One of the biggest mistakes I see advertisers make in Google AdWords is giving up on a set of keywords before they should. AdWords is not about giving up all the time, it’s about looking at results and making moves to get the right cost per conversion going forward.
I have an injury lawyer client that was advertising in Spanish and getting about 70 cases a year from our Spanish campaigns. The cost per case was more expensive than he wanted, so he had us end the Spanish campaigns. And that was that, no more Spanish campaigns.
But fast forward to a few months later and the client is wanting to know how we can get more cases from AdWords. I know how we can get more cases… turn the Spanish campaigns back on that got us 70 cases last year. Duh!
I explained to the client that we made a mistake turning off the case-producing Spanish campaigns that were getting a cost per case that was a little bit more expensive than we wanted. Instead, we should have made adjustments to get the cost per case lower and not just completely give up on the Spanish campaigns. We should have lowered bids, paused problem keywords, tried different ad copy, added more negative keywords, tightened match types, added more extensions, etc.
Going forward, I told him, we can lower our bidding and get maybe 40 to 50 cases a year instead of 70, but we’ll get them at a profitable cost per case with our new, lower bidding strategy. The client agreed to try Spanish campaigns once again, and now I’m confident that he’s going to get more cases each year from AdWords, and he’ll get those additional cases profitably.
AdWords is not about turning things off and shutting down groups of keywords completely, especially when they are producing conversions. Instead, AdWords is all about tweaking, testing, and experimenting until you find the right settings and get to a profitable cost per conversion.
