Category Archives: adwords

Adwords vs Twitter vs LinkedIn ads, a small experiment

I am running a course for people who want to create their own commercial software products. Promoting the course has been a challenge. How do you reach a programmer, sitting in his cubicle, dreaming about making a living from selling his own software? In particular, how do you reach ones who might pay to attend a weekend  course in the UK in March? Most of the attendees of the last course came via this blog. But I also want to try to reach people who have never heard of this blog. So I have been experimenting with paid ads via Twitter, LinkedIn and Adwords. Crucially, all 3 of them allow me to restrict my advertising to people in the UK. I thought the initial results were interesting, so I am sharing them here.

Adwords

Google Adwords allows you to show your ads alongside organic (non-paid) search results when people type relevant phrases. But it is hard to think of phrases my target audience (and only my target audience) might be searching on. Terms such as “software marketing” and “software sales” are too vague. In the end I came up with about 200 phrases, including  “sell my software”, “software startup”, “start a software company”, “name software product” and “sell software online”.

One of my Adwords ads (I tested several).

One of my Adwords ads.

But there just aren’t a lot of searches on these phrases. Bidding between £0.25 and £1 per click (depending on relevance) for UK searches over the last 47 days I have managed a meagre:

  • Impressions: 1.7k
  • Clicks: 20
  • CTR: 1.13%
  • CPC: £0.31

Looking at the Dimensions>Search terms report to see the phrases typed by the people who clicked, the clicks seem fairly well targeted. And my impression share is >25% for the majority of the adgroups, so I don’t think increasing my bids is going to make a big difference to the amount of traffic. Adwords just doesn’t work that well unless there are unambiguous phrases your potential customers are actively searching on. I haven’t tried display (content) ads, as these have never worked well for me in the past.

LinkedIn

I also tried running LinkedIn ads targeted at people who are based in the UK and list programming skills such as “Programming”, “SaaS”, “Subversion”, “Git”, and “C++”. The minimum bid per click is $2.00 (ouch), so I bid $2.05 per click.

linkedin-ad

One of my linkedIn ads.

The result over 12 days have been:

  • Impressions: 133k
  • Clicks: 54
  • CTR: 0.04%
  • CPC: $2.00
  • Leads: 2

That is a good number of impressions, but a horrible CTR. Looking at the breakdown of clicks by industry and job function in the reporting, the clicks seem fairly well targeted. A ‘lead’ is where someone expresses an interest and LinkedIn allows you to send them a message. But you don’t get their email address and it appears you can only message them through LinkedIn once.

Twitter

I paid to put a sponsored tweet in the timeline of Twitter users in the UK, based on who they follow. I picked the Twitter handles of 4 other people who blog about bootstrapping.  Note that Twitter claims they won’t show ads to all the followers of these Twitter handles, but to people who are interested in similar things to the people who follow those Twitter handles. That seems a rather hair-splitting distinction, but I guess it allows them to claim they aren’t exploiting the popularity of their customers directly. I bid a maximum of £0.75 per ‘engagement’ (click, retweet or follow). I didn’t include an image with the tweet as I couldn’t really think of anything relevant at the time (a classroom?). The text of the sponsored tweet was:

Sell your own software. Be your own boss! 2 day course, 22/23 March, Wiltshire, England. Full details at: https://successfulsoftware.net/software-business-training-course/

The result of this 1 sponsored tweet over 2 days has been:

  • Impressions: 5.8k
  • Clicks: 174
  • CTR: 3%
  • CPC: £0.29
  • Favorites: 7
  • Retweets: 2
  • Follows: 1

Given the small number of favorites, retweets and follows, it is hard to know how well targeted this was. I guess a 3% CTR implies it was fairly targeted. The fact that the CPC was a lot less than my maximum bid may be down to Twitter ads being a relatively new medium, without too much competition (yet).

The reports have left me confused. Twitter report 3,112 impressions and 106 clicks for followers of my own Twitter handle @successfulsw.

twitter-reportingBut:

  • I didn’t tick the Also target your followers check box, as it seems idiotic to be paying for tweeting to people that I can tweet to for free.
  • I don’t have 3k Twitter followers.
  • I direct messaged a few of my Twitter followers based in the UK and they said they hadn’t seen a sponsored tweet from me.

This was the response when I queried Twitter support:

Thanks for the information. We have investigated this issue and we can see that your handle is in your @handle section of your campaign, this is because implicit targeting was enabled (targeted followers with similar interest as your followers), that is why your handle is showing there. We have confirmed you have a nullcasted Tweet and this Tweet is not showing to your followers. We realize this may be confusing and we’ll work with our product team to improve how this looks on the user interface.

