Hey guys, back in December of 2007 I wrote a post about a Google Adwords tip that I was testing to see if it lowered my cost per click.

Well, I meant to give you an update after 4 week — opps! — but now we have about 8 weeks worth of data to look at so the results should be more solid.

You can read the post above for a run down of what I was testing, but here it is in a nutshell: I took my top 10 performing keywords out of one adgroup and put them in their own adgroup to see if it would lower my CPC.

OK, I just ran a report in my Google Adwords account for December 5, 2007 (the date of my previous post) through today.

Here are the stats:

Adgroup A is the top 10 keywords
Adgroup B is the remaining keywords

CTR for A = 3.93% on 46,890 impressions
CTR for B = 4.13% on 25,586 impressions

*** I consider this pretty dead even because Adgroup A had almost twice the number of impressions and still maintained a very similar CTR. Plus, I know I changed ad copy from time to time so these measurements are skewed — but I wanted you to see them anyway.

Conversion rate for A = 18.76%
Conversion rate for B = 21.57%

*** Conversion rate is measured as a click thru to the merchants website from my landing page, not an actual sale. Like above, I consider these pretty even because adgroup A is working with almost twice as many visits to the landing page. But I guess you can argue that adgroup B won because it is more than a 10% difference.

Note: the conversion percentage for both adgroups has increased significantly over the last few weeks as I’ve made changes to my landing pages to encourage click thru’s.

Average CPC for A = 41 cents with an average position of 4.57
Average CPC for B = 42 cents with an average position of 5.74

*** Ah ha! This was the heart of the test and it seems to have worked out positively. There’s only a 1 cent difference, but look at the average position. I probably could have gone 5 cents (or more) per click lower on the top 10 keywords adgroup. I was paying 1 cents per click less and still averaged 1 whole position better.

Thoughts Overall:

The results weren’t as profound as I expected. But based on the CPC and average positioning, I think this is something to definitely take a look at in your own Adwords account.

Don’t view this test as super scientific — but the tweak clearly lowered my CPC, and if I had focused more on these two adgroups, I probably could have lowered the CPC even further for adgroup A.

If you’re going to test this, start small so you can scale things back if something goes wrong — and then when you have the method down pat, slowly expand to your other campaigns.

Free Google Adwords eBook:

Like I did with my previous post, I’d like to end with a good Google Adwords resource. I found this free Adwords eBook from GoogleLady.com and it gives some pretty helpful tips — and it’s free!

Talk to you soon,
Ryan

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Tags: Free eBooks, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click