I had a very telling phone call with a prominent SEM agency today. I’ll leave names out to protect the guilty. On the call, we were discussing the results of this agency’s free trial of our testing platform. The individual in charge of the evaluation was concerned that our system would not allow her to isolate an individual element of the ad. Apparently, she wanted to be able to find the ULTIMATE headline, for example, so that she could go back to her client and report that she had found the best possible headline for their AdWords effort.
There is, of course, some poor logic behind that target deliverable.
Point 1- Get Granular
Firstly, all AdWords efforts are, by nature, very granular. The beauty, and at times the frustration, of Internet advertising is that every interaction can be broken down to an individual click, a single search string, or a particular visitor. There is inherent frustration there, because nobody has the time or attention span to evaluate their marketing effort manually at such a granular level. Of course, if you can harness technology toward this end, there are tremendous gains to be made. The idea that you might find one King Kong headline, or ad for that matter, that you can then roll out to your entire account is, to say the least, inaccurate. If every keyword responded in the same way to any given ad, there would be no reason to break up your account and your campaigns into different ad groups. The reason that Google encourages you to break up your effort into different ad groups is that you will attain much better results if your ads are actually TARGETED to specific keywords. Much to my surprise, this very basic AdWords best practice seems to be lost on many of the so called “experts” that companies are entrusting with their marketing dollars.
The only way to know for certain which ads are going to perform well in which ad groups is to TEST TEST TEST. Of course, you want to break up your ad groups right off the bat with your best guess on themes, geography, etc. After that, you HAVE TO TEST. If your SEM agency is running only one or two ads in your ad groups, please, FIRE YOUR SEM AGENCY. The best SEM agencies test with fervor, but they are in the minority.
Of course, no one wants to test dozens of ad groups manually, writing hundreds of ads and tracking for statistical significance. That is why BetterPPC exists.
Point 2- PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Manage to a Number
You should always inform your SEM Agency of what number you would like to manage to, either CTR or Conversion. In most cases, the performance of your SEM should be directly tied into your bottom line. Furthermore, if your SEM is managing to a conversion event, CTR should be a part of the equation, as Google will penalize you if your ads receive a low CTR and your conversion work may thereby be for nought. If your SEM agency is not managing your AdWords efforts from an ROI standpoint, or if they are not at least managing to CTR, FIRE YOUR SEM AGENCY. 50% of SEM agencies are giving “AdWords Experts” a bad name.
If someone is managing your marketing budget, make certain they are clear on what the objectives are of the effort. They should be spending your money as if it was their own. At BetterPPC, we take on a very limited number of SEM projects, and they are ALWAYS on a performance basis. Paying someone 25% of your PPC budget to manage your effort and then not putting any performance metrics in place just doesn’t make sense.
If your SEM agency is not testing your ad copy rigorously, they are leaving YOUR money on the table.
Filed by Joe Agliozzo at 8:17 am under BetterPPC, Google AdWords