How Profitable is Google AdWords for you? - #BiddableWorld 2014 - Calltracks

Editor's Notes

1. The advantage you also get is a product like Google Analytics gives you most of the answers in one place, you can link your AdWords, view transactional data and so on. In the example above you can see two of the 3 metrics we need – AdWords Cost and Revenue generated from AdWords.All that is missing is Cost of Products / Services sold
2. You can even build a custom dashboard like this example for econsultancy.Of course you can also see cost and transactions in your AdWords interface, but personally I think nothing better than viewing your data in GA – see how people progressed through site, what pages converting from e.t.c …..this ability to quickly query the data to get more detailed information for me is key.
3. But if your customers can’t transact on your website this subject is a bit more tricky. You’ll know what you spend, you’ll know how many visits it drives, and you’ll know how many goals get completed. Break down emails, phone call completions (if you are running phone call tracking and so on)But this doesn’t help you understand profitability – because what is a goal?
4. For example compare non-transactional data with transactional data. As you can see in first set of stats with Goal Completions – it only gives you one part of the equation compared with Revenue which gives you two parts.
5. So Google’s advice here is that you’ll have to estimate.They even give you the option to assign a value to the goal to help you.But then if you start optimising your campaign around this, you are optimising for conversions, not optimising for revenue like a purely transactional ecommerce site.From my experience, the same conversion can have completely different outcomes. As you will have heard said before “not all leads are created equal”. Who’s to say a phone call in this example is even a lead? The first one might be, the second one might be a customer calling up who has placed an order …..or in very recent example, someone from Italy call us to query where their Xmas parcel is.It it was your own personal money going into your AdWordsbudget (and in some cases it might be) would you be so convinced to keep spending based purely on conversions?
6. Optimising for conversions is a bit like optimising for visits. More phone calls and form fills might mean more sales but it might not. Last year I talked about this at Brighton SEO when I worked at my previous company, and if you were optimising for conversions based on the data above, which keyword would you think is more successful?
7. However, when we linked CRM data into our call tracking software to see the outcomes, we suddenly started to see what conversions became sales (+ what profit we made). Of course the thing with this though was it was difficult to get the full picture as you have cost and visitor data in your Adwords / analytics and the call and sales data in a 3rd party piece of software. The last few presentations I have done have always had to have two screenshots from different pieces of software. If you then wanted to tie up keyword data you needed to pull into a data warehouse, or into spreadsheets and join it all up. This solution isn’t the most ideal.
8. This headline from TechCrunch really hit the nail on the head for me….
9. As said by EconsultancyIt’s the offline aspect of Universal Analytics that will cause the biggest change to what we do – absolutely spot on.
10. …but a lot of what people say is all about the theory, what does it look like in practice. While this video shows potential, it wasn’t quite what I had in mind of where it would take us.That being said it’s a good laugh and worth a watch.
11. [Audience participation time]I asked the audience during my presentation for a show of hands to the three questions above and the answers were as follows:Who thinks it would be great – everyoneWould that help answer the question – everyoneWho has seen a working example – 3 handsIn fact everyone had already seen offline transactions being fed in, it was on my 3rdslide – as this was our data from our website (www.calltracks.com) – which is a lead gen website
12. Add in the mixture of conversions and transactions on the right and it looks like the above – a much more complete picture.Caveat, we are a call tracking company, so we are talking about conversions relating to phone calls, either people purchasing while on the phone, or customers purchasing post phone call.Obviously the possibilities go much further than this eg. Email conversions that go on to purchase and so on.You can even customise the date range, post-call, that a sale will still be attributed back to the phone call and to that Client ID. E.g. if you have a longer sales cycle you may specify that a sale within 1 month of the conversion still gets attributed back.
13. So once you understand whether your AdWords is profitable, you will want to see what you can do with it.Feed in your sales description, product identifier, e.t.c as we have done – floor company might feed in details like “laminate” or “vinyl” and Motor industry would be something like “Mazda”, “Hyundai” or “Suzuki”Pull the data back into AdWords for users who like to do analysis in the AdWords interfaceMake adjustments to your data. [Audience Participation time again] I asked “in this example based on this data who would say campaign 4 has been the most successful?” Most of audience raised their hands.
14. Still on Audience participation I asked them to now look at the data in point 3 – now that I have extended the data. I asked “Who would still say campaign 4 has still been the most successful?” – surprisingly no hands raised
15. E.g. you could target leads that have been marked as “hot prospect” in your CRM, who have converted off the website, but haven’t yet purchased
16. You get 20 slots for Custom Metrics and Custom Dimensions.Any data you want can be fed in, either call related data such as whether call answered or not, or sales data (continued on next slide).
17. Here we tie up the final piece of the puzzle, the one thing that had been missing – cost of goods sold.And of course, much much more. But give us feedback, ask us questions and we’ll let you know if it is possible?
18. Any thoughts on presentation please let me know, I would really appreciate it