BoldChat vs. Google
A decent chunk of our marketing expenditure goes to paid click advertising and the vast majority of that spend is through Google’s AdWords system. While many conversion types are possible on our website, the only one that matters with Google is a successful paid customer conversion. This is, in fact, the only conversion we track using the AdWords ‘conversion tracking’ feature. Over the past year or so we have systematically attempted to drop our cost per conversion by implementing and testing a variety of methodologies. We have relied most heavily on the advice from Perry Marshall and his AdWords course. Just a few of the things we’ve done include:
- Careful analysis of keyword type matching (broad vs. phrase vs. exact)
- live chat vs. “live chat” vs. [live chat]
- Focus on CTR
- Religious split testing of ad variations
- Dynamic keyword insertion
- The use of “Official Site” in copy for our own keyword ad variations
- Negative keyword research using the Search Query Report
Suffice it to say that those of us with primary responsibility for this channel have sliced it, diced it, puréed it, filleted it, oiled it, and boiled it. We’re confident that we haven’t left many stones unturned.
The result? It’s better than when we started. It would be hard, however, to classify it as a resounding, world record breaking success. It’s, well, better than when we started.
A few weeks ago, we were contacted directly by Google. The very nice and professional young woman I spoke with offered us a special consultation and a free optimization of one of our campaigns. I took her up on it. (Note: if this kind of offer is made to you, you should verify that you are really speaking to Google – you can do so because the representative will be able to access your account and affect it directly.)
We’ve spent another couple of weeks reviewing their work and just this week, we took the experiment live. The surprising thing about the optimization is that most of the advanced techniques we’ve employed over the past year were utterly stripped away. Dynamic keyword insertion remains in a couple Ad Groups, but all keywords are broad match, many of our keywords have been deleted, no misspellings are being bid on, bids are consistent across keywords, and the ad copy is amazingly similar throughout the campaign.
We’re incredibly curious about how this will do over the course of the next few weeks and we’ll keep you posted right here on the BoldBlog. I wonder if others have utilized this service with good results.
March 11th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Yes, Ross….definitely keep us posted and feel free to shoot me an email on any finds lest I miss your post.
April 1st, 2009 at 10:40 pm
At our Search agency, Google has provided some good advice. At times they’ve also provided bad advice. We’re always open to listening to new ideas, but we’ve found the most success by processing and making them our own. For example, Google recently gave us keyword recommendations for a client. Anyone who has ever tried to create a keyword list knows it’s not easy covering every search phrase out there, and editing is a lot easier than creating. We took the list, scrubbed it and out of 500 terms there were about 50-100 that we decided to add to the campaign. We wouldn’t have used all 500 because we know our client doesn’t want traffic seeking discount products etc.
I’m interested to see how this experiment goes.
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
February 16th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
This post made 11 months ago – any conclusions? haven’t seen any related posts.