Adwords Conversion Optimiser

[TheGrid]

OK Mozers! Here's the situation (my parents went away on a weeks vacation...)

• I am managing an online furniture retail website Infurn .com

• Our budget is 500 euro per day and we need basically 20% cost per sale and im hovering at 30 - 35%

• I recently was given the opportunity to participate in The Conversion Optimiser which allows you to set a desired CPA and Google works its magic geting you that target by adjusting your bids accordingly using historical campaign data.

• Is this something I should use? Or should I continue to hone my ad groups, bids, products, landing pages, and ad copy until I reach my 15 - 20% CPA goal?

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Hi kynduvme,

I think the Conversion Optimizer is something that maybe works well for some and not at all for others. I have tried it several times on e-commerce sites, both large and small. I never got as good results when it was enabled as when I just optimized the campaigns myself. In fact, across the board when I used it my cost per conversion went up and my conversion rates went down. This is just my own personal experience. I think it's something worth testing on one campaign to see how it goes in your individual situation. Hope that helps!

Dana

[TheGrid]

Thanks Dana, that is not the first time I have read that someone had that experience. Nothing compares to "hand-optimizing" each keyword one at a time

[SEO5Team]

I would agree with Dana. We tried it for one of our clients spending $1000 a day in the franchising industry and our results plumetted. It reduced our impressions massively thus impacting our # of leads and increasing our cost per lead. Some things are just done best the good ole fashioned manual way :):)

[danatanseo]

You are welcome. Yes, you know the same is true when evaluating site performance in Google Analytics. We were recently researching what day of the week and time of day would be best for email sends. If we'd just chosen the day and time with the most revenue, it would have been totally skewed by one $5,000 sale that came in on an normally slow day at an even slower time. You have to mix your analysis with common sense. An algorithmic "Conversion Optimizer" isn't capable of inserting the "common sense" part of the equation...at least not yet!

[EGOL]

I agree with Dana.

If you are a reasonably smart person who understands  products, pricing, quality score, landing pages, google bidding/ranking methods, profit then you will probably get better results doing the bidding yourself.

Of, course, it is still possible to be an expert at all of the above and not be able to make a profit using adwords because the competition is cannibalistic.

[danatanseo]

EGOL is quite correct regarding the profitability of Adwords campaigns particularly in highly competitive spaces. I think it's really important to have a clear idea of what the Lifetime value is for customers acquired through this channel, so you know when to hold and know when to gold int terms of ad and keyword bids.