What is optimisation? Video Transcription:
Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service, today I wanted to talk to you about optimisation within google ads (but some of these principles will apply to other medias also). There is some confusion about what optimisation is, so this is an attempt to simplify it. Optimisation is basically another way of saying improvement. So whenever anyone says to optimise an account or a campaign, what they are saying is they want to improve it.
But in order to know how to improve something we need some sort of baseline measurement or existing performance (this is sometimes referred to as the control).
An example of that might be optimising or improving cost per conversion. Let’s say you are regularly getting enquiries at £20, so every time you spend £20 on your marketing, you either get a phone call, or an enquiry. And you know that if you were able to get that down to £15, the marketing efforts could scale and it would be profitable for you, what are some of the things within google ads that you could optimise?
The actual answer to that is very lengthy as there are all sorts of things you can improve, which will influence other metrics. A simple answer would be if you just brought down the average cost per click manually by a percentage, it’s possible that your cost per conversion comes down with it.
In that instance, you would also want to keep an eye on the number of conversions as if you are willing to pay less, you may also get less traffic.
Potentially a better way of doing that is focusing on metrics which influence cost per click. An example might be ad relevance, the more relevant you make an ad to the searcher, the less it costs, the less a click costs, the lower your cost per conversion will be. Providing the optimisation efforts are getting the ads shown more often to better prospects, that’s likely to improve the account or campaigns.
A list of metrics you can optimise is:
- Budget allocation
- Cost per click
- Click through rate
- Number of conversions
- Cost per conversion
- Conversion rate
- Ad relevance
- Expected click through rate
- Landing page relevance
- Quality score
- Impression share
- Top of page rate
- Absolute top of page rate
- All the extensions
- The quality of your search terms
- Your landing pages
- Your audience lists
- Age
- Gender and other demographics
- Placements of Ads
- The Location of Ads
- The days and times the Ads show
- The devices the Ads shown
- Which bidding strategy you use
- Which features you use
- Ad rotation
- Networks
- And keywords you decide to have in your account
You can measure all these and they can be improved or optimised to influence the metrics that you are trying to improve.
Google has attempted to make some of these activities automated, so if you wanted to you could put some of these options on a setting which is more done for you, but there is no shortage of activities you can do to improve the metrics and therefor your goals within a google ads account.
And that is what is meant by optimisation. If you would like this done for you, visit us at ethicalmarketingservice.com and I’ll speak to you soon.