During the month of March, we made some changes to our daily budget which resulted in a dramatic increase in clicks and impressions and an increase in the cost of our ads, while the CPC (cost-per-click) did not decrease proportionally.
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 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 that appear in the margins on the page you are viewing.
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 March our standard ad group received 45,749 impressions and 2,760 clicks. That constitutes +144.2% more impressions and +197. 1% more clicks than February. Those dramatic increases occurred because we increased our daily budget about halfway through the month. As it happens, our click-through rate (CTR) also gained significantly — namely, by +21.3%, such that it was 6.03% for March. Just to be clear, the CTR is the number of impressions divided by that of clicks.
The other crucial indicator for this month was the CPC or cost per click. This also decreased by -11.2% to an average of $0.22 per click. A positive sign.
This was an experiment made in part to take advantage of daily budgets that were not being spent.
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 March our dynamic ad group received -3.9% fewer impressions — only 2,831 — and -3.4% fewer clicks (113). So even though we increased our daily budget midway through the month, this did not affect the dynamic ad group. The CTR for our dynamic ad group is 3.9%, which is actually +.5% increase since February. Last but not least, our average CPC is $0.22, which is actually a -23.7% decrease … and that’s a good thing!
Interested in starting a campaign for your own site? Reach out and let us help.