Wasted Spend -- Still Hurts the Most

[RhinoFish]

King Wasted Spend, still rules the Kingdom of ROAS!
[searchengineland.com...]

It is way more important to avoid inefficient spend, than anything else.
Quality Score is important, but Wasted Spend is more important.
Long live the King!

[RhinoFish]

If you sell Sailboats, you can have a 99% Bounce Rate and earn millions per year.

Bounce Rate can be a true liar.

[Mark_A]

Yes, sometimes I wish I sold Sailboats :-) You have given me plenty of food for thought RhinoFish and for that I thank you.

I started down this road about bounce rates because we were spending quite a lot on adwords and seeing firstly low click throughs and then from those already low clicks we were seeing high bounces. Adding the new columns, QS Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience seemed to support my feeling, that, people aren't clicking our ads enough and of those few that do, most are dissatisfied with the destination page on our site and are bouncing.

An aside: the bounce rate adwords reports, is that the number of adwords visitors that bounce or is it the total bounce rate for that page including organic visitors?

There has to be some sense of proportion in these things, we are about ready to replace our second most popular page (after the homepage the page with the highest page views) primarily because Adwords says "below average" Landing page experience!

It might still make sense to replace that page because it could better be reinvented as 4 separate and more focussed pages, but I am not sure "Below Average landing page relevance" should be the primary guide of which pages get the chop.
.

[tangor]

@Mark_A: Focus on smaller chunks of presentation can have a benefit. After all, the USER has also changed over these years. At one time they had the attention span of a gnat, now it is that of a nit!

[Mark_A]

Hi tangor yes I think more focused pages should be better.

[RhinoFish]

An aside: the bounce rate adwords reports, is that the number of adwords visitors that bounce or is it the total bounce rate for that page including organic visitors?

The data for Bounce comes from your linked Analytics account.
But the data displayed in AdWords is for AdWords clicks only.

So it does not include Organic visitors.
In Analytics, you should be able to compare your Bounce rates for AdWords, vs Google Organic, and other combos of Source / Medium.

[RhinoFish]

There has to be some sense of proportion in these things, we are about ready to replace our second most popular page (after the homepage the page with the highest page views) primarily because Adwords says "below average" Landing page experience!

It might still make sense to replace that page because it could better be reinvented as 4 separate and more focussed pages, but I am not sure "Below Average landing page relevance" should be the primary guide of which pages get the chop.

Keep in mind that LPE is keyword specific, meaning if you aim wide, into an area where the keyword is not very relevant to what;s on the landing page, you LPE scores for those keywords could be low.

Meaning, before you go changing up the landing pages, dig thru the data and decide if the page has issues, or if some keywords you're sending there are the issue.

Like let's say you're using Broad match keywords, few Negs, and you're dragging in all kinds of widely aimed (shotgun) searches, and you're pointing them to a landing page that is specific, and the content / products are limited in scope... your keyword and ad practices might make the landing page a poor fit for THAT traffic.

I used to take it for granted that my peers (all of you!) spent as much time as I do, digging into the Search Terms report. :-)
But perhaps 25% of PPC Keywords Jockeys take the time to do this critical work.
The other 75% let their horses run free.

Pick a keyword or three with a poor LPE score, do a Search Terms report on each keyword, then ponder on the degree of relevance between those Searches, your Ad that is triggered, and the Landing Page the traffic is sent to.

Earlier I was saying the QS points, really are #1 and #2-5.
Make sure your research on #1 is thorough first.

[RhinoFish]

King Wasted Spend, still rules the Kingdom of ROAS!

Here's a picture of the King:
[istockphoto.com...]

[SarbjitGrewal]

You can use negative keywords, location extension and IP blacklist extension to avoid wasted spend. The most important thing in wasted spend you must be aware about policies of running advert that might be helpful.

[s_rahbari]

Maybe you like this information given out by google itself (I don't remember the source, otherwise I'd mention it):

The highest conversion rate is achieved on exact match keywords and after that is dynamic keywords. Still, there are times I want more people coming in, so I focus on phrase match with negative keywords. But never go for broad match keywords. never!

[Mark_A]

Hi RhinoFish,

I check active search terms daily and use negative keywords with some care but still I have quite a list. We also have a lot of three word search terms in exact match which are very targeted and while they rarely trigger impressions, when they do we know we have a relevant click.

That said I am hacking our adwords campaign about a bit at the moment. We had targetted no 1 positions but I didn't feel we could justify the CPC so we have now decided that poisition 3 + is quite adequate. This has greatly reduced our CPC so much so that Adwords is grumbling in a number of ways.

[buckworks]

have now decided that poisition 3 + is quite adequate

This is a variable well worth testing. You might get more sales if you're the #1 ad, but on the other hand margins are often better in a lower position. Measure the effectiveness by which approach puts the most money in your pocket, overall.

Consider setting up an automated rule that will reduce your bids a bit if your position is above #3, and another rule to boost them if your ads are too low. Somewhere in there is the optimum combination of volume vs margin.

[RhinoFish]

Good news on the optimum combo of volume and margin, the aggregate profit curve is shaped like a hill, and when you slide side to side ANYWHERE near the top of the hill, you'll do fairly well.

Which brings you back to wasted spend, and why he is the king.
Wasted spend moves the ENTIRE hill curve down.

[Mark_A]

Having a bumpy ride with Adwords at the moment, it seems grumpy that I cut our CPC levels and isn't giving me so many impressions. That said organic google is also down, perhaps this is just a Christmas quietening effect.