Wonderful Machine uses its Google Ads campaign to promote member photographers in November the ads were not as effective as they had been in October, but are showing longer-term signs of growth.
Let’s say you’re a business owner (as you probably are), and you want to advertise both your industrial photography and your portrait photography. You would create a separate ad group for each of those targets with a distinct set of keywords.
There are different types of ad groups, including standard and dynamic ad groups, both of which we employ.
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.
In November 2021 the “Specialities” ad group received 3,962 clicks, which is a -28.8% decrease in comparison to the number received in October. Since that ad group was seen 110,532 times (this is called an impression), our CTR or click-through rate was 3.58%. The average CPC or cost-per-click was $0.08. The CPC actually improved by +61.9% over October when we were paying twice as much per click.
So as you can see, drawing conclusions from these numbers is a little more complicated than it might initially seem.
Our dynamic ad group, called “Commercial Photographer,” received 65 clicks out of 2,387 impressions. The number of clicks declined -76.9% since October; the number of impressions only (!) declined by -25.1%. Our CTR for the dynamic ad group is 2.72%. The average CPC was $0.16.
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.
Unlike e-commerce sites, our Google Ads cannot attach a literal dollar amount to our conversions because conversions for Wonderful Machine means clients finding photographers through our website and hiring them. But since Wonderful Machine is just the middle man, so to speak, what happens in the last part of that exchange is unknown to us.
This is a long way of saying that the most important indicator for Google Ads will depend on the specific business model.
But any business wants to maximize impressions and clicks and ultimately receive clicks but pay less for them.
As such, we are perhaps a little disappointed that our CPC is not as low as it was in October. But part of that may have been related to the fact that we had inadvertently increased our budget (actually, this was wholly my doing). This is one of the Recommendations that Google frequently encourages, but although we saw significant increases in clicks and impressions during that period, we are not necessarily convinced that the greater clicks and impressions lead to the best result.
We are not ready to increase our budget and so we must accept this state of affairs. However, we are continually considering ad relevance scores as well as effectiveness and are convinced that these improvements will bear fruit on a longer timeline.