5 Simple Things To Double Your Adwords ROI

If you’re a diehard Adwords campaign manager like myself, then you are also always searching for an

edge on your competition to raise your rates of return. While I have found dozens of different ways

to do this over the years by looking at literally hundreds of different campaigns, I decided to list 5 of

the commonly missed techniques and features that should have already been considered by most to

contribute back to the KissMetrics community.

Some of these items I have listed here can be used to lift your campaign ROI (return on ad spend)

TODAY and especially if your competitors are not already employing them.

While the most substantial way to increase your campaigns ROI still involves increasing your accounts

overall average keyword quality score (as quality score and cost per lead metrics are directly

correlated), your overall level of success in Adwords is still heavily reliant on whether or not you have

first covered all of your bases as like mentioned in this article to create for yourself an overall bigger

pie, in the right flavor for your business.

#1 - Demographic Testing By Income Level –

Half the battle with PPC has to do with understanding who can afford or ‘must’ afford your products

or services so you can properly target them.

I have outlined the process for discovering which income classes are purchasing from you if you don’t

already know, at what rate, and how to make your adjustments to target these people exclusively and

increase your campaign ROI.

How Income Filtering Is Done In Adwords

While targeting B2B clients via PPC, we really can only guess who our customers are by what they

type into Google, (at least until Google rolls out their customer list targeting features). In B2C

however, it is rather simple and required in most cases required to derive a healthy return from your

campaign spend.

There are actually two ways to go about segmenting the traffic you are purchasing via Google

Adwords ad interface by income level, one manual and one automatic.

The Manual Way

If you are a local business, I recommend going through all of your individual neighborhoods and

townships and making a list of all of the neighborhoods in your area that are likely to bring in

profitable customers by neighborhood type and category. Manually, you should be selecting each of

these areas individually via Google’s location settings, and ensure that your location targeting settings

are set at “people in my targeted location” to prevent leakage.

[screenshot file: locations – manual]

[screenshot file: locations – manual 2]

The Automatic Way

For national campaigns, you can break out your targeted audience by income bracket easily via the

campaigns ‘location groups’ settings menu.

[screenshot file: locations – automatic 1]

Tiering Your Bids By Income Bracket

For most products and services, there will be income classes that are more profitable than others so

we can’t automatically eliminate any one income class target right away.

Breakout, test, and review conversion numbers for each income bracket individually to make

decisions about who to target and compare this with what your CRM is telling you after the fact to

make your front end bid adjustments.

Set Bids For Each Income Bracket Individually & Only When Statistically Signiant Data Is Available

[screenshot file: locations – automatic 2]

Don’t Forget About Remarketing

Remarketing campaigns that lump together audience members from all traffic sources can also be

cleaned up significantly by filtering out unprofitable income brackets.

No need to market to those cheap trade show contest entry contestants from your latest trade show,

they are likely not worth the clicks and can prove that now.

How Income Bracket Filtering Really Helps You Make Money

Spending the time to figure out who is buying doesn’t just affect your campaign ROI on the front end

alone however. Time less spent on telephone and or doing quotes in person reduces overhead and

strain on salespeople.

Less time spent chasing bad leads will allow you to divert more of your sales department’s budget on

better, more affluent sales people which will then translate into a higher lead closure rate.

#2 - Testing Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Ad Headlines –

DKI or Dynamic Keyword Insertion (which automatically matches your ad headlines with the users

search query) is a highly controversial topic amongst us Google account managers. While it can often

bring in the worst of leads, it does usually bring in a lot more leads overall, especially when tightly

grouped keyword sets are harder to assemble.

The trick to make DKI work extraordinarily well for your business lies with figuring out how to

disguise them which I explain here.

DKI That Actually Works Tricks The Web Searcher Into Thinking They Are Normal, Highly Relevant

Ads.

If there is no false reality created, then it’s not worth your time to implement.

[screenshot file: DKI 3]

This DKI ad example looks fairly non generated, but could be even more convincing with a stronger

‘Description Line 1’ as described below.

[screenshot file: DKI 6]

Here is a better example of the DKI ad example listed above. General search intent around ‘top

network monitoring tools’ is met with an offer to view what looks like an industry reviewed product.

This ad would work fantastically well for most of the long tail traffic generated on this adgroup’s

keyword.

Proper keyword selection and match types work hand in hand with the DKI ad copywriting to make DKI

ad strategies highly profitable.

How To Decide If DKI Should Be Used On Your Adwords Accounts

Rule #1 - Do not use DKI on any adgroup that is not converting well. DKI is known to make poor

converting adgroups perform even worse.

Rule #2 – Evaluate all of your Adwords adgroups individually when evaluating whether or not DKI will

work for those adgroups.

