For my first company, as I started to work with their AdWords campaigns, the only goal there was to get clicks (visitors), as most clients wish. This was one of the 2 key figures that my boss was watching everyday. The other one was the CTR. If we were under 12%, the campaign was not good enough, and we had to work on the keywords or the ads.
As I moved on to some other companies, i improved my work by reading blogs, trying things (A/B Tests), and getting my hands more deeply into the figures I was getting back. I found a good way to improve my PPC campaigns by using the Analytics figures. You can get a good CTR on a campaign (higher than 20%), but are the results really happening in the end? How many visitors that clicked on that Ad did purchase something, or even read more than 1 page?
This is what I’ll do :
- Open Analytics and go to the Traffic Sources / AdWords / AdWords Campaigns.
- Go to the details of your campaign by clicking on the campaign name until you reach the keywords level.
- This is where it all happens! You can score well with a keyword in AdWords (CTR > 20%), but if you have a 45% bounce rate on it once the visitor gets to your site, all you’re doing is losing money. This is where you can truly see if a campaign is working or not.
So, here we are:
- Check all those keywords with a high bounce rate; let’s say that everything above 30% must be looked at.
- Check what is the landing page for those words (this is set up in your AdWords Campaigns).
- If the landing does not provide or show the correct related information, I change and improve the content. If that doesn’t do it, then I change the landing page.
Just by looking at those figures in Analytics and not just focusing only on my CTR in AdWords, I have raised the number of visitors that stay on the site and raised the sales. The AdWords Reports give you many figures (CTR, Avg. Position, Avg. CPC, etc), but not the one that could improve and sharpen your campaigns correctly.
Overall, I still spend as much money as I did before, but my client is happy because the bounce rate has decreased for my Adwords campaigns, and the number of visitors did really improve (not just the clicks on the campaigns).
