Friday, April 15, 2016

Understanding the ROI for paid search

ROI, although simple to calculate using AdWords, Analytics and spreadsheets, is a tricky beast! Improving all on-page aspects, removing obstacles to conversion, streamlining checkout processes and reducing costs within AdWords all help to improve ROI.

Conversion Tracking Code

You may need to set up a number of different groups of conversion tracking code after a purchase has been made.

Linking With Analytics

Linking your AdWords account up correctly with your Google Analytics account allows you to analyze the PPC traffic from within Analytics. This means that you can see more detailed data on how your paid traffic behaves on the site, allowing you to determine obstacles to conversions. It is also possible to then compare organic traffic and other mediums with paid traffic.

Tracking

Using call tracking and heat mapping and integrating this with your analytics data, where possible, also provides valuable insights into calculating ROI.
Call tracking allows you to track phone calls as conversions and down to keyword level. This can be imported into AdWords or viewed separately, either way there may be hidden value in those keywords.
Heat mapping allows you to see how people are interacting with your site in great detail, thus allowing you to identify problems or improve visitor flow through to conversion

Behind ROI

This is top level Return On Investment though, digging into the data further will reveal much more information. At first glance a keyword receiving loads of clicks and good CTR but with a poor Conversion rate might be a waste of money, but keywords can assist other keywords, meaning that this keyword could assist in a large percentage of conversions. There is no clear ROI on this keyword but it would cost you in profits to delete it, understanding the relationships between data gives better insight into understanding your Return On Investment.
Looking for the common denominator will help you to spot opportunities and then exploit them. For example, look at the top converting landing pages for paid traffic. Compare them to the lowest converting landing pages and you may spot an obvious difference; something that you could change on the lower converting page.

Research for benchmarking paid search marketing

·      Average conversion rate for the search network in Q3 2012: 5.63%
·      Average conversion rate from the display network in Q3 2012: 4.68%
·      The Travel industry has the lowest conversion rates
·       Internet / Telecoms has the highest conversion rates across search & display.
·      The display network (ads outside of Google on publisher sites useful for generating awareness) generates 5x the volume of impressions but 1/5 of the clicks compared to the search network (searches within Google and its partners).
·      Clickthrough rates are not covered by this research, but Wordstream suggest an average 2% to 5% paid search clickthrough rate for competitive industries and a 5%+ click-through rate for non-competitive industries for top positions with brand terms higher.


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