If the adgroup you are evaluating is indeed already converting well and you wish to gain a nice boost

in converted clicks, then you should next check to see if there is a high disparity in the way people are

searching for your products or services in that respective adgroup by monitoring your keyword search

term reports from within your keywords tab here….

[screenshot file: DKI 4]

If you find there isn’t a way to effectively target all common search queries with a laser targeted static

based ad, then it is time to run a DKI split test on that particular adgroup in question. If there is

indeed a way to target each keyword individually and effectively with a static headline alternatively,

then it is time to silo the keywords in question into new adgroups as they will actually perform better

that way.

Testing DKI On Applicable Adgroups

Landing pages used in conjunction with DKI generated PPC traffic will not often behave the same as

landing pages that are handling traffic from static ads will so pay particular attention to your

engagement metrics when you initially make the switch to DKI. It may be that you have to setup a

whole new landing page type to convert your DKI traffic well.

Example DKI Ad Split Test

[screenshot file: DKI 1]

Quickly Monitor Engagement Metrics From Within Adwords By Modifying Columns

[screenshot file: DKI 1-5]

[screenshot file: DKI 1-75]

In general, landing pages with less copy and simple forms work the best with DKI.

Example Of A Landing Page That Will Convert Well With DKI Traffic

[screenshot file: DKI 2]

Mirroring DKI On Your Landing Pages

Once you have found the best DKI Headline and supporting description strategy to grab the attention

of as many prospects as possible and maximize qualified traffic to our landing pages, it’s time to

replicate this strategy out to each of our adgroups landing pages to maximize our conversion rates on

that traffic.

With a little bit of scripting, we can automatically pull the users search query from our referrer and

plant this as the h1 headline to each of our adgroup specific landing pages. Third party services such

as Unbounce and others even have this as a premium feature if you are using outside technology as a

premade solution and simplify your life (and well worth the extra money if you are already using it).

[screenshot file: DKI 7]

From Unbouce.com’s Website

[screenshot file: DKI 8]

# 3 - Employ A Reminiscent Retargeting Image Ad Strategy –

I don’t know how many times I have seen people using remarketing display ads in a way that is

creating a huge disconnect in the way people are identifying with the solutions they offer.

[screenshot file: remarketing 1]

Here is an example of a remarketing ad done wrong.

Your Goal To Meet With Your Remarketing Display Ads

Remarketing display ads are there to remind the user of the copy they read on your site, or the

conversation they had with your sales staff, and with the proper amount of follow-up, ensure a

commitment is made.

Users will have multiple uninitiated conversations with themselves if you execute on my advice here

which is key for effective remarketing results.

Here is a Realistic & Entertaining Example of a Remarketing Example Sequence That Your Visitors

Should Follow:

[screenshot file: remarketing 4.5]

Visitor First Browses K&N’s Site for a High Performance Air Filter for Their Vehicle

[screenshot file: remarketing 2]

Visitor Sees The Following Ad And Thinks: Ok, this ad makes me want to stop reading the site I was

reading, I definitely remember the benefits of the product as they had listed. I am however not

motivated enough to get my credit card out of my wallet right now, but maybe later…

[screenshot file: remarketing 4.75]

Visitor Then Sees The Following Ad And Thinks: There it is air filter I want to buy again for my Honda.

Heck yes I want my car to run better. ☺ Maybe I will buy it when I get home…

[screenshot file: remarketing 9]

Visitor Then Sees The Following Ad And Thinks: Wow, I have been telling myself I was going to buy

this thing for a while now but… 27 more horsepower, really?….. OK K&N, you got me….

Segmented Remarketing Works Better Than You Think

By segmenting out your landing pages and remarketing message sequences as already mentioned,

you are going to have a much stronger impression on your visiting audience as a whole.

Take a look at your view through conversion reports in Adwords after you have finished siloing out

your remarketing campaigns and see how well your view through conversions are trending. If

executed properly, view through conversions will have spiked sharply across the board, for all of your

remarketing related adgroups.

Again, Modify Columns to See Your View Through Conversions Reported Directly Within Adwords

[screenshot file: remarketing 5.5]

How to Properly Calculate Remarketing Followup Length

Products and service leads that do not usually result in an immediate close mostly always require a

good remarketing strategy to generate ROI. The only real question to ask yourself is how long visitors

should be followed up for.

You can check your CRM sales reports and / or your Google Adwords and Analytics sales time lag

reports to find the length of cookie window you should be setting for your remarketing campaigns.

The following data and screenshots should put things into perspective of how long you should really

be setting your Adwords remarketing list cookie windows:

The Average B2B Sales Cycle -- From 2009 Marketing Sherpa Study

[screenshot file: remarketing 3]

[screenshot file: remarketing 3-5]

An example B2C Adwords conversion time lag report which shows most revenue coming in at a much

later date.

