My first attempt at Google Ads. Am I taking the right approach?
I created my first ever Google Ads campaign a few days ago. I didn't know what to expect, and was surprised to find how rich and powerful the campaigns can be. I was able to focus on my target audience based on their niche interests.
It's now been 4 full days since the campaign went live (including the weekend) and I'm feeling pretty good about the numbers 🙌🏼
- 17K impressions
- 1K clicks
- 6.12% CTR
- 180 users started the sign up journey
- 43 users completed sign up
- 5 feedback form submissions
But I'm not an experienced marketer. I'm wondering the following things 🤔
- Am I focusing on the right metrics, or are these vanity metrics?
- I need to improve the completion rate of the sign up journey
- It's currently a free product. When we add pricing plans with a free trial (coming soon), should I expect these numbers to drop?
What do you guys think? I'd love some feedback. Am I taking the right approach?
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Hello Elliot, from my experience (i am a UX / Product designer, not a marketer), you are lacking there a key metric CPC (Cost-per-Click) if its search campaigns and CPM (Cost per Mille) - cost per 1000 views.
Because of this, you can calculate an acquisition cost per user, and even if this is a free product, you should know how much you pay per user.
Like I said, I am a UX / Product Designer. So I would focus on the signup funnel. If you make this process better, you won't need to spend more money on ads.
Work from the back of the funnel. Create a funnel (Goals) in Google Analytics to know the most significant dropoff and fix it. I will also recommend implementing Smartlook (Recording of the user). This can give you a lot of information.
https://www.smartlook.com/?_ak=N8JuYJ6Ny
I hope you will make the whole process better.
Thank you Simon. You're right :) Will definitely spend some time on analysing cost, and the signup funnel
Hi Elliot,
Building on what Simon said, you should look at CPC (Cost per Click) but most importantly Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC for premium conversions) or Cost per Acquisition (CPA for free conversions).
It's good to know what you are paying per click, but you shouldn't really care about how many people visit your site.
What you really want to know how many users signed up for your service and what you spent per new user.
That's why when we run ads, we mainly look at CAC or CPA.
Here is an example of campaigns we run:
What I really care about are:
As you already know how many users started the sign up journey and how many users completed the sign up, it seems like you have successfully set up goals/conversions in Google Ads. That's the most important step in your journey of looking at meaningful metrics.
Now when you ask, what should the CAC or CPA be? That's a whole new story and really depends on your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - which you currently can't know as you only have a free product.
So there a lot to figure out for sure but it's a festinating journey for sure. And if you have a knack for marketing , you will start obsessing over these stats for many, many more hours as there are so many factors to A/B test and optimize your CPA/CAC. Because at the end of the day you will need to make sure to not burn but earn money with every ad you run. :)
I hope that helped!
Thank you 🙌🏼 This is really helpful, there's lots to think about here!
Happy to help! If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask!
Good summary, this covers everything that matters in the beginning
Thank you! :)
To add to excellent comments by Simon_Jun and hannah_mike, please check and keep an eye on the matched queries report (or whatever it's called nowadays). That's the one that shows the actual search terms your search ads have been shown for.
I used to own a really successful digital marketing agency and we saw Google sneakily creeping in quite a lot of crud there if you're not paying attention.
Besides keeping an eye out for these, add any undesirable queries to your negative keywords. This helps you get shown more for things you want to be shown for and get more bang for your buck.
Hope this helps.
Great shoutout, 100% agree with iamjoona.
A typical approach would be to for example remove any search terms including "free". As these users have a high likelihood to never convert to premium users.
But then again, that depends on your type of business. If you have a great free tier and users have a high likelihood to convert to premium users eventually, you might want to bid on terms including "free" as these queries are usually quite cheap and might bring you great users in the end.
Great point @iamjoona, I didn't realise this was even a thing. Will make sure I do this now 🙂 thank you.