Paid advertising judged on cost per enquiry
Paid search is the fastest way to find out whether people will buy from you. It is also the fastest way to spend money finding out they will not.
Connect the audience, the message and the page they land on.
- Right audience
- Relevant advert
- Focused landing page
Spend, response and enquiries, considered together.
What should we actually measure?
Cost per enquiry and cost per customer, not clicks or impressions. A campaign with a poor click-through rate that produces cheap customers is a good campaign. One with a great click-through rate and no sales is an expensive way to buy traffic.
This means conversion tracking has to be right before anything else happens. A surprising number of accounts we take over are optimising towards a conversion event that fires on every page load, which teaches the algorithm to buy the wrong traffic.
Where most accounts leak money
Broad match without negatives, one ad group holding fifty unrelated terms, landing pages that ignore what the ad promised, and automated bidding pointed at a badly defined goal.
- Search terms nobody reviews
- Broad match will find you traffic. Some of it will be genuinely unrelated. Regular negative keyword work is the least glamorous and highest return task in the account.
- Landing page mismatch
- Sending every ad to the homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in paid search.
- Bidding without a real target
- Smart bidding works well when it knows what a conversion is worth. Given a vague goal it optimises confidently towards the wrong thing.
How we run accounts
Structure first, then tracking, then testing. We rebuild the account structure before touching budgets, because bidding well on a badly structured account just loses money more efficiently.
Enough to generate roughly thirty conversions a month, otherwise there is not enough data to optimise on. What that costs depends entirely on your industry, and we will tell you honestly if your budget is too small for the market you want to compete in.