My PPC Stats

[Sparetoolparts]

Hi Guys

I'm just interested on hearing your feedback on my stats so far for 2016 with my Adwords account:

Cost - £561
Conversions - 144
Total Conversion Value - £870
Clicks - 7000
Impress - 145,762
CTR - 4.78%
CPC - 0.08p
Search Impression

I have always ran my own adwords account from 2009 and everything I have done/techniques are self taught from Webmaster videos etc. I am really curious to see if a company could do it better. I know for a spend of £187pm isnt a big budget (based on 2016 stats) but I would be willing to spend more if the results proved fruitful all my campaigns get very little TLC maybe a quick look once or twice a month just to make sure I'm not loosing money. But with Spring/Summer fast approaching and with my site being revamped to take advantage of this time of year (updated/added products) I thought I may as well increase my adwords spend too

my website is www.sparetoolparts.co.uk btw incase anyone wanted to know

any advice/insight would be great

FYI

I'm just off the phone from PPC company and they said they could match my CPC in the short term anyway so what gives?

 

[Nochexman]

Hi Sparetoolparts. Thank you for starting such an interesting discussion. My main observation would be that I would expect the amount spent would translate into a higher level of sales (that is what you mean by total conversion value, I guess). If this is the case then maybe the thing to look at is how can you translate visitors into higher transaction values. Maybe offer an incentive at the point of sale to increase sales value (buy one get one half price, for example).

I'd be surprised if your PPC agency would not expect to match your CPC! Maybe offer them a deal based on sales value over expenditure.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

Hi Nochexman

The Total Conversion Value is based on £6 profit per sale/conversion so for spending £561 I made £870. So is it worth it for £309 how can I scale this up as only one campaign maxed out it's daily budget of £3 and is now set to £5

 

[Nochexman]

I would be interested to read what others think, but £309 'gross profit' for £561 spent does not sound like a great return, so you either need to reduce your expenditure (better CPC) or increase the average sales value, or indeed both. To my untutored eye your CPC metrics look OK, I'm assuming you have negative keywords and all that good stuff. What is your average sale value and how many items do you typically sell per transaction? Also, do you convert CPC customers into clients who make subsequent sales later?

 

[Sparetoolparts]

that's why I'm posting

BTW I have already increased my profit margin from £5 to £7 per sale within the last few month. so I took the middle ground for my conversion value, (£6) the average sale value per transacton is £25 with 70-80% of them single item sales, Although I am trying get more cross sells sorted

TBH I haven't spent enough time on my campaigns recently I do have a few negative keywords but not many, but I hope to get more time on my campaign soon once I'm finishing updating my Lawn & Garden offering for 2016

 

[pilgrim.marketing]

You should look at Cost Per Acquisition (that is your costs/conversions) as your key metric - it will make it easier to understand what is happening with your campaigns on a more granular level.

So in this case £3.90.

So you pay £3.90 for a customer that you're telling me is worth £7 (now anyway).

Based on that you need to increase your budget until you've exhausted all the clicks you can get from your current keywords, because they are profitable - there is no reason not to spend £1000 a day if you can get £1800 back. Yes it's not the best ROI ever, but that's what you work on next.

You should have a good idea of if you can get more clicks from more budget because AdWords will tell you when you can get more clicks by increasing budget.

But...

1. Make sure that £7 is your actual profit - after returns, taxes, employee time etc.
2. Make sure that £7 is your actual profit - when taking into account customer lifetime value, what percentage will become return customers?

So are you really making £7 per customer? It could be more or it could be less.

Then you need to...

Aside from the obvious (optimise ad text, remove underperforming keywords etc) your big job is to find more keywords that can deliver that positive ROI. Because eventually you'll run out of clicks that you can buy for £3.90 CPA with your current keywords - you'll need to find more clicks.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

Thanks for the good advise, I had forgotten about CPA, I used to use in my last jobs 3 years ago when I ran their E-commerce operation. But totally forgot! I only have 2 days a week to run my entire operation including order processing, so Adwords has taken a back seat. But the site updates/upgrades are scaling down within the next few weeks so I will then concentrate on Adwords for a while,

The min profit a sale makes me is £4.50 the norm is £7 thats after shipping and Paypal Fee's etc, I don't factor in my other running costs when pricing my products. but in my head I know that if I make one sale that's my hosting covered for the day and everything else is gravy, as long as I'm making between £60-£100 a day I'm happy.

Would you say I'm doing an ok job then with my adwords or do I need a good overhaul?

 

[pilgrim.marketing]

Thanks for the good advise, I had forgotten about CPA, I used to use in my last jobs 3 years ago when I ran their E-commerce operation. But totally forgot! I only have 2 days a week to run my entire operation including order processing, so Adwords has taken a back seat. But the site updates/upgrades are scaling down within the next few weeks so I will then concentrate on Adwords for a while,

The min profit a sale makes me is £4.50 the norm is £7 thats after shipping and Paypal Fee's etc, I don't factor in my other running costs when pricing my products. but in my head I know that if I make one sale that's my hosting covered for the day and everything else is gravy, as long as I'm making between £60-£100 a day I'm happy.

Would you say I'm doing an ok job then with my adwords or do I need a good overhaul?

I would say if you're profitable and you know it, then you're doing better than most! I'd really need to see more data to have an idea if you're spending too much or leaving anything on the table.

Are you using Product Listing Ads?

 

[Sparetoolparts]

I had started it yea, but dropped it as it wasn't working, but I will try again

I am also going to try bing as well

 

[pilgrim.marketing]

I don't have any experience of Bing so can't say how good that would be, but I've had great success with Product Listing Ads, some of my lowest CPAs ever and with a large amount of conversions to go with it. I'd certainly recommend trying to get them right.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

I've got a good pluggin for my Magento site that exports feeds for me for use in Google and Amazon etc, so I will need to give it another stab and see how it gets on, I do see my competition using it, so I may as well have another go

 

[webgeek]

One thing many DIY PPC campaigns have in common is that they haven't segmented their results and used that info to separate the wheat from the chaff.

It could be that some days of the week, times of the day, or other common factors, significantly outperform others.

Examples:
A men's clothing shop found that by excluding the large cities, and focusing on the rural and small towns, they were able to avoid a ton of non-converting clicks (because people in the cities have more choices, at lower prices).

A training company found that by excluding everything outside of England, their ROI improved nearly 50% (because people weren't looking to travel that far, plus their local area had unique requirements as compared to England).