Adwords is Easy to Set Up – Why Do You Still Need a Consultant?

Small businesses on the Internet are increasingly resorting to Google Adwords and with Google’s effort to rope in more and more businesses to try the service with all the free Adwords coupons and assistance, there is every reason for the businesses to try this amazing advertising service.

Given Google’s simple and intuitive interface a person with half decent knowledge of Internet can set up and run an Adwords campaign and apparently there is no reason for a business to hire an Adwords consultant or specialist . So why do you still need an Adwords specialist?

Recently I have been working with a client in Hyderabad helping them with Internet marketing for some of their projects and one of their projects was an e-commerce website, currently selling products only in Hyderabad and projected for nation-wide growth in near future. They were running a very small Adwords campaign at their end and was seeing decent results however, they wanted me to do an audit of their account and do any necessary change required to improve the performance.

The top level figures for the account were ok but nothing great. They were particularly struggling with an extremely low CTR ( 0.07%) while still paying a CPC of around Rs.16-Rs.20.

After studying the account and the website I noticed the following:

a)There is no conversion tracking in place. The way their website was set up it wasn’t easy to set up the conversion tracking.

b)There were dual objective for the campaign : to sell a specific product each day and also to get user registration, however, the way the website was set up it was predominantly focusing on selling the product of the day than getting user registration, which is a more profitable objective for the campaign.

c)The campaign was running on both search and display network and Display was literally cleaning the campaign in terms of extreme low CTR.

d)The campaign structure was missing a proper planning.

e)There were adgroups with mixed keywords like restaurants in Hyderabad and consultancies in Hyderabad.

f)Some of the keywords were too broad for a small budget campaign. There were keywords like sale, deal coupon etc.

g)Also noticed they were missing on certain opportunities in terms of keywords.

h)All visitors were sent to the home page of the site ( which featured the deal of the day) irrespective of the keyword or ad copy they clicked

Whether its SEO or Adwords consulting my approach has always been to provide a more holistic solution and after some discussion with the client I felt that it is not just the Adwords account but for the campaign to be successful we need to work on the website as well.

So here is a small account of what we did.

a)The campaign was completely restructured. Keeping the limited budget in mind, we set up basically four campaigns Generic (covering generic keywords), City (covering Hyderbad specific keywords), Category (covering broad product categories), and Daily (keyword specific to the product of the day)

b)A thorough analysis of the existing campaign was done to identify performing keywords and keyword research was done to find more potent keywords

c)Some of the existing ad copies were modified and a few new ad copies were written with suitable landing pages

d)Display network was switched off

e)Targeting was set to Hyderabad and 40Km around the city

f)A new landing page was designed with the objective to drive registrations with very clear call to action. The landing page had a sole objective and there was no chance for the user to be confused.

g)The website structure was slightly modified to ensure all conversions could be tracked.

So did it make any difference to DealDrums Adwords campaign ?

CTR increased by 31 times to 2.17% and CPC came down by Rs.5.95, which effectively means at a budget of INR 10000, earlier they could get 622 clicks, which has now increased to 989 clicks ( an increase by 59%). They did not have conversion data earlier on Adwords so it was difficult to map the progress, but from the number of overall signups they were seeing on a monthly basis they were not close to the present numbers. A conversion rate of 31.32% is definitely something that any business would love to have.

There are still a few variations of the landing page that needs to be tested and can be further optimized to increase the conversion. This is in progress. However, going by the figures and the clear increase in performance it shows how an experienced Adwords consultant can drastically improve your campaign performance.

Adwords campaign set up being so easy, it often doesn’t occur to the beginners that there could be so many nuances to it and there could be so many different factors that play a role in the success of a campaign. Adwords is an extremely powerful tool and to make best use of it, it is of extreme importance that you have complete knowledge of all the tools, features and functionalities that Google provides and also have a proper understanding of how Adwords work. There is no harm trying to learn or taking a DYI approach, however if Internet marketing is not your domain of expertise, it is always wise to take help of an Adwords consultant while doing it for the first time. In all likeliness he will pay off for his fees in terms of the savings/increased number of clicks and conversions you receive from Adwords with his expertise.

p.s. This post has been edited to remove some of the specifics of the campaign on client request for competitive intelligence reasons.