Google Ads (Adwords) Case Study

I often find a new client Good Ads account that hasn’t seen some love for a while, and this one was a perfect example. It’s a perfect example for our first Adwords case study.

On the face of it, it was getting a lot of clicks. It’s a specific health-focused retail product and it was obvious that whoever had set-up the campaigns and Adgroups in the past, knew what they were doing.

The graph below shows the last four weeks, compared to the previous four weeks. The darker blue and orange lines represent the last four weeks clicks and conversions respectively, and the lighter lines of the same colours represent the previous four weeks.

Now, it would be fairly obvious to point out that the last four weeks have a significant amount of increased traffic and thus clicks. It doesn’t take a genius to point out that the dark blue clicks is much higher than the light blue clicks. So either my CTR (click through rate) has rapidly increased, which is highly unlikely, or generally the traffic has increased.

It was the latter, as we launched some mobile-only display campaigns that generate a lot of traffic and a lot of clicks very cheaply – but not a fantastic conversion rate. They’re mainly an awareness activity, but that’s a conversation for another day.

But the point is that the dark orange line was about 68% up on the lighter orange line. That’s a 68% increase in conversions in four weeks.

And for this Adwords case study, this was all down to just one thing: breaking up a campaign.

Why break up campaigns?

This is one of the most common issues I’ve seen in Adwords; where a single campaign with a single budget has multiple Adgroups that are fighting for that budget. Invariably, one Adgroup packed with some more general terms, is sucking that budget up for themselves.

This is what was happening here and it’s quite an easy fix.

Step One – duplicate the campaigns.

Step Two – switch off the major Adgroup in Campaign #1, and switch off all the other Adgroups other than the major Adgroup in Campaign #2

Step Three – split up the overall budget across those two campaigns. We can experiment and adjust these later.

Step Four – ensure both campaigns are set back live

The Downside?

The downside here is that you’re splitting the budget which means sometimes, Adwords will find it harder to get quality clicks. An Adwords budget with $50 to spend every day is going to find it easier to get traffic for you than two campaigns with $25 each, especially if the clicks are in the higher range above $10 or so.

So there may be an option where you need to look at increasing the budgets across both campaigns, which for some on a tight budget, might not be a great option. Suddenly jumping from that $50 a day to $75 a day can make an impact in the long term. The counter to that is that these new campaigns should deliver increased traffic and conversions and lead to a better ROI for your budget, which would justify the increase in budget.

However, that’s where your testing comes in. Best thing to do now is set the account live and see the results in the first week to work out if there has been a benefit in dividing the campaigns into two. If not, it only takes a few minutes to put it back the way it was.