I havent done much with my adwords account since then, but saw a feature "Conversion Optimizer" has come out of beta.
Is this the same thing? Has anyone had success with either? (PPA or Conv Optimizer)
An explanation would help a lot, along with success stories. If this is just a tool google puts out there for the "newbies" to help google make more money, i'm not interested. If people have found these tools to improve their ROI i'm all ears:)
Hubie
For example I can list a TV on amazon.com seller marketplace and in the end that TV will cost me about 199.00 to sell there leaving a slim profit.
With this tool am i able to set a cost per action to 100.00 and save 99.00 potentially? What happens if it doesn't sell and the action ends up being 499.00 for whatever reason - does Google stick to the CPA or simply pause the account and make you revise?
I don't pay other CPA networks above and beyond the contracted CPA so i'm curious how Google works.
do you have the required volume to participate in the program (200 tracked sales in last 30 days)?
if you don't use the cpa optimizer, they stick to your max cpa bid. but if you don't convert, you move down (or off) the ppc listings within the cpa arena on the content network distribution.
if you do use the conv optimizer, G tries to dynamically adjust your bids (and therefore costs), based on your target max cpa - they don't guarantee they'll hit it or not exceed it - but as time passes, if you don't convert well enough for their systems to do just that, you'll move down in position until the optimized balance is found (or your position makes your volume shrink you right out of the auction) at the max you specified as your target.
more here:
[google.com...]
max cpa bid can be exceeded (in the relative short run) explained here:
[adwords.google.com...]
Basically, it's a bid management tool that is designed to get you more conversions at your target CPA. It will adjust bids on a variety of factors. Ideally, it will figure out you convert well on Tuesday afternoons and thus increase your bids on Tuesday afternoons.
Generally, I'd say it's great for beginners who don't want to constantly tweak bids, know their CPA, and have the required number of conversions.
I would say it's less valuable for experts. However, the tool does seem to be improving. I was in the beta and had mixed results: it did increase the number of conversions, but exceeded the targeted CPA. I've started experimenting with it again and it's doing a better job at staying under the max CPA and is returning more conversions.
An explanation would help a lot, along with success stories. If this is just a tool google puts out there for the "newbies" to help google make more money, i'm not interested. If people have found these tools to improve their ROI i'm all ears:)
Hubie, while I know that you are really looking for success stories from other folks on WebmasterWorld, I did want to at least mention that you'll find three such stories on this page from the the Conversion Optimizer site:
[google.com...]
In terms of more explanation, well, that too can be arranged. ;)
I quoted several of the posts from this thread in the Advertiser Feedback Report last night (including yours Hubie) and was pinged earlier today by the Product Manager for Conversion Optimizer. He said he'd be happy to answer questions that come up in this thread or others, so please feel free to fire away.
AWA
I thought I'd pop in to let you know how my experiment with the conversion optimizer is going. We've been running it for a week now, so are starting to see a pattern.
Avg CTR has dropped by around 3.5%
Avg CPC has dropped by around 10%
Conversion rate increased by 13%
Cost/Conversion dropped by 20%
So far it seems to be working well for us. We are still hitting our daily budget targets and we have seen a nice increase in business.
I think the plan now is to try to watch which AdGroups are hitting the CPA targets and play around with pausing some groups to free up additional budget for the best performing AdGroups. I know this is what the conversion optimizer is meant to do itself, but I think a bit of manual input can't go amiss.
Out of 15 AdGroups 13 are getting the conversions at between 30-65% below the set CPA and 2 are going over by 25-50%
I'll report back after we have more data to give.
Briggidere
