Lead Generation PPC & SEM Specialist (on all major digital ad platforms), Top 25 Most Influential PPC Expert & Professional Speaker
It’s time for another PPC Hard Truth. Low conversion volume accounts are struggling in paid search and they have been for some time now. Yup, I said it out loud. Let’s start by defining a “low conversion volume” account. On Google Ads, a low conversion volume account is any account that records fewer than 50 conversions per month. And there are MANY accounts that fall into this category! It is a bit baffling to see these accounts being left behind by Google Ads, but it is absolutely happening. So if your accounts are struggling, you are not alone! And it is not happening because you just suck at Google Ads. How did we get here? Well, over the past few years, Google Ads has leaned hard into machine learning (or what they like to call AI). This has manifested in the push to not only automated or smart bidding strategies (such as maximize conversions or target cost per acquisition) but also the rise of more fully automated campaign types (I’m looking at you Performance Max!). These technologies and campaigns work fabulously for lots of accounts. But for lots more, they just don’t. And all of the talk coming out of Google Ads never acknowledges it. The machines need a certain amount of data to find their footing. If your ad account is below those thresholds, even the most brilliant of PPC strategies can’t make up the difference. Now you may think “well, I will just use manual bidding - that is still an option.” And it is. BUT (and this is a gigantic but) when you use manual bidding, you lose access to a lot of the machine learning that gets applied in real time to campaigns using automated bidding. So you’re at a pretty significant disadvantage on that front when using manual bidding. Which is also frustrating when the automated bidding isn’t working great either. Have you found a secret to low volume accounts on Google Ads lately? If so, please share with the community! Stay tuned for my next post in this series where I will talk about what you can do if your account is in this performance limbo!
Aldwin Neekon
2mo
One thing I've tried is feeding offline conversions back to Google (on lead gen campaigns) at multiple funnel points. I've also tried boosting the signal by associating increasing value amounts with each successive funnel stage. But would like to hear from my PPC network who manage a much much larger set of accounts or have access to a larger data set.
Jordan Brunelle
2mo
You're definitely right about manual CPC. Inherent disadvantage. Buuuut I have see that work for clients who couldn't take advantage of smart bidding for whatever reason. My assumption is just that I would see a better cost per conversion if we had enough conversions to run a max conversion strategy. But sometimes you just have to do what you can with what you have.
Tad Miller
2mo
First step on this kind of thing is not on the pre-click side of things. You must maximize the post-click experience. Whether that means a custom PPC landing page or a re-write of your site content is up for debate. But the greatest gains in conversion happen by optimizing after the click. The reality is that most paid search landing pages are terrible. The biggest "sin" is not putting the value propositions of what you are offering on the page at all. Too many people essentially have a landing page that says "we exist" and not much else. That never works. You need to hit people in the face with WHY your product / service is the one to buy and not the competitor's product / service. Landing page layouts also matter, especially if a strong portion on your PPC traffic is mobile. You need to test what page elements work best in what parts of the page. Landing page software test platforms are not really cheap these days, but if you are going to play in this space you need to invest into a platform that gives you a chance to test and learn and most importantly improve. Otherwise you are on a path to failure that can't be fixed on the "pre-click" side in the ad platform.
Derek M.
2mo
Keyword arbitrage. For example, replace: "personal injury lawyer" $100 per click with "police accident report." $5 per click. Anyone hurt in an accident needs the report. Offer help in doing so. Same audience, new offer.
Matt Lambert
2mo
My view is that leads are way more expensive than they used to be. The 'average nature' of clicks costs hides that increase behind large numbers of invisible clicks. So if you are prepared to spend double on manual bidding than you used to then it can still work. The only way to bring the costs back down is value proposition, conversion rates and a negative hygiene bordering on obsession. Great Post.. transparency win.
Mel Hartman
2mo
Before I left PPC management, I worked with a lot of B2B software clients and a key strategy was targeting specific review-based keywords (Forrester reports, "compare" keywords for example.) But Google's automatic keyword expansion of these word definitions made management painful, and the real BOFU stuff was expensive as hell. Some advertisers were using remarketing audiences and prospect lists as well as geofencing around key markets where competitors lived - all strategies that continued to cut down on the size of their targeting, which caused the machine learning to not work, and often ads would not serve if we got our targeting dialed in. All in all, search was just a poor quality channel and getting worse for the reasons you mentioned. It's also a poor channel for promoting content and people grow tired of whitepapers. I felt many B2B advertisers were reinvesting in inbound marketing and Demandbase around the time Performance Max & the death of Broad match were really blowing up. Tearing their dollars away from search to reinvest in email funnels and ABM. Sorry to hear it is still tough out there for certain business types who are ignored by the algorithm's blessings. 🙏
One thing I've been doing is tracking more lower funnel conversions in order to get more volume. The key is to get as close to the end goal as you can though! For example, begin checkout is better than add to cart or MQLs/SQLs are better than form fills. Also if possible, portfolio bid strategies can help smaller accounts that have campaigns segmented by services or in other ways consolidate their data and help bidding strategies have more information to work off!
We have been trying to optimize for more frequent events that are a bit further up the funnel. For example, instead of optimizing for the purchase event, we try checkout started or add to cart events. We still report KPIs/results in terms of the actual most intentional conversion (purchases or dollars or leads), but sometimes widening that net further up the funnel brings in a bit more data for the machines to learn.
Mike Hayden
2mo
Google has also made the keyword match types much broader, along with other changes like withholding half the search term data and ad positions. It seems they are deliberately destroying manual bidding as opposed to just leaving it behind. Maybe so there is less competition for their smart bidding. For campaigns that need manual, I use exact match for everything, which is still broader than the phrase match used to be. And then I use scripts to check and negative out everything at ad group level that goes too broad.
Paid Advertising Specialist
2moYeah I think Micro conversions are being used a lot more in these cases. I see a lot of people bashing micro conversions on here but sometimes there's a good reason for using them. I use them in accounts where conversions don't reach that 30/month mark. Another way is using portfolio bid strategies. If you have an account with 2,3,4 campaigns where the budget is spread thin use a portfolio bidding strategy, and gather the learnings of all these campaigns collectively