I was stuggling in my AdWords campaign the other day after having some relatively good success. Unfortunately, I had gone through editing so many freaking ads that I had forgotten what was working anymore. So, I figured I better see if I can happen to look at some deleted ads. I found this article that told me just how to do that.
Remarkably, enough, when I looked at my deleted ads and keywords, I found that the ads I was rewriting were, in fact, being treated as new ones by Google. In other words, if I rewrote an ad, the original ad remained but was considered deleted. I found the ads that were working for me and got myself back on track.
I decided to explore all the ads I had deleted throughout the years (since March, 2004, to be exact) to see if I could find anything that would help me better identify what was working and what was not working. That’s when I saw the very first campaign that I had run:
Personal Hurricane Center AdWords Campaign
It was for my hurricane program. The program actually wasn’t published until May or June of 2004, but I had done some market testing (which I wasn’t even aware of); I suppose to drum up branding.
What surprised me is, for one, how cheap it was to drive in so much traffic. Now, $142.23 may not sound cheap. When you look at that Avg. CPC field, you can easily see that sending a visitor to my site for $0.05 or $0.06 CPC is a hell of a deal and there is very little share at that low of a cost for many markets today.
What also surprised me was the CTR. If these keywords were getting 10% CTR on 100 impressions, I wouldn’t be bragging (hell, anyone can do that). My least-shown keyword was generating a 3% CTR off 34 impressions.
Ahh – whatever.
The others, though, are damn impressive and even a marketing guru would have to admit that. Having a CTR of 4.83% to 5.32% with a minimum of 4,100 impressions is a damn big deal. I promise you there’s not a single respectful marketer in the world that wouldn’t take that.
I wanted to see what my advertisements read like for them to be generating such a high CTR:
Personal Hurricane Center.com AdWords Ad
One ad. Simple and to the point. If I had to write this ad over again, I wouldn’t have put it anywhere close to resembling this. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Personal Hurricane Center.com AdWords Ad Stats
The total statistics (minus content – most you guys know how that goes…) were rather impressive. 3.15% CTR from over 19,000 impressions. 2,645 visitors from early March to early September. I can’t control how many people searched for the keywords I used. But, I damn sure could control what I showed them when they searched. And, I did pretty good (yes, yes, thank you – no applause necessary).
Now, here’s the thing: I’ve been in that market long enough to know that Hurricane Katrina changed everything. Global warming changed everything. Hurricanes became more of a niche market – quite a bit more saturated. More people started building hurricane websites. More people started targeting that area. And, I’ve seen that even to this day. I’ve not updated my hurricane blog regularly for several weeks – months, even. Yet, I get tons of traffic from various searches of hurricanes. People looking for imagery, video and more. People wanting to relieve a particular storm. (Don’t ask me why).
I had no intention’s of trying to compare 2004 to now. Until I stumbled upon a second campaign I ran in 2008 for the website.
Personal Hurricane Center AdWords Campaign 2008
This campaign only lasted a couple of days because I was running a survey. But, the results were the same: an average CTR of 3.67% of a minimum 6,700 impressions. My ad was simple:
Personal Hurricane Center AdWords Ad 2008
There’s one other critical thing I want to point out. Note the average position in my first campaign was 2.7 with my best positioning around 1.4 and my “worst” at 3.1. Also, my quality score for all keywords was 5/10.
The second campaign had an average position of 3.7 with the best at 1.7 and the worst at 5.9. Just using the keyword “hurricane” put me in the 3.8 average spot yet still brought me a 4.22% CTR. What’s not shown in the screenshot is the QS: all 19 keywords were 5/10.
Total cost of over 10,500 impressions with an average CTR of 3.41%: $71.66 (not counting content network results). Many of you would kill for those results. Hell, I’d kill for that right now.
Of course, the goal of advertising is making money. I don’t have the ROI numbers from either of these campaigns on me. But, assume I had a 2% conversion rate on the first campaign when I was selling a $30 product. I paid $143 for 2,645 visitors. If 53 bought the software that would have made a nice $1,590: an ROI we all dream of. Even a 1% conversion rate would have been extremely respectable; damn near giddy.
This has my mind thinking a little bit differently. What worked about these ads? Besides the fact I was clear about what the clicker would get when they arrived, I didn’t use hype. It was simple, to the point, no BS wording. There was no science behind this. I wrote something and let it go. And, it worked.
One thing’s for sure that I’m putting into effect today on my campaigns is this: I have to stop trying so damn hard. Maybe, for success, we all do.
