Our grand experiment has come to an end and the results are in.  If you haven’t read my first post about Google’s offer to optimize our AdWords campaign for free, let me bring you up to speed.  Google contacted us and offered to put together an “optimized” campaign aimed at boosting results.  During email and phone conversations with the team assigned to our account, we were very clear about the definition of results; success was lower cost conversions.  Full stop.

We were asked to allow the campaign to run for two weeks.  After two weeks, we saw the following:

• Better CTR
• Better visitor behavior (more pages per visit, more time on site, and less bounce)
• No movement in conversions

Thinking that the improvement in behavior would eventually translate into buyers, I allowed the Google optimized campaign to run for the rest of the month.  The complete results we saw by using the campaign put together by the team at Google for the entire ~3 week run were:

• 11% improvement in CTR
• 11% improvement in the number of pages per visit
• 20% improvement in average time on site
• 13% change for the better in bounce
•  A three-fold increase in cost per conversion

The last bullet was, obviously, disappointing.  Based on that, we have reverted back to our own campaign and the ways of the sage AdWords master – Mr. Marshall.

My dealings with Google were extremely professional and they too came to the same conclusion.  I believe we benefited from this interaction in several ways – not the least of which was the slew of new negative keywords recommended by the optimization team.  These were great suggestions and they remain a part of our campaign today.

This also taught us that a huge part of AdWords management is domain expertise – not just with search engine marketing – but within the realm in which one does business.  For us, knowing the live chat buyer certainly helps us to craft better PPC advertising. The Google team expressed interest in taking another crack at our campaign and I’m totally willing to try it.  If Google wants to continue to learn about our business in order to bring us more conversions at lower cost, the door’s open.

Image source

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.