On paper, last month was a good month for our MVA leads program. The cost per case came in at $5,342. That is close to the goal range of $4,000 to $5,000, and it was down from $6,135 in June.
I’m glad we had good numbers and got near the goal, but it was a horrible month from an operations perspective. We had “intake transition” issues and that really hurt our results. We had good numbers on paper, but it never felt like we were in our groove during the month due to poor intake.
What’s interesting about the AI era of Google Ads, is that there’s so much interplay between the humans and the machine. Poor intake hurt our results. That showed up in the data with us reporting fewer conversions, fewer conversions caused the machine to slow itself down, a slowed down machine led to fewer conversions still, and it’s like next thing you know we’re chasing our tail all month trying to figure out how to get back on track.
But it is what it is. Humans are going to human. I take a licking but I keep on ticking. It’s all part of the game. When intake stinks it up, it’s my job as the ads manager to figure out a way to translate to the machine that “hey it’s not that bad, we just have some humans messing up but we’re in the process of correcting things, don’t pull us back too much, keep some aggression and volume coming in, we’ll get it back on track.”
And translate I did. We tried a lot of things last month to get back on track (new campaigns, new landing pages, new bidding strategies) and most of it did not work, but interestingly some of it did. The AI going off course was a good excuse to get out of my comfort zone, try a lot of things, and get lucky when some of those things show potential.
We now have a new set of landing pages we’re going to try out. And I have some state-wide campaigns that are running and have shown the potential to get a ton of volume and now it’s just about reining that volume in and getting the cost per conversion we want.
It was a bumpy month, but we got the intake issues under control, I was able to get our AI strategies performing again, and we’ll be continuing to build on some of the things we experimented with last month. So far in August, we have a $3,700 cost per case and we’re trending towards 18% more cases as well.