The reporting of the interests of the people that engaged doesn’t make sense either. It says that of the 5.8k impressions, 4.7k were to people interested in “Hip hop and rap” and 4.5k to people interested in “NFL football”. We don’t even play NFL football in the UK!

twitter reporting interestsThis was the response when I queried Twitter support:

I understand it’s confusing, and I’ll share this feedback with my team. What you’re seeing is a cumulative total of paid/earned/organic engagements. This total also considers secondary account signals eg a users prime interest is photography, and a secondary interest in baseball. I can assure you that you paid for primary interests only, and organic/earned and secondary engagements were not charged for.

I am still none the wiser about the “NFL football” result. It does make me wonder how accurate their ‘targeting by interest’ option is.

Conclusion

This is obviously only a very small experiment and it is hard to judge exactly what the quality of the traffic was like (I was sending traffic to a wordpress.com page and I am not able to measure detailed analytics, such as bounce rates or time on page). But I even these limited results are still illuminating.

I like Adwords, particularly the fact that it shows your ad to people at the point they are searching for a solution to their problem. It has worked pretty well for my table planner app over the last 9 years, despite bid price inflation. But Adwords is only effective when there are well defined phrases with reasonable search volumes you can target. That doesn’t seem to be the case for my course.

LinkedIn is a good way to target people according to their skills or job function. There are lots of different targeting options and the traffic volume was better than Adwords. But the clicks are very expensive. Given an industry standard 1% conversion rate I can afford to pay $2 per click to promote a £600 course. But forget it if you are selling less expensive products.

Twitter ads seem quite promising. There are lots of targeting options and you can get a lot of traffic quickly for a relatively low price per click [but see update, below]. I could have got a lot more clicks by targeting more Twitter handles and/or increasing my bid. But its not something you can leave running continuously like Adwords or LinkedIn. You have to keep sending new sponsored tweets. Also the reporting is confusing and of dubious veracity. Finally it feels slightly grubby to be targeting the followers of your peers and/or competitors so directly. But I think it shows promise. If you are going to try it, I recommend you do so soon. The law of shitty clickthroughs means that it is sure to be a lot less cost effective in a few years time.

**** Update ****

I noticed that the clickthroughs to the URL in my sponsored Twitter post was only about a third of the clicks reported by Twitter. When I asked Twitter about this they replied:

Twitter Ads measures engagements which we define as “clicks” within the Promoted Tweet Dashboard are defined as follows: clicks on the URL, hashtag, Tweet copy, avatar and username, or the expand button. It’s likely that the other analytics you are seeing are tracking link clicks.

So I am paying for someone to just click the Tweet copy (text)! The cost for a clickthough to my site is actually around 3 times the CPC reported by Twitter. That makes it around £1 per clickthrough, which is much less attractive.

Boostrapped.fm podcast

I was a guest on episode 21 of Bootstrapped.fm, the podcast of Andrey Butov and Ian Landsman. The discussion was very wide-ranging, touching on SAAS vs web, the Qt development environment, the royal wedding, A/B testing, capoeira, Adwords, the history of shareware, my new training course and lots more besides. I really enjoyed it. Boostrapped.fm also has a thriving discussion forum at discuss.bootstrapped.fm.

Upgrade your Adwords accounts before the 22nd July – or else!

google adwordsGoogle will automatically switch all Adwords campaigns to ‘enhanced’ on 22-July-2013. If you don’t do it before then, Google will do it for you. And you can be confident they will be thinking of their interests, rather than yours. The changes are mostly bad news for those of us that sell software for desktop computers. In particular you can no longer choose not to bid for clicks on tablet devices. I would like to have more control over how I bid on different platforms, not less, so I am not happy about the changes. However your choices are either to upgrade your campaigns to ‘enhanced’ or close your Adwords account.

You can at least bid less for clicks on mobile devices. If you are selling downloadable software that doesn’t run on mobile devices, I recommend you set your bid adjustment much lower for mobile devices. My own analytics data tells me that mobile devices only have one tenth the (measurable) conversion rate of desktop/laptop computers. So I have set my mobile bid adjustment at -90% for mobile devices. Presumably you can set it to -100% if you don’t want to bid for mobile clicks at all. I don’t understand why advertisers aren’t being given the same option for tablet devices.

Note that you can’t set a mobile bid adjustment for CPA campaigns. However Google should notice the lack of downloads and sales on mobile devices and adjust the mobile bids down for you automatically.

Upgrading is pretty straight forward and should only take a few minutes. More details on the software promotions blog.

The declining profitability of Google Adwords

Google Adwords used to be a great way to get targeted traffic cheaply (if you knew what you were doing). I think those days are well and truly over.

