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Help me resurrect these campaigns…
Hi Everyone.
Hope you’re doing well.
I’ve got an issue with two of my client accounts on Google Ads. We had a great first month running a manual cpc + ecpc and got some solid conversions in for small budgets – about 10-15 on each of them.
We made a few major (probably stupid) changes to “optimize it in” after the first month like changing the ad schedule, removing some underperforming keywords & ad groups and putting the bids up to be more aggressive + both the clients increased their ad spends.
In hindsight after the first month of a brand new campaign these were all horrible ideas and as you can imagine the conversions collapsed. We went basically 2 weeks with no conversions after having over 10% conversions on one account and a healthy 5% on the other.
We had to make some changes to keep the clients happy so we built custom landing pages (which wasn’t the worst idea as it now is optimised for PPC lead gen) and we have had to delete all the conversion actions we set up to create new ones for the landing pages.
Its been about 3 days – we tried running maximise conversions to blindly spend the budget trying to get “Something” in but have realised that was just going crazy with it all. Now we have come back to a full manual cpc sitting just above the first page bid amount.
I really need some help from your more experienced PPC warriors – what in gods name do we do?! We have till the 15th of this month before the clients “cycle” is up. I’m pretty sure they’ll be happy to keep going if I can give them some good forecasts.
Please give me advice on if its just a “waiting game” or if we actually need to swap the bid strategies up etc…
As you can imagine google is useless and I’m not sold on smart bidding strategies particularly with such little data. Is there a lag we can expect from here? Can we expect it to right itself in a week or so?
Thanks in advance…
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10 Replies
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Before anything what columns do you have set up on your dashboard?
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This is probably not exactly the response you were hoping for. I’m going to suggest to basically change all the settings back to what they all were before the drop in conversions.
I recommend identifying what day you made the changes that caused the start of poor performance. Set a date range from that day until yesterday, enable the compare function to previous period. Expand your columns going from your campaign view, ad group view, keyword view and begin to analyze where where the changes occurred. Then, you’re going to want to work your way back through all the changes you made to the campaigns.
You could also look through change history and maybe the “undo changes” is still available.
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Are you tracking conversions in UI or GA and had client or some other team member been making site edits?
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It sounds to me like to many changes were made within a short window which has thrown your campaigns into learning mode and potentially confused the engine of what the desired outcome is.
You’ve hit the reset button and are hoping to duplicate past performance. This is certainly a step in the right direction but unfortunately with such little conversion data, I would recommend allowing the campaigns 3-4 days to produce some sign of life. In other words, it is somewhat of a waiting game. If you don’t have any luck, consider adding additional keyword coverage (if you haven’t already maximized your coverage) and/or increasing bids on the keywords that were once producing conversion.
Also, if your conversions are using a last-click attribution model, those low-performing keywords you had paused could have been generating the initial clicks that ultimately led to conversion from other campaigns/keywords. Perhaps try enabling these keywords again and lowering their bids opposed to pausing them.
One last note: smart bidding will be the most efficient method of managing bids in most cases. Google‘s auction time bidding and other advanced signals give Google significantly more insights about any given user than we advertisers could ever comprehend. Although the smart-bidding strategies can be black boxes that are hard to understand, they do work.
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There are so many questions such as:
* how do you know the keywords were under performing
* What was the time you had the most conversions
* how do you track such conversions
* which bids did you increaseIn vacuum, most of the changes done were correct.
Also, you need to keep in mind that Google deals with data you can see compared to Facebook where you need to train a ‘pixel’.
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Maximize Conversion can cause your campaign to spend $10 CPC off a $3 CPC if you arent careful about it basically cause you to overspent your daily budget.
What are the search terms that are converting? What are the keywords that prompt those search terms?
Like what others mentioned, the optimization you did is correct but seemed like there is an underlying issue that we arent seeing here.
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It sounds like changes were made too early to really gauge which areas of the campaign were performing well. Sometimes trends are not as obvious as they appear, and you need to allows for enough data so the changes you are making are statistically significant. As people are random and inconsistent, so a certain keyword might perform well one week, but not for the next 3 weeks, then good again.
I would advise reverting back to the original set up. You can obviously still optimise and make fundamental changes like negatives keyword, tweaking ads, landing pages, extension etc.
You say you are nervy about smart bidding, but this is exactly where it can make an impact. Its easy to get trigger happy with keyword when looking at CPA and Conv rate, but you probably were not looking at all the data. Where as the AI (aslong as there is enough data to feed it) will makes these educated changes, from more data that isn’t available to advertisers.
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February is a shit month for lead gen. It’s been tumbleweeds 2 client accounts I manage and my own ppc account this past month. February + coronavirus = people not buying. It may be just as simple as that.
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You should be able to find most of your “probably stupid” changes in the change history and reverse them out (either by undoing them or manually adjusting them).
Assuming what you ran originally was great, and nothing else has changed, you should return to similar performance.
If it doesn’t work out it’s a live and learn experience. You need to collect data and make thoughtful and appropriate changes to your account… not just change things randomly to test them out.
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Since you have little time and little data I would first set everything back to how it was when everything was alright. Next, you should look to where the ad spent really went to. I would set the column bar as following: clicks, impressions, ctr, av. cpc, costs, conversionvalue, conversionvalue/costs, conversions, conversion rate, impression share, click share and lost impression (budget). Next, export a csv and compare current periods with historical ones. Preferably on a month to month basis. If not possible, week to week. Compare the results and see were the most changes happen. Considering the raise in cpc and budget, you’ll have a high impressions and high impression share. While your ctr and click share are low, especially in comparison with the better periods. This will confirm you are reaching the wrong audience. Confirm this hypothesis by search the searchterms, probably a lot of your money is going to the wrong ones. Exclude these asap. Check to which devices the most money is going efficiently (check this with conversionvalue/costs). Repeat for location, audience etc. Finally, check the max. cpc benchmark and see how far you are above. Long story short, drill down exactly what is happening. NB. English is not my native language, sorry for that…
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