still getting a third to a half of previous traffic.
- This principle works for Placements too.
- You can use 80/20 to spot and cut your overspending quickly.
- Rank campaigns, ad groups and then keywords by cost, then look for high costs per conversion.
- Using placement reports, rank domains (then later URLs) by cost, then look for high costs per conversion.