I have been using Google Adwords to advertise my table plan software since 2005. The following graphs show some metrics from my Adwords campaigns over that 8 years. The graphs show 12-monthly cumulative figures (e.g. each point represents the value for that month plus the preceding 11 months). Using cumulative data hides some of the noise, including the seasonal variations that are inevitable in a business related to weddings (more people buy my software when it is summer in the northern hemisphere), and makes the overall trends clearer.

Average cost per click (CPC)

Average cost per click (CPC)

Clickthroughs

Clickthroughs

Conversions (sales)

Conversions (sales)

Profit per month

Profit per month

The trends are clear and it’s not a pretty picture. Less, more expensive clicks = less profit. I can either pay more and more per click to maintain the same number of sales. Or I can continue to pay the same per click and get less and less clicks. Either way, my profit goes down. It isn’t a trend I see changing direction any time soon.

I think these long-term trends are mostly due to increasing competition. As more and more companies bid on Adwords for a finite number of clicks, it inevitably drives up the cost of clicks (simple supply and demand). It also doesn’t help that a lot of Adwords users are not actively managing their campaigns or measuring their ROI, and are consequently bidding at unprofitably high levels. Google also does its best to drive up CPC values in various ways (suggesting ridiculously high default bids, goading you to bid more to get on page 1, not showing your ad at all if you bid too low – even if no other ads appear etc).

Of course, this is just my data for one product in one small market. But the law of shitty clickthrus predicts that all advertising mediums become less and less profitable over time. So I would be surprised if it isn’t a general trend. Are your Adwords campaigns becoming less profitable? Have you found another advertising medium that works better?

Setting an optimal bid price for Google CPA bids

A couple of years ago I wrote up the results of an experiment comparing Cost Per Action vs Cost Per Click bidding in Google Adwords. At the end of the experiment I decided that I did trust Google CPA bidding, but the results from CPA bidding weren’t compelling enough for me to switch. So I stayed with my mature CPC campaign. Subsequently I spoke at length with Adwords guru David Rothwell and Adwords master practitioner Alwin Hoogerdijk. They convinced me that:

  • I hadn’t really given Google CPA enough learning time – the more data Google has the better it should be able to do. The mighty Google brain might even be able to spot and exploit patterns I would find very difficult to emulate (e.g. based on season, country, day or week or time of day).
  • I should switch from paying per sale to paying per download, as this would give Google an order of magnitude more data to work with.
  • CPA bidding would require a lot less of my precious time to manage.

So I switched back to CPA. This time measuring a conversion as a successful download and install (my table planner shows a help page in a browser on first run, this contains the Google conversion tracking script).

So now, instead of having to choose thousands of bid prices (one for each keyword and match type in each campaign), I had to choose a single bid price – what I am prepared to pay Google for a download. If I pay too little for a download: Google won’t show my ads much, I won’t make many sales and my profit will be low. If I pay too much for a download: Google will show my ads a lot, but the amount I pay for each conversion will be high and my profit will be low. In between their should be a ‘sweet spot’ that gives me optimal profit. But how to find that sweet spot?

Looking at analytics data I have a good idea at what rate Adwords traffic converts to sales. I chose a CPA bid based on this and then I randomly varied the bid up or down every 7 days (some days of the week perform consistently better than others for my product). The graphs below show the results. Each data point is 7 days of data. The black lines are linear trend lines. I deliberately haven’t put values on the axes, but the x and y axes are all linear, starting at 0.

The trends are pretty clear. Increasing CPA bid price:

  • increases the number of times your ads are shown
  • makes little difference to the click through rates
  • decreases the click to download and download to sale ratios

So higher bids means more sales, but also a higher cost per sale. But, of course, the really important metric is profit. So I worked out the average daily profit from Adwords traffic, which is the net sales income (gross sales minus sales costs, including payment processor fees and support costs) minus Adwords costs. Again each point is 7 days of data. The black line is a 2nd order polynomial trend line.

The data is quite noisy. But some data is a lot better than none and there does appear to be sweet spot about where the red arrow is. The curve is fairly flat meaning that I don’t have to be too precise in my bid price to get a near to optimal return. But if I bid twice the optimal price my profit will drop by about 35%.

In an ideal world I would have run all these different bid prices concurrently, instead of one after the other. But that just isn’t possible with Adwords at present (you can use Google Adwords experiments to split test bid prices, but only 2 at a time). Also I could have gathered a lot more data, used longer time intervals (7 days probably isn’t long enough for Google CPA to get into its stride) and bid a lot higher and lower, to make the trends clearer. But I wasn’t prepared to spend the extra time and money required.

