Optimising Google Ads without conversion data? Here’s what you need to do
Let’s admit it! Launching a fresh Google Ads account, campaign or new product/service for a business can be tough! Very rarely we find things will work out perfectly from the get-go. There’s little conversion data to help us navigate our decisions, so an initial process of testing new campaigns & different keywords is inevitable. In essence, you need to spend money to buy data from Google & figure out what is working.
Taking hasty decisions and pausing all the advertising is the worst thing you can do. As a paid media acquisition channel PPC plays a crucial part in the marketing mix of companies of all sizes. So how do you know if you are pulling the plug too early, or how can you demonstrate your value to your client if you provide PPC services in those early stages?
At Adsmith we tend to look beyond traditional conversions such as sales or leads initially to focus on micro-conversion metrics such as “Add To Carts”, Avg. Session Duration/ Bounce Rates & Others. Why? Let me explain…
Average Session Duration
Definition – Average length of sessions (visits) on your website.
Why it’s a good metric
Imagine that you’re running a new campaign for a shoe company with keywords such as “high heels size 9”/ “trainers size 10” & you see the average time spent on the website for some keywords is 15 seconds & for others 2 minutes+. You can argue that the keywords which bring in users who spend roughly 2 minutes on the website were definitely more interested, and it might not be the traffic but the offering on the website that is not working. This is where it is very crucial to make the right call & decide to either tweak the website or pause the keywords. When was the last time you spent 2 minutes on a website?
Adsmith Advice
One very long session can skew the data and make the keyword look better than it actually is in terms of site engagement so make sure to undertake a deeper dive into Google Analytics before making a decision.
Bounce rates
Definition – The percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only the page they landed on. For example, if 10 visitors came and only 1 of them continued to view more than the page they landed on your bounce rate will be 90%. This is because 9 visitors left the website without visiting any other pages on your website, therefore a low bounce rate tends to indicate good on-site engagement and quality traffic.
Why it’s a good metric
Usually, it’s difficult to know what bounce rate is high or low – but you can always start off with a benchmark if you do a simple Google search & down the line determine your own. As a rule of thumb bounce rates of 70%+ are a good indication that something is wrong & people are probably not finding what they are looking for.
Adsmith Advice
Bounce Rate isn’t the be-all and end-all. It might be that people find exactly what they want on that one page (for example a phone number) and bounce but are still engaged. It depends on the industry. We run some campaigns (especially Shopping campaigns) where the bounce rate is high but the ROI is on target.
Add To Carts
Definition – A visitors clicking an add to cart button on your website. Simple!
Why it’s a good metric
For eCommerce, add to cart is the action that people need to perform before they purchase from you. So this is a great indication to judge whether the traffic is relevant or not. Could it be that users are adding to cart but not purchasing? This would mean again that the traffic is good! But something happens after they’ve added to the basket that stopped them from converting.
Adsmith Advice
If you see lots of add to carts but the drop off to purchase is high take some time to analyse why this is happening before you think the campaigns are not working. Changes to the checkout experience will pay dividends and improve the ROI.
To Summarise
These are the metrics that are often overlooked & these exact numbers can lead you to make better decisions in the early stages of a campaign/account.
To see engagement metrics such as Bounce Rates & Average Session Duration you will need to link your Google Analytics account with your Google Ads account! Get in touch if you need help with this!
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