For B2C, the general rule of thumb is the higher the item ticket price, the longer the sales cycle.

You should set your cookie windows in Google Analytics to match the length of time it takes for your

slowest customers to convert.

Remarketing List Followup Window Setting Location in Google Analytics

[screenshot file: remarketing 4]

Summary

As with everything in marketing, ad frequency is more important than reach, Mohamad Ali did not

beat his opponents with one punch! This is a game of subtle subliminal messaging we are playing

with our prospects and only works incredibly well if it’s incrementally spaced out like any other

branding or direct response campaigns are.

Leveraging These Remarketing Results

Once you have setup your hyper-targed remarketing campaign and know it’s working well for you, it’s

time to leverage what you have built.

Replicate every ad you have made in every allowable ad size Google Adwords accepts. If you are not

aware, Google now allows for up to 17 different ad types now which of course only half are even used

by most advertisers giving you a great competitive edge and sharp discount for those who do use

them.

Google’s Adwords Display Eligible Ad Sizes From Google’s Help Site

[screenshot file: remarketing 6]

Animated Ads

Once you have created ads in size Google allows for and wish for an even greater response, try

animated varieties. I have seen CTR lifts of 2 or even 3 times on remarketing campaigns when an

animated and / or interactive ad strategy was employed over a static one.

You’re Not Done Yet…

Once everything is setup, it’s important to keep mixing stuff up to keep your ads noticed like we do

with Facebook Ads. Once your prospects have viewed your ads 7 or more times, each additional ad

impression after this will be less effective.

Produce and swap out new remarketing ads every quarter to ensure the maximum response from

your new remarketing strategy.

Checkout K&N’s diverse set of ad’s found on Moat.com for inspiration, they have a really good

example of what you can do to mix up your ad strategy.

[screenshot file: remarketing 7]

But This Is A Lot Of Work…

Because most other advertisers in the display advertising space run ads for thousands of unique

products or services together, custom designed ads and manual tagging is your edge on the

competition.

[quote]Marketers who do what everyone else is doing get what everyone else’s results.[/quote]

# 4 - Turn Off Automatic Audience Targeting Expansion –

Some of you are in such a hurry when setting up your new Adwords display campaigns that you do

not notice that Google has taken the liberty to decide who your customers are for you.

[screenshot file: automatic audience targeting 1]

When setting up any Google display campaign targeting with predefined audience list as a targeting

option, Google gives you the choice (which is selected by default) to automatically expand it’s reach

past this finite list given to them. While I have seen this feature of Adwords work successfully before,

this feature by default likely won’t provide any value to your campaigns unless you are first giving

them a huge audience list to work from.

For people running new campaigns or smaller lists, making the mistake of leaving this default

campaign feature on when creating your retargeting campaigns, you will likely double or even triple

the your advertising costs without increasing the amount revenue you’re remarketing campaigns are

generating.

The only products I have seen work with automatic audience expansion are the ones that have

general mass appeal and or extremely low commitment offers (think free).

A Possible Good Ad Candidate For Automatic Audience Expansion – But Only Maybe

[screenshot file: automatic audience targeting 2]

#5 - Turn Off Adsense For Mobile Apps –

Any good manager that I know already knows about this one, but I wanted to throw this one out there

as well just in case you haven’t checked into it yet.

For Google display campaigns, Google by default allows us to advertise on mobile apps unless we

specify otherwise (thanks Google).

By checking your display campaign placements report today, you can see evidence of mobile ad clicks

coming through your campaign if mobile app targeting has not been already deactivated in your

account:

[screenshot file: mobile apps 1]

Mobile app clicks almost never provide good quality leads as a rule of thumb as these people either

fat finger their ad clicks or are not in the right frame of mind to take commercial offers seriously.

There are two places you must look to deactivate these pesky display ad featured placements, make

sure you get them both to prevent any further mobile ad clicks from coming through to your display

campaigns.

[screenshot file: mobile apps 2]

As I haven’t personally seen Adsense for mobile apps traffic produce quality leads on any campaign I

have ever worked on, I could see it working for advertisers advertising offering other comparable

mobile apps since ad inventory is so inexpensive on mobile apps.

Conclusion

If you think you have mistakenly committed to one or all of these fatal mistakes, then go check your

account out right now. Even one of these items can result in double digit changes in your campaigns

ROI numbers.

Bio

Corey Zeimen CEO of Guaranteed PPC – Offering performance based PPC consulting advice and

execution.

25% More Revenue Or My Work Is Free. Currently Accepting B2B and B2C clients.