If you are using CPA bidding you should be able to carry out a similar analysis on your own Adwords account to find your own CPA bidding sweet spot. If you are still using CPC, perhaps you should consider switching to CPA and let Google do some of the heavy lifting for you. You can switch any campaign that has 15 or more conversions per month to CPA bidding in the ‘Settings’ tab.

You can always switch back to CPC later. If you aren’t using Google conversion tracking, well you really should be.

A word of warning. Not all downloads are equal. You might think that download to sale rates would vary a lot less than impression to click and click to download rates (I did). But download to sale ratios can vary a lot between different campaigns, even for the same product. For example, my analytics data shows that downloads from Adwords display (=contents/adsense) traffic only convert to sales at around a quarter of the rate of Adwords search traffic. So display campaign downloads are worth a lot less to me than search campaign downloads and I set my CPA bids accordingly.

I showed a draft version of this post to Alwin Hoogerdijk of Collectorz.com collection database software, who first persuaded me to switch back to CPA and knows a lot more about CPA than I do. He had the following to add:

When using CPA bidding you should give Google more room to experiment. On search, this means using more broad match terms, or at least modified broad match. And less negative keywords (I removed a lot of my negatives lately). The idea is that Google will automatically find out what works and what doesn’t (again, this may take a lot of time).

On the Content Network it means being less trigger-happy with the site exclusions. Without CPA bidding, I would be more likely to exclude generic sites like Facebook, about.com, etc… But with CPA bidding, I tend to allow the optimizer to display on those sites and the find the right pages within those sites to show my ads on.

In my experience, the optimal CPA bid can vary (wildly) between products, campaigns, etc. . Content Network CPA’s in general tend to be much lower, for the same products. Strangely enough, content network visitor sign up (or downloads) are worth less than search traffic sign ups. Which wasn’t what I was expecting. Of course, content network traffic is less targeted in general so one would expect a lower sign up rate. But even if those visitors sign up, they convert less well to actual sales too. Tricky.

Is it worth advertising Mac software on Google Adwords?

I learnt a long time ago that people will happily click on totally irrelevant pay per click ads. For example, if you bid on “seating plan” I can assure you that a significant percentage of people searching for “boeing 747 seating plan” will happily click on your ad titled “wedding seating plan”. They won’t buy anything, as they aren’t interested in wedding seating plans, but you still have to pay for each click. You can stop your ad showing to these searchers by adding “boeing” and “747” as negative keywords. Problem solved.

But what do you do if you are selling software that only runs on Mac OS X? The vast majority of searchers are running Windows. Indiscriminate clicks by them could quickly turn your Adwords ROI negative. In your Adwords campaign settings you can choose to only show ads on desktop computers and laptops. But you can’t choose the operating system.

As discussed above, putting “Mac” in the title is unlikely to be enough. You can’t use negative keywords, because the vast majority of Windows users searching for, say, backup software will type “backup software” not “Windows backup software”. You can just bid on searches containing keywords “Mac”, “Apple” or “OS X”, but will this be enough? My general advice to Mac only software vendors was to avoid Adwords, unless the ticket price of their software was in the hundreds of dollars. But, as my software runs on both Windows and Mac, I didn’t have any data to back this up.

Recently I got some data on Adwords clickthrough rates for a Mac only app (www.puzzlemakermac.com) by Hokua Software. They have kindly allowed me to share the data.

Initially they bid on generic keywords, such as “crossword maker” and ran ads such as the following with “Mac” displayed prominently in the title:

The results from analytics: 60% of the people clicking on the ads were on Windows and 40% on Mac.

Then Google banned them from the word “Mac” in their ads (it is possible to get this reversed with the express permission of Apple, but I don’t know how likely they are to grant this). So they switched to “OS X” in the ad, which hasn’t been blocked (yet).

The results from analytics: 73% of the people clicking on the ads were on Windows and 27% on Mac.

Then they restricted their bids to Mac targeted keywords such as “mac crossword maker”.

The results from analytics: 23% of the people clicking on the ads were on Windows and 73% on Mac. But there was a big drop in the number of impressions.

I think it is going to be almost impossible for anyone to get a return from Adwords when the majority of their clicks have no chance of generating a sale. So only bidding on Mac specific keywords seems to be the way to go. But there will still be a significant number of wasted clicks from Windows users. Also any Mac users who don’t use the appropriate keywords won’t see your ad. Consequently the return on time and money invested is likely to be a lot lower than Windows, cross-platform and web developers can expect. If you have a Mac only product with: a high ticket price product, well-defined keywords and limited competition, it might be worth trying Adwords. But otherwise it is probably better to wait and see if Google release OS targeting.

