Overview of Google Conversion Optimizer

Earlier this year Google’s AdWords team quietly introduced a new feature that has received very little attention or press: Conversion Optimizer. Since Google knows every detail about your campaigns as well as those of your competitors—conversion rates per keyword bid… per CTR… per ad quality score… per geographical location… per time of day—it became clear to us that no human could ever analyze all that data in a short amount of time daily. After all, we marketers move quickly!

So, if Google could automatically find missed opportunities and correct unnoticed problems, and do all of that behind the scenes while we focused more on marketing, we knew this would be a big hit as long as it worked.

And it worked! We have recently tested Conversion Optimizer and can say without question our conversions have increased 10-20% across most niches in our testing.

4 Steps to a Successful Campaign with Conversion Optimizer

Here are some things we’ve learned along the way that should help get you started profitably and stay profitable.

  1. Getting Started

    To turn on this feature, all that is required is to navigate to your campaign settings, find the Bidding and Budget section, and change your bidding option to Conversion Optimizer. But to really use this feature, you will need to adopt a new approach to bidding, which for many of us represents a whole new way of thinking. This new approach is known as CPA bidding, or cost per acquisition. Bye-bye, keyword bidding!

    (This is not to be confused with cost per action (also CPA), another recent adoption by Google that is a platform for affiliate marketing where conversions correspond to actions—such as email signups—rather than sales.)

    Ok, so are you ready? Go ahead and turn on Conversion Optimizer now!

  2. Set a Starting CPA

    You probably want to understand how it works before going much further. Google takes historical data from your account to calculate a recommended starting CPA. If your campaign has been running for many months or even years, great! Start with Google’s recommended CPA. Just make sure you actively monitor your ad spend.

    However, if your campaigns have been running for less than 3 months, we recommend you set your CPA about 50% higher than your target cost per conversion. For example, if your targeted cost per conversion is $26.00, you might try a CPA of $39.00, and see how it goes.

    Keep in mind, the higher your CPA, the more impressions and conversions you’ll receive, and the more money you’ll spend. So be careful when you first get started!

  3. Tweak, tweak, and more tweak
    Monitor daily and adjust your CPA until you find the sweet spot. But make changes in small increments. It’s best to play it safe from the start.
  4. Possible Ad Group Restructuring
    If you notice an ad group witha bunch of keywords performing erratically, you might consider removingsome of those keywords and creating new, tighter ad groups devoted just to them. Monitor the cost per conversion column and make sure your keywords are all performing similarly.

Final Word

The last bit worth mentioning is you can always go back to your previous CPC bidding approach. Just click campaign settings, uncheck Conversion Optimizer, and your previous CPC values will be restored in an instant. But we think once you turn it on you’ll leave it on!

Good luck!