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Since August of 2020 Wonderful Machine has been using Google Ads to promote our member photographers. Over the life of the campaign, we’ve seen ups and downs. During January 2022 we saw some downs in comparison to the previous month. Fewer clicks, and fewer impressions overall. However, the bounce rate went down.
As you may know, there are several different flavors of Google Ads campaign types, including search, display, video, shopping, apps, etc. Wonderful Machine does not use video, shopping, or app ads because none of these seem apposite to our goals.
Yeah, that’s right, I just used the word apposite. Me. That’s who.
Only search and display ads are actually appropriate for 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“).
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 that are required when you have a Google Ads campaign.
Our campaign has two different ad groups: a “standard ad group” and a dynamic ad group. Below are the results for each.
At Wonderful Machine, our 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, adventure photography, etc.
During January the standard ad group received 28,040 impressions and 1,590 clicks. That is 52,545 fewer impressions than in December and 513 fewer clicks, respectively declines of -65.2% and -24.4%.
With that said, our CTR — click-through rate, or impressions divided by clicks — improved by +117.3%, as it increased to 5.7% from a measly 2.6%. This raises the perennial question: are we paying for clicks or quality?
I should also note that our conversion rate for January, in comparison to that of December, saw considerable gains. If you look at the bottom row of the above image, you’ll see that we had 361 more conversions in January than the previous number. An improvement of +54.1%.
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.
During January our dynamic ad campaign had 4,907 impressions and received 146 clicks. Those numbers are improvements of +16.9% and +40.4%, respectively, in comparison with the results of December 2022. Even our CTR went up, from 2.5% in December to 2.9% in January — an improvement of +20.2%!
With reference to the perennial question raised above, in this instance only Bob Dylan can answer, as he did so eloquently at the end of “The Clothes Line Saga,” a hilarious ballad performed and recorded with The Band in the now-famous Basement Tapes: “I just do what I’m told.”
Interested in starting a campaign for your own site? Reach out and let us help.