Of course, you could always use one of the free Adwords vouchers that Google are handing out like confetti (I get one every month in my PC Pro magazine) and try for yourself. This is how Hokua software got the results above. If you do, I would be interested to know how your results compare.

5 great ways to waste money in Google Adwords

google adwordsI have looked at quite a few Google Adwords accounts as part of a  1-day consulting package I do for other microISVs and small software vendors. I have also talked to a lot of people at conferences and on forums about Adwords. It clear that a lot of people are wasting a lot of money on Google Adwords, sometimes with really basic mistakes.

For example:

  • paying $1.50 per click to advertise a $20 utility
  • paying $1 per click for an expensive, English language only development tool in some of the poorest, non-English speaking countries in the world.

Ouch.

Below I list 5 great ways to waste money in Adwords. I have seen them far too often. I have considerable admiration for what Google has achieved. But I think Larry and Sergey are probably rich enough already. I would like to see a lot less people throwing money at them and getting nothing useful in return.

1. Don’t use conversion tracking

conversion tracking adwords

With conversion tracking you decide a goal to track (typically a customer buys your software) and put a small script provided by Google on the appropriate page (e.g. the ‘thank you for buying’ page). Google will then use cookie tracking to calculate the cost per conversion for your ads and keywords. It is that simple and you can set it up in a few minutes. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t use conversion tracking. With conversion tracking you will soon notice that some ads and keywords convert consistently better than others, often much better. Armed with this information you can optimise Adwords by changing bid prices and deleting under performing ads. Without conversion tracking it is pure guess work.

Conversion tracking isn’t perfect:

  • Adwords cookies time out after 30 days. If someone buys 31 days after they click your ad it won’t be tracked. And the cookie may be pushed out of the cache before 30 days.
  • If someone clicks your ad on one computer and then buys it on another computer (or even using a different browser on the same computer) the conversion won’t be tracked.
  • Some customers may have cookies disabled.

But imperfect data has to be better than no data. Obviously the 30 day limit on cookies is problematic if you are selling software with a sales cycle that is typically 30 days or longer (e.g. software with a 30 day trial). In that case you are probably better off tracking downloads, rather than sales. The fact that someone takes time to download your software, rather than bouncing straight out of your site, at least shows some interest. If you have stats which show your typical download to sale ratio (and you should) you can use this to work out what a download is worth, and set your bid price accordingly.

2. Don’t use negative keywords

adwords negative keywords

My own experiences with Adwords quickly showed me that people will click an ad, even if it isn’t at all relevant to what they are searching for. For example people searching for “747 seating plan” will click on an ad with the title “wedding seating plan”. It is the nature of the web that people are surfing rather than reading, and clicking on an irrelevant ad doesn’t cost them anything. You can avoid a lot of wasted clicks with carefully set-up negative keywords. For example, you can be sure that I have “747” set up as a negative keyword.

Ways to find negative keywords include:

  • Generating ‘Search Query Performance’ reports from Google Adwords reporting
  • looking through your web logs/analytics for the sort of terms people are typing into search engines to find your site
  • using Google’s keyword suggestion tool
  • using Google suggest

There is also a useful list of negative keyword suggestions on Alwin Hoogerdijk’s blog.

3. Advertise in developing countries

adwords country selection
Over a billion people have access to the Internet. Many of them are in developing countries and aren’t realistically going to buy your software due to a combination of: cost (even $20 is a lot of money to people in many developing countries), payment issues (they may not have access to credit cards), language issues (your software isn’t localised for them) and cultural issues (there just isn’t much respect for intellectual property and copyright in many parts of the developing world). But that certainly won’t stop them clicking on your ads and you still have to pay for the clicks.

Start with wealthy countries where plenty of people speak a language your software has been localised into. If you really think you might be able to make a return in developing countries, then test it by creating a separate campaign that only runs in these countries and set your bids much lower (it is very easy to duplicate a campaign with Adwords Editor).

4. Bid too much

adwords bids

Lets use an example:

  • Your software sells for $30, of which you get $20 after subtracting ecommerce fees and average support costs.
  • Your typical visit to sale conversion ratio is about 1%.

That means you will only break even if you pay $0.20 per click through Adwords. Personally I find it hard to justify paying more than 50% of my profit to Google. So I wouldn’t bid more than $0.10 per click. If I couldn”t get any impressions at $0.10 per click I would try to either improve my quality score (e.g. improve my ads or delete keywords with low clickthrough rates) or find cheaper ‘long tail’ keywords to bid on. Paying $0.20 or more just to ‘get on the first page’ of Google is crazy (unless perhaps, it is a loss leader for market research purposes). You can’t make up on volume what you lose on each sale!

