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Let AdWords Optimize Your Bids for Conversions with Conversion Optimizer

Are you looking to increase AdWords conversions and lower your cost per conversion? You should be using CPA bidding. According to AdWords, advertisers who use Conversion Optimizer ssee a 21% increase in number of conversions while decreasing costs by 14%. Instead if painstakingly managing ad groups and keywords bids, or purchasing costly software that does that, AdWords will do the work for you. You’ll still pay per click, not per conversion. But the system will optimize your bids for you to help you reach your set goals.

The tool is free of charge and in order to use it, you’ll have to be tracking conversions, of course. Additionally, your campaign will have to have accumulated at least 15 conversions over the past 30 days.To see if you are elgible and start using it, go to your campaign settings and under Bidding and budget click on Edit your current Bidding option. You will see a Focus on conversions (Conversion Optimizer) option.

If you are eligible and would like to use it, you will want to decide if you want to do Max CPA or Target CPA bidding. If you’re new to the tool, I recommend choosing the system recommended bid in order to keep your traffic stable. If you go much below the system recommended bid, you might get less traffic and fewer conversions. Plus, you can always adjust the CPA bids, as you see how your campaign performs.

Conversion optimizer users your campaign’s historical conversion data and also takes into browser information, geographic location, and other information to help you achieve your conversion goals. CPA Bidding is one of the most robust tools AdWords provides to help advertisers optimize and manage ROI. If you aren’t eligible for CPA bidding and are tracking conversions, you might want to consider another conversion focused tool AdWords offers called Enhanced CPC I previously blogged about here.

Should you let AdWords do the bidding for you with Enhanced CPC?

AdWords recently released a new bidding option under campaign settings called Enhanced CPC that uses your conversion data to optimize bids for ROI. Advertisers will reportedly benefit from spending less time on managing bids while receiving more conversions at an equal or lower ROI.

The way Enhanced CPC* works is that your keyword bids are automatically adjusted up or down depending on how an individual keyword converts for you. As a result you may pay up to 30% of your set bid. It’s a feature you can enable at the campaign settings page, and it applies to all the ad groups within the chosen campaign. If you’re uncomfortable paying more than your set Max CPC, you should probably not use Enhanced CPC.

Unlike with Conversion Optimizer, the other AdWords advanced ROI bidding option, you do not need 15 conversions in the past 30 days to use this. However, Conversion Optimizers allows you to set specific CPA goals, which Enhanced CPC does not offer. If you are looking to lower CPA significantly, then you might be better off using Conversion Optimizer, which has greater potential to help you improve CPA.

*Do note that if you enable Enhanced CPC you will not be able to make changes to your campaigns through AdWords Editor.

Find out when your AdWords ads convert to maximize budget and ROI

Many advertisers have observed that their ads convert differently during the day. In fact, hourly conversion rates can vary as much as 50% from the overall average. To maximize your budget you should first find out when visitors are more likely to covert. To do so, log-in to your analytics account, go to Traffic Sources, click on the AdWords tab, and select Day Parts. There, you can see goal completions by hour of day.

If you notice that most of your conversions happen during certain times of the day, say during standard business hours, you may want to run your campaigns during business hours only. This can be set-up automatically within your AdWords campaigns by enabling Ad Scheduling. Be aware that restricting your ads to certain hours only will results in decreased impressions and clicks. However, this may still be a viable option for you, especially if you have a limited budget. Understanding when your ads convert and acting on that information can help you maximize advertising dollars and improve ROI. You’ll avoid spending money on clicks that are less likely to convert and focus your efforts on what’s working for your website.