Adwords has always been an interesting area of traffic generation for me. I’ve given talks for years on best practice regards creating campaigns and ran a number myself for clients. Through some work with the High Growth Programme via Business Link I’ve been working with a client that required a review of his Adwords campaign. So it gave me a chance to put the theory into practice again and make a difference. The good news is – it still works….
The client had initially been working with an external agency for approximately 6 months but was keen to get a handle on the campaigns and start generating some real return. The typical view I’m making lots of money through Adwords was soon shattered after a simple review of cost and expenditure was carried out an analysed showing that the major profit was through sales been generated after he had stopped using the agency.
In relation to traffic that generated sales, the majority of sales came from organic SEO, so a pretty good win for his web company on building the website.
A few hours of looking at the ads and keywords actually reaching the website gave some quick and easy wins. Simple changes made involved;
1. Adding some negative keywords such as ‘free’ and ‘downloadable’ to all campaigns
2. Removing content network sharing from the campaigns
3. Deleting keywords that had high spend and no purchase on the website.
4. Adding benefits into a couple of adverts
The result even though we still have a lot to look at still to get more sales was an increase in sales and a reduction in costs. In real terms we’ve seen a 1:5 increase in profit revenues. For every £1000 of investment we’ve seen £5000 of sales, link this to the other sales on the website its looking like the website has generated over £12000 in the last month, an increase in excess of £5000 on the previous month.
Not wanting to finish there the next steps have been plotted out to try and maximise this and drive the conversion values up even further from the 2.5% we started with. Currently we’re seeing a conversion rate of over 5% on PPC which were expecting to increase.
If you’re running a PPC campaign it might be worthwhile getting an independent review carried out to see if there are clear areas you can increase return on investment.