5. Don’t monitor your results

adwords reporting

Leaving your adwords campaign running for months on ‘auto pilot’ is ill-advised. Adwords is a constantly changing landscape. Google is continually changing the system and your competitors are coming and going and changing their Adwords campaigns and their products. So you need to continuously monitor how you are doing.  Google makes this very easy. For example, you can just set up Adwords reporting to email you a weekly summary of the number of conversions and the cost per conversion for each adgroup. A quick glance through this will let you know if things are going awry.

Conclusion

Adwords can be a very responsive, cost effective and well targeted form of advertising, if you take the time to learn the ropes and experiment. Below is a graph of my return on investment from Adwords for my table planning software over 5 years (almost certainly an underestimate due to the short-comings of conversion tracking, as discussed above). You can see that, after a few months finding my way, I was able to get a consistent ROI of around 4 or 5 to 1 and maintain this in the face of increasing competition.

adwords ROI graph

ROI = number of dollars in sales for each dollar spent on Adwords (1=break even).

Adwords is a complex system and the defaults are weighted in the house’s favour. In this article I have only touched on a few of the biggest mistakes I see. Google will give you plenty of rope to hang yourself and there are lots of other, less obvious ways to lose money. You really need to take the time to learn the system and experiment if you are going to have any chance of getting a decent return.

When I started with Adwords 5 years ago I read the Perry Marshall e-book on Adwords (beware – long copy!). I found it quite helpful. I assume they have kept it up to date. If nothing else, you will learn what it is like to be relentlessly marketed and upsold to. Google also has lots of free Adwords documentation and videos. If you go to conferences such as SIC or ESWC it well worth listening to Adwords specialists such as Dave Collins of softwarepromotions.com (formerly sharewarepromotions.com) talk about Adwords. There is also lots of useful information in the blogosphere. Start with a small daily budget and gradually increase it as you learn what works for you.

If you haven’t got the time or inclination to learn the system and experiment, pay someone who knows what they are doing to do it for you or stay well away from Adwords. Also bear in mind that Adwords works better for some products than others. If I was selling a $20 Mac-only product in a market with lots of more expensive competitors, I probably wouldn’t even bother trying Adwords.

** Update **

I used a deliberately provocative headline for this post, because I wanted to emphasize the fact that a lot of people are wasting a lot of money on Adwords. It seems to have worked in terms of traffic. But, judging by comments here and on Hacker News it has also confused some people. Sorry about that. To clarify, the sections heading are telling you how to waste money. To maximize your ROI you should do the opposite:

  • use conversion tracking
  • use negative keywords
  • only advertise in richer countries
  • not bid too much
  • monitor your results

A test of Cost Per Action (CPA) vs Cost Per Click (CPC) in Google Adwords

CPA vs CPCThe traditional approach to Google Adwords is to set a bid price for each keyword. This is known as Cost Per Click (CPC). Google then then uses the bid prices in conjunction with a secret formula (the quality score) to decide how high to rank your ad in the Adwords results. If you bid more, your ad will appear higher and typically get more clicks, but your cost per click will increase. So setting an optimal bid price is important. Bid too little and you won’t rank high enough to get a decent number of clickthroughs. Bid too much and you will potentially end paying more to Google than you recoup in sales.

An alternative approach is to tell Google Adwords how much you are prepared to pay for a particular action, e.g. a sign-up, download or sale. This is known as Cost Per Action (CPA) or Conversion Optimizer. Google will then automatically calculate your bid prices and attempt not to exceed the CPA you set (although this isn’t guaranteed).

CPA sounds great. I can stay in bed a bit longer while the mighty Google brain does the bid tweaking for me. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use CPA. I  count sales as conversions (not downloads) and I have my adwords account split into a number of campaigns by geographic region and by type (e.g. search vs content). Having my campaigns structured like this, rather than one monolithic campaign, makes for more flexibility (e.g. different ads, phrases and bid prices for different geographical areas) and more useful reports (e.g. separate reports for search and content). But it also meant none of my Adwords campaigns made the minimum threshold for conversions per month.

When Google dropped the minimum threshold for CPA to 30 conversions per campaign per month, one of my Perfect Table Plan search campaigns became eligible. So I did an experiment. I ran a campaign for 4 weeks using CPC, then 9 weeks using CPA, then another 4 weeks using CPC. I set the CPA bid to roughly the average cost per conversion I got for CPC. I was curious to see if Google would find sweet spots that I had been missing or whether they would bid as high as they could to take as much money off me as possible. Summary: CPC outperformed CPA on all key metrics, including: 4.4% higher conversions, 9.4% lower cost per conversions and 8.0% higher profit.

