Ok, I hate to break this to you guys.

I really do.

This is really, well, you just ain't a gonna believe this one, friends.

Here goes, because somebody has to say this. I know half the other posts in this blog are about increasing CTR, increasing CTR, increasing CTR, as kind of the Google holy grail. But one of the things that I end up doing is people come to me with Adwords accounts all the time that are messed up, for me to fix.

Are you ready?

Ok well here it goes....

By the way, this includes major advertising agencies, who pay my salary very handsomely and who therefore will remain nameless, as well as mom and pop smaller web businesses that are trying to get better results...

So for better or worse I get to look at a lot of accounts, which gives me a pretty interesting perspective. One thing I have noticed, is occasionally I find someone that does everything wrong in adwords, but they use the conversion tracking and in spite of having a messy account that makes me cringe in terms of everything I know, the person is still pulling off a really, and I mean REALLY good rate of return on their investment. In some cases they are getting a way lower cost per lead than I would expect. So they do everything wrong, but the end result is right.

I have seen a lot of accounts where the ROI is fine, but Google just disables their keywords because they are just getting too good a deal- or at least that's the way it looks sometimes. I mean if you are in position 50, your CTR will be in the toilet, but you just might get some cheap clicks, and you just might have a pretty amazing ROI too, as long as you don't get disabled. But accounts like this are not very stable, and end up coming to someone like me to improve their CTR and re enable keywords that were once performing well.

But here's an interesting concept----drumroll please....

You don't really need CTR.

Google likes CTR because Google makes more money, and it is more "relevant". But lets say someone is searching for "blue widgets"

There are exceptions, but in general everyone searching on the internet wants everything immediately, for free, but the reality is stuff costs money.

So the ideal CTR ad would be something like "Hey, we've got blue widgets here- get this (benefit) now!

The only problem is that even if you use the word "free" and its variations to filter out people searching for "free blue widgets" as negative keywords, you will still have a certain number of people who are searching for "blue widget" and hoping to get it for free.

Ok, so you have a great ad, that has a high CTR, and you get a lot of people to your site, and you feel smart because Google loves your ad, and you can now get a lower CPC because of it.

But what if you just put in the ad itself- Hey, I've got blue widgets here, and they cost $399. Pay me!

That filters out people who want stuff for free, and eliminates people clicking on your ads who aren't qualified. So now your CTR goes in the toilet, and you have been a very, very bad Google boy. But look, if you had a 3% CTR ad before, and by changing this ad text your CTR goes down to .5%, so your CPC goes up, but your CONVERSION PER VISITOR goes up by 500%, who is the real winner here?

I am not going to go through the math exhaustively, and it will be different for every site, but I just want to point out that sometimes "relevance" involves filtering out visitors you really don't want to pay for, in your ads themselves, and not worrying so much about the CTR.

The bottom line is your cost per conversion, per lead, or per sale, not the amount of traffic, the cost, or your CTR.

The apparent equation Google wants you to do is:

1) really relavant keywords to your product
2) negative keywords that filter out people who really aren't looking for exactly what you have
3) super high CTR ads that make google a lot of money and offer free stuff
4)highly relevant landing pages that are information rich, help the world, support open source and answer peoples search query for free.
5) the advertiser is then supposed to convert this into money somehow

This is what I propose:

1) really relavant keywords to your product
2) negative keywords that filter out people who really aren't looking for exactly what you have
3) honest ads that filter out the freebie seekers and the casual shoppers
4)highly relevant landing pages that sell the darn thing
5) the advertiser converts these real customers into money better and enjoys a profitable website, and spends more time at the beach.

How do I do adwords?

Well, the same old way unfortunately, testing different ads, worrying about my CTR and the relevance of landing pages, lots of negative keywords.

But now I have a hope for something better, and I plan to monkey around with it, based on some accounts that break all the rules and still come out ahead.

This would be an interesting test if you can track conversions down to the AD, which is to test a high CTR ad, against a low CTR ad that filters out people more, and look at the difference in conversion.

The first person that gives me a good case study on this will win something very cool.

-Steve

Steve Blom
Certified Google Adwords Professional

Adwords Training Video Author:

Blog:
http://marketingnewsblog.adwordstraining.org

Free Adwords video:
http://www.adwordstraining.org/video/free_adwords_tutorial_video.htm

Contact: steve@adwordstraining.org