Dang, it still feels good to win.
I’ve been in this business since 2014 and I’ve done a lot of winning, but it still feels good when you turn something around and get some momentum going again in a client’s account.
One thing I always talk about with max conversion target CPA bidding is pushing up your target CPA and your bidding level from a position of strength. And that’s something I recently did for a personal injury client I work with. I’ve written recently about how the cost per case has crept up in recent months, and in order to fix it I was going to focus this month on turning down the bidding levels. And I did this. And it worked. And the cost per case came down. But it worked too well. Cost per case came down to $4,000 but the volume really slowed down.
With one of my clients, I got the tap on the shoulder, “bro, cost per case is nice, but no one makes money with this volume, we have fixed costs.”
Good. That’s where we needed to be. We needed to turn it down so we could turn it back up. And on Friday that’s what we did.
For this client, the conversion action we optimize for is signed cases. We don’t care about leads, calls, etc. What we care about are signed cases. And that’s what we run our bidding on. The goal is $4,000 to $5,000 per signed case, while also hitting the volume goals we have. So to get the cost per case back down from the $6,000s last month, I had turned down the cost per case to $4,500. I did this to really get the cost per signed case down. This account averages not seeing 18% of the signed cases we actually get from Google Ads, meaning like they just don’t show up in Google Ads as conversions for some technical reasons about 18% of the time. So this $4,500 cost per conversion target CPA bid I put in place was effectively telling the system to get us cases at a cost of $3,690.
And that’s what it did. Through the 9th, the cost per case was $4,000. But the volume had slowed down too much. Not enough calls, not enough leads, not enough cases. And the client was starting to feel it and was getting concerned about volume and fixed costs.
Okay, so that’s the tap on the shoulder. I got the cost per case down to goal range by intentionally underbidding the goal, but now it was time to turn things up from a position of strength, and see if we could walk that magical line of getting cases at a good cost and get the volume we want.
And on Friday we did!
Friday came in with the most leads since May 14th, and we also had a great day from a cost per case perspective with a $3,800 cost per case, and likely lower than that because we have one more lead that is very likely to get signed in the next couple of days.
I was staring at the lead count all day, and it felt great to see the kind of volume we were getting in March and April when we had a couple of great months, along with a really good cost per case on the day.
To me, the key thing here is raising the bidding from a position of strength.
Instead of pushing things when the cost per case was above the goal, we pulled back, tried to communicate to the system that we needed a lower cost per case, got that cost per case, acknowledged the volume issues that started to cause, and then decided to push things up and see if the system could continue the cost per case momentum while also turning some attention towards hitting our volume goals as well.
I’d much rather have a week of slow volume along with a profitable cost per case and then see if we can turn things back up, than turn things back up when we had a bad cost per case and be in a spot in the middle of the month where we made a bad cost per case worse, which leads to a lower likelihood of being able to come in at a good cost per case by the end of the month since you’re that much further in the wrong direction.
If the cost per conversion is bad, and everything is dialed in (landing page, ad copy, keywords, conversion tracking), then at some point you’re going to have to lower the bidding and accept lower volume anyway, so you might as well get it over with quickly, solve your cost per conversion issue, and then try and push the volume back up. To me, it always beats going in the other direction and risking making things even worse.
I’m pumped up for Friday’s win and it definitely feels like this account is back under control and performing exactly how I want it to perform. But the trick now is to take a step back, let things continue to play out, and realize one or two days in an account like this is nothing, results can vary widely over a few days for a ton of reasons, and if Monday and Tuesday aren’t great, so be it. Stick to the plan, bid the right amount, definitely accept the gut feels I get that come from experience, but give things a few days to keep playing out because based on what I saw towards the end of last week, I think this account is back on track.