The detailed results are as follows:

metric CPC  (vs CPA)
impressions/day +13.9%
clicks/day +1.3%
conversions/day +4.4%
CTR -11.1%
conv rate +3.1%
income/day +4.4%
cost/day -5.5%
CPC -6.6%
profit/day +8.0%
PKI -5.2%
ROI +10.4%
cost per conversion -9.4%

In graphical form (click to enlarge):

CPA vs CPC graph 50pc

Notes:

  • The values given are taken by computing (CPC metric – CPA metric)/(CPA metric). E.g. ROI of +10.4% means that CPC had a 10.4% higher ROI than CPA.
  • Only a single (geographically based) search campaign was measured. The total number of conversions during the time period of the test was in 3 figures.
  • I only measured sale conversions. This gives me less data than measuring downloads, but I think it is unsafe to assume the number of downloads correlates closely to the number of sales.
  • The PerfectTablePlan sale price is £19.95/$29.95. To calculate profit I only counted 75% of the price of a sale (the other 25% was assumed to cover the cost of support, ecommerce fees and other overheads associated with the sale).
  • Each of the time periods was a multiple of 7 days to avoid any issues with different results on different days of the week.
  • I ran CPC for an equal amount of time either side of the CPA test to try to balance out any seasonal factors.
  • Google conversion tracking uses Cookies and is therefore not 100% accurate.
  • PKI is Profit Per Thousand Impressions.
  • ROI is Return On Investment.

It wouldn’t be wise to draw any sweeping conclusions from one test with a limited amount of data. However I believe the results show:

  • A CPA campaign running for 9 weeks wasn’t able to outperform a mature CPC campaign. The CPC campaign had been running for over 4 years, but one would have thought CPA would have been able to use that pre-existing  data. CPA might have performed better if given longer. It would probably also have done better against a less mature CPC campaign.
  • Google didn’t rob me blind using CPA bidding. The CPA cost per day was only 5.5% higher.
  • The results weren’t hugely different. On the basis of the above results one might still conclude that CPA is superior to CPC as it requires less time to manage.

Google Adwords: improving your ads

google adwordsOne of the keys to success in Google Adwords (and other pay per click services) is to write good ad copy. This isn’t easy as the ads have a very restrictive format, reminiscent of a haiku:

  • 25 character title
  • 2×35 character description lines
  • 35 character display url

Whats more, there are all sorts of rules about punctuation, capitalisation, trademarks etc. You will soon find out about these when you write ads. Most transgressions are flagged immediately by Google algorithms, others are picked up within a few days by Google staff (what a fun job that must be).

Google determines the order in which ads appear in their results using a secret algorithm based on how much you bid, how frequently people click your ads and possibly other factors, such as how long people spend on your site after clicking. Nobody really knows apart from Google, and they aren’t saying. The higher your click frequency, generally the higher your ad will appear. The higher your ad appears in the results, generally the more clicks you will get. So writing relevant ads is very important. This means that each adgroup should have a tightly clustered group of keywords and the ads should be closely targeted to those keywords.

There is no point paying for clicks from people who aren’t interested in your product, so you need to clearly describe what you are offering in the few words available. For example you might want to have a title “anti-virus software” instead of “anti-virus products” to ensure you aren’t paying for useless clicks from people looking for anti-viral drugs (setting “drugs” as a negative keyword would also help here).

I have separate campaigns for separate geographic areas. Each campaign contains the same keywords in the same adgroups, but with potentially different bid prices and ads. This allows me to customise the bid prices and ads for the different geographic areas. For example I can quote the £ price in a UK ad and the $ price in a US ad. Having separate campaigns for separate geographic areas is a hassle, but it is manageable, especially using Google Adwords editor.

Writing landing pages specific to each adgroup can also help to increase your conversion rate. It is worth noting that the ad destination url doesn’t have to match the display url. For example you could have a destination url of “http://www.myapp.com/html/landingpage1.html?ad_id=123” and a display url of “www.myapp.com/freetrial”.

