Are Your Google Campaigns Meeting International Standard?

Are Your Google Campaigns Meeting International Standard?

adwords-industry-benchmarks-average-conversion-rate

There are quite a number of companies and people who claim they can do Google AdWords Campaigns, while some of these companies are legitimate and know what they are doing, quite a number are amateurs trying to make a dollar and not actually understanding what they are doing.

We have seen many mistakes from Google AdWords campaigns and including simple mistakes like:

  1. Connecting to the home page, or
  2. Even connecting to a page which doesn’t exist (giving a 404 error),

Both resulting in 0% to low conversion rates.

Through to campaigns which are not set up correctly with the right keywords or keyword formats, leading to the following:

  1. Higher Click through Rates (CTR) in the wrong industry – Burning up the daily budget spend faster,
  2. Click through from irrelevant Keyword Searches – Causing higher bounce rates on the website,
  3. Non sales related Keyword Phrases – Causing Higher bounce rates and wasted spend

These are just some of the errors which have occurred, so it is always a great idea to have a benchmark to see if your Google AdWords campaigns are actually working or if you are throwing your money away on people who don’t actually know what they are doing.

To the right are the key areas to look at and are based off over $200 million worth of campaigns in the US, i.e. figures are in USD.

Things to look for include the following 4 parameters of your Google AdWords campaign.

 

Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks

Click Through Rate (CTR)

This is an indication that people are or aren’t clicking on the advert and there may be a couple of things wrong with the campaign including the following:

  1. Is the advert attracting enough or the right attention,
  2. Do the Keywords match the advert or what people are actually searching for (miss match advert and keywords),
  3. Your spend per Keyword isn’t enough to be shown on Google searches because of how high the competition is

If you are getting people to click through, are they meeting or exceeding the figures to the left. If not then you need to look at the above as well and see how you can improve this.

Average Cost Per Click (CPC)

You may be able to gain click through, but you may be paying too much for your traffic. The figures to the left give a basic overview of what prices you should be paying.

Some things which may be wrong include the following:

  1. You may be bidding too high in medium to low competition keywords,
  2. Are you bidding on the wrong keywords and wasting money,
  3. Or you may be using Broad Match Modifier Keywords which are appearing in the wrong categories and searches – This can lead to high prices for clicks (i.e. Removalist+ Brisbane+ can also appear under search phrases “Tattoo Removalist Brisbane”)

Average Conversion Rate

If you have traffic coming through to your landing page, but you are getting no leads, sales or phone calls, then you need to firstly look at the following:

  1. Is the page set up for Conversion Rate Optimization (i.e. is it simple to use and easy to make the required action like finding the phone call, making an inquiry or to buy)
  2. Check to see if you have a unique selling proposition (USP) on your landing page,
  3. If all of this looks fine then make sure that the traffic which is coming to the page matches the landing page, i.e. have you linked the advert for how to fix a clogged gutter, linked to the right page or is it going to a page about fixing a leaking sewer drain

Average Cost Per Action (CPA)

This is very similar to the Average Conversion Rate, but if you are meeting the Click Through Rate (CTR) and your Average Conversion Rate is on par or better, you need to check on the following:

  1. Look at each individual Keyword and make sure that you aren’t paying too much,
  2. Identify any non performing keywords and remove from the campaign

All of these points are about making sure that you have a successful campaign. If you are outsourcing your Google AdWords campaign, then this gives you a basic idea of how to read the report. This also makes sure that the company or person running your campaign actually knows what they are doing and they have a bench mark for which to follow.

At Netvision, we have taken Google AdWords campaigns of other expert companies and managed to reduce Cost per Click spend by between 50-60% and have achieved conversion rates of the landing pages by 20% or more for different industries by following the above points and continually improving the campaign to gain better results.

Don’t get caught by an amateur, expect the best.

Data Sources:
This report is based on a sample of 14,197 US-based WordStream client accounts in all verticals (representing over $200 million in aggregate Google Ads spend) who were advertising on Google’s Search and Display networks between August 2017 and January 2018. Each industry includes at minimum 30 unique active clients. “Averages” are technically median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD.