How To get More Bang For Your Buck

I’ve had a few emails and calls regarding a previous blog post about Google AdWords advertising from a couple of days ago.

The main question being how do you get campaigns so efficient.

Well, the first answer to that is start measuring what happens on your site.

Here’s an email I sent a client today (I’ve stripped out the identifying stuff obviously) – it might give you an idea of what you can do to measure the effectiveness of what you’re doing with your web site generally, and Google AdWords specifically.

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A note on how we can now measure the effectiveness of the web site:

In the AdWords campaign yesterday, we set up 4 pages:

*Action 1 thank you
* Action 2 thank you
* Action 3 thank you
* Action 4 thank you

and applied conversion code to them.

What this tells us is how many times the forms have been used as a direct result of the Adwords.

If you look at today (11/11/2010) numbers, you’ll see that right now (8.57 am) you’ve spent $41.25 for 4 conversions.
And you’ll see they’re all from the ******* campaign.
So each conversion has cost you $10.31.

Goals in Google Analytics

In addition to those conversion, in Google Analytics (Go to the Reporting Tab, then down to Google Analytics) we have set up ‘Goals’.
That is, each time these 4 thank you pages are visited is counted as a goal.

If you dig down a bit (by clicking Goals in the left side menu), you’ll see that for yesterday we had 12 goals reached:

* 3 for Action 1
* 1 for Action 2
* 5 for Action 3
* 3 for Action 4

Goals are different from Conversions in that Goals are overall for the site.
Conversions are the leads generated by only the Google AdWords.

Make sense?

Now importantly, don’t just count the conversions and goals as the end result.

You’ll also have telephone calls, word of mouth referrals, etc generating in from web site visitors.
And, very importantly, with the unique content and positioning of that content you’ll also benefit substantially from increased branding benefits.

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Hope that helps you develop a more efficient AdWords campaign.

There’s lots more to a great campaign than the above, but if you can measure the effectiveness of what you’re doing you’ll have the information to make better decisions.