Obviously what makes for good ad copy varies hugely with your market. Here are some things to try:

  • a call to action (e.g. “try it now!”)
  • adding/removing the price
  • different capitalisation and punctuation
  • keyword insertion (much beloved of EBay)
  • changing the destination url

But, as always, the only way to find out what really works is testing. Google have made this pretty easy with support for conversion tracking and detailed reporting. I run at least 2 ads in each adgroup and usually more. Over time I continually kill-off under-performing ads and try new ones. Often the new ads will be created by slight variations on successful ads (e.g. changing punctuation or a word) or splicing two successful ads together (e.g. the title from one and the body from another). This evolutionary approach (familiar to anyone that has written a genetic algorithm) gradually increases the ‘fitness’ of the ads. But you need to decide how to measure this fitness. Often it is obvious that one ad is performing better than another. But sometimes it can be harder to make a judgment. If you have an ad with a 5% click-through rate (CTR) and 0.5% conversion rate is this better than an ad with a 1% click-through rate and a 2% conversion rate? One might think so ( 5*0.5 > 1*2 ) but this is not necessarily the case. I think the key measure of how good an ad is comes from how much it earns you for each impression your keywords get.

I measure the fitness by a simple metric ‘profit per thousand impressions’ (PPKI) where, for a given time period:

PPKI = ( ( V * N ) – C ) / ( I / 1000 )

V = value of a conversion (e.g. product sale price)

N = number of conversions (e.g. product sales) from the ad

C = total cost of clicks for the ad

I = impressions for the ad

Say your product sells for $30. Over a given period you have 2 ads in the same adgroup that each get 40k impressions and clicks cost  an average of $0.10 per click.

  • ad1 has a CTR of 5%, a conversion rate of 0.5% and gets 10 conversions, which gives PPKI=$2.5 per thousand impressions
  • ad2 has a CTR of 1%, a conversion ratio of 2% and gets 8 conversions, which gives PPKI=$5 per thousand impressions

So ad2 made, on average, twice the profit per impression despite the lower number of conversions. Given this data I would replace ad1 with a new ad. Either a completely new ad or a variant of ad2.

PPKI has the advantage of being quantitative and simple to calculate. You can just export your Google Adwords ‘Ad Performance’ reports to Excel and add a PPKI column. Some points to bear in mind:

  • Selling software isn’t free. You may want to subtract the cost of support, CD printing & postage, ecommerce fees, VAT etc from the sale price to give a more accurate figure for the conversion value.
  • PPKI doesn’t take account of the mysterious subtleties of Google’s ‘quality score’. For example an ad with low CTR and high conversion rate might conceivably have a good PPKI but a poor quality score. This could result in further decreases in CTR over time (as the average position of the ad drops) and rises in minimum bid prices for keywords.
  • PPKI is a simple metric I have dreamt up, I have no idea if anyone else uses it. But I believe it is a better metric than cost per conversion, or any of the other standard Google metrics.

To ensure that all your ads get shown evenly select ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ in your Adwords campaign settings. If you leave it at the default ‘ Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often’ Google will choose which ads show most often. Given a choice between showing the ads that make you most money and the ads which make Google most money, which do you think Google will choose?

Text ads aren’t the only type of ads. Google also offer other types of ads, including image and video ads. I experimented with image ads a few years ago, but they got very few impressions and didn’t seem worth the effort at the time. I may experiment with video ads in the future.

The effectiveness of ads can vary greatly. Back in mid-December I challenged some Business Of Software forum regulars to ‘pimp my adwords’ with a friendly competition to see who could write the best new ads for my own Google Adwords marketing. The intention was to inject some fresh ‘genes’ into my ad population while providing the participants with some useful feedback on what worked best. Although it is early days, the results have already proved interesting (click the image for an enlargement):

adwords ad results

The graph above shows the CTR v conversion ratio of 2 adgroups, each running in both USA and UK campaigns. Each blue point is an ad. The ads, keywords and bid prices for each ad group are very similar in each country (any prices in the ads reflect the local currency for the campaign). Points to note:

  • There were enough clicks for the CTR to be statistically significant, but not for the conversion rate (yet).
  • The CTRs vary considerably within the same campaign+adgroup. Often by factor of more than 3.
  • Adgroup 1 performs much better in the USA than in the UK. The opposite is true for adgroup 2.
  • Adgroup 1 for the USA shows an inverse correlation between CTR and conversion rate. I often find this is the case – more specific ads mean lower CTR but higher conversion rates and higher profits.

‘Pimp my adwords’ will continue for a few more months before I declare a winner. I will be reporting back on the results in more detail and announcing the winner in a future post. Stay tuned.

Google Adwords ‘placement performance’ report

Google Adwords placement reportYou can now find out what sites your Google content ads are appearing on, using the new ‘placement performance’ report. This will alllow you to spot under-performing sites in a content campaign. To exclude a site from your campaign click the ‘excluded site(s)’ link at the top of the appropriate campaign page.

My placement report for June shows that PerfectTablePlan has had 25,309 impressions and 0 clickthroughs from myspace.com. Does that make it officially the least cool software ever? ;0)