Bringing showers and warmer weather, April also planted the germ of innovation as we created a new ad group for our Google Ads campaign.
At Wonderful Machine we use a Google Ads campaign to promote our member photographers, not our consulting services. Our campaign consists of three ad groups (ad groups are subsidiary to campaigns), two of which are standard and the third dynamic. For the past year we’ve been using both one standard ad group and one dynamic, but during the month of April we commenced with a second standard ad group.
As you may know, there are several different flavors of Google Ads campaigns, including search, display, video, shopping, apps, etc. Wonderful Machine does not use video, shopping, or app ads because none of these seem appropriate to our goals.
Only search and display ads fit our goals. Display ads appear on different websites among the content on that site. Display ads, according to Google, are useful for establishing name recognition or awareness (the top of the marketing or “purchase funnel“). These are the advertisements appearing in the margins of a webpage being viewed.
The most basic type of ad is a search campaign, and this is what most people think of when they think of Google Ads. These are the advertisements that appear at the top of search results.
During that period we have maintained a constant budget, but we have changed certain keywords, fiddled with the ad copy, and even employed images. These are the kinds of basic maintenance required when you have a Google Ads campaign.
Our campaign has three different ad groups: two “standard” ad groups and a dynamic ad group. Below are the results for each.
At Wonderful Machine, our longstanding standard ad group is called “Specialties” and includes 26 of the 41 keywords that we use to identify the different specialties in which our photographers specialize: i.e., food photography, lifestyle photography, industrial photography, etc.
The Specialties group received 1,700 clicks during March, which is a -38.4% decrease in comparison to the previous month. Those 1,700 clicks came from 70,851 impressions (the number of times the advertisement is shown), which is a +54.9% increase. According, our CTR (Click Through Rate, or impressions divided by clicks) went down to 2.4%, being a -60.2% decrease over March’s CTR. The average CPC (cost per click) was $0.13, a -41.4% decrease vis-a-vis March. So that is a good thing (boy this can be confusing).
The Locations ad group, our second standard ad group, received 321 clicks from 10,596 impressions. That equals a CTR of 3.0%, which is better than that of the Specialties ad group. With that said, the average CPC for the Locations ad group was $0.22. That is $0.09 more expensive than Specialties.
If you are a faithful reader of the Analytics report card articles (as I know you are), you surely have noticed that our photographer database is searched more frequently for locations than it is for specialties. Clients search for photographers in certain locations more than they do according to specialties. This is the reason why we’ve created ads that target major metropolitan areas across the United States and beyond.
We also run a dynamic ad group. A dynamic ad group creates advertisements based on pages from your website. So instead of making your advertisement based on keywords, you provide Google with a series of pages that you want to draw traffic.
In relation to the standard ad groups, the dynamic ad group is surprisingly non-dynamic. We received only 55 clicks from 1,084 impressions during March, respectively decreases of -51.3 and -61.7%. The CTR for the dynamic ad group was 5.1%, which is stellar compared to the standard ad groups and a +27.1% increase over March. The average CPC for the dynamic ad group is $0.18, a -15.6% decrease over the previous month.
Interested in starting a campaign for your own site? Reach out and let us help.