Want to make your brand campaigns on Google Ads more efficient?
As a European fintech company, we used Google Ads as an acquisition lever. Initially, we found success with Google’s target impression share for brand campaigns.
However, in 2023, with profitability as our goal, we challenged the status quo. Our hypothesis was to reduce CPCs without sacrificing traffic and conversions.
This article explores the inefficiencies of PPC campaigns and recommends a restructuring strategy. It aims to inspire vital changes to improve efficiency and reinvest savings in new business acquisitions.
Challenge the status quo
Not all inquiries are created equal. Also, not all keywords cost the same or perform the same.
Google has been pushing for more reach and less control for several years.
If you turn on broad match, it tends to immediately find the competition and position your generic keywords for their brand queries.
If you’re doing it to others, chances are they’ll do it to you. My guess is that Performance Max will follow the same path.
This has some general negative effects on brand campaigns:
Using Smart Bidding without a max CPC. can capture your important brand traffic, because we all know that Google can make nervous CPCs for any query. Just having participants in the auctions increases the winner’s CPC, even if it was highly unlikely that the competitor’s company would have won the click. Target impression share in campaigns with mixed match types can push CPCs beyond belief because a phrase match can deliver relatively irrelevant queries, while achieving your 100% impression target on all words key
Identify a “non-existent” problem.
In research, we can predict our performance when things are stable, but we don’t know what will happen after any change.
We needed a mix of two things to bring this project to life: data and faith. Data is the easiest to find, faith is not.
People love to pretend that research can be scientific. However, when you feed your numbers into a statistical model, more often than not, it cannot account for all the exogenous and endogenous factors that affect an account.
However, we must not get stuck in inertia due to data dependency. Sometimes you have to be bold.
Realization of the analysis and proposal of the project
Our team mined all brand keywords per week with all typical KPIs (i.e. impressions, clicks, cost, conversions) and competitive metrics (impression share, top of page overall and first position ) share of clicks.
Creating all the necessary calculations and recalculations in Excel, allowing use to segment the data as desired.
CPC = Cost/Clicks
CTR = Clicks/Impressions
CVR = Conversions/Clicks
CPA = Cost/Conversions
Impression share metrics are a bit more complicated because they are already averages that need to be transformed into raw calculations before being recalculated in a pivot table.
By convention, we multiply impression share metrics by impressions and divide the calculation by impressions after the pivot table is created.
We immediately recognized two categories of keywords.
Low CPC and low CPA (relatively high CPC for a branded campaign) high CPC and high CPA (close to generic campaigns CPC)
Both had 99% of all impression share metrics. We noticed that the second category had a closer performing CPA to the generic keywords than the first.
This gave us hope that it could improve the overall ROI. However, we were unable to estimate the increase in ROI. We have gathered all the people responsible for making the necessary decisions, we make our case.
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Proposed solution: Split the campaigns into two and provide a relevant strategy.
We decided to split the two categories into two campaigns. This would allow us to optimize the CPCs of the top performing category while turning the second category into a performance campaign using conversion goal smart bidding.
Not wanting to ruin all the historical data, we kept the first category in the same campaign, while creating a new campaign for the second category.
We kept target impression in the first category; however, we reduced it to 95% and set a maximum CPC. In the second category, we used the 30-day average CPA for the initial setup and created a single campaign portfolio tCPA strategy with a maximum CPC.
Improve ROI while saving thousands
The results were immediate. Our top tier CPCs were down -73%. We haven’t lost any competitive metrics except for 1-2 percentage points (which have remained in the upper 95% range since the switch).
For some reason, Google was charging us more than we would have otherwise paid, even with the same target impression share strategy. The second category also saw improvements.
Our CPCs were down -31%. However, we lost about 7 percentage points in click share. This was predictable because we aim to generate conversions in this campaign and not clicks at all costs.
Google may have stopped ranking in some audiences’ search queries. For the second category, we often use the bid strategy simulator to measure the cost of incremental conversions.
We are currently at a comfortable level, although Google estimates that for a mind-blowing tCPA we could generate 2-3 more conversions. Our returns would soon fall off a cliff if we caught all the traffic.
Lower CPCs, higher conversions in Google Ads
This has already allowed us to directly increase our new business acquisition budget. Consider spending 75% less on your brand’s keywords in a week, month, or year.
Depending on the size of your business, the savings could be astronomical. Now we have to prepare for the new world, where trademark inquiries are no longer our safe place.
We need to learn to use smart bidding to our advantage, but also be critical of what’s going on in search at all levels.
As PPC marketers, we must stay true to our work, improve performance by any means necessary, regardless of company, client, platform or so-called best practices.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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