How I Increased My Google Adwords Click-Through Ratio by 170% Overnight (And Made Thousands of Dollars as a Result)

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A quick but interesting question: What business model and product helped an obscure company that didn’t even exist a little over 10 years ago to make well over $100,000,000,000 and revolutionize the way that many of us do our shopping online?

The answer, of course, is Google Adwords. If you are familiar at all with the internet and internet marketing, you probably know that Adwords, otherwise known as Pay-Per-Click advertising, are the small, no-frills text ads that show up on the right side of the page when you conduct a Google search. These little ads are truly amazing in that they are the first and only method of advertising that actually allows businesses to reach completely targeted consumers who are actively looking to purchase a product. Even better, the advertisers only pay for their ad when a prospect visits their website.

Is it any wonder they are so damn effective? 

I have been using Google Adwords for years, starting in about 2004 when I first got involved in internet marketing. I tried my hand at some affiliate marketing using PPC on Google and other sites such as Miva and Yahoo. I did not have much success, but I did make some sales and it was enough to peak my interest. I used and studied PPC off and on, with varying degrees of success.

Now that I have been consulting on PPC advertising and running campaigns for offline businesses for awhile and have had time to master the key components of a great PPC campaign, I have identified certain techniques and strategies that can be used to instantly increase the success of the ads that I am promoting.

In this article, I will outline the one method that literally helped me to increase the Click-Through-Ratio (CTR) of my ads in Google Adwords by over 170% overnight, and how you can easily do it too!

The Longer the Tail, the Higher the Clicks…

As some of you may know, the way that I initially got into internet marketing and niche marketing for offline businesses is that I began using the knowledge that I was picking up during my own studies on internet marketing to help promote and market my family business’ website.

This has been great experience for me because the business is extremely niche…..we sell masquerade masks. Not Halloween masks or plastic masks, but very specifically we sell hand-made masquerade style masks, with feathers and jewels and lace and other materials. We are one of the only companies in the world who does this.

Because of the extremely specialized market that we sell to, I have learned a great deal about niche marketing and the special aspects of marketing that come into play when you are selling a unique, unusual product that is hard to find and in short supply.

Google Adwords is perfect for a business like ours because good masquerade masks are not easy to find. And what do people do when they are looking for a product that is not easy to find? They do a Google search, of course!

When I initially set up the Adwords account for our business, I had less experience with PPC and did not do the greatest job of getting the campaign started. I made many beginner errors, and then made the even worse mistake of not following up with the campaign and letting it languish, rather than keeping up with it and optimizing it accordingly. We still made money, just not as much as we could have been making.

Some time later, I checked up on our PPC account with Google. Because I had learned a great deal more about PPC advertising since the time I initally set up the campaign, I immediately recognized several mistakes that I had made, especially one in particular that I realized was costing us thousands of dollars per year in wasted ad dollars.

What was the one big mistake that I fixed which led to a literally %170 increase in CTR overnight, not to mention the phone ringing off the hook immediately?

The mistake was simple, although it may not be apparent to someone who does not have experience in internet marketing: our keyword terms that we were advertising for were too general.

When compiling the list of keyword terms that we would advertise for in Adwords, my father and I took a very cavalier approach. We made a common mistake that many business owners who are not savvy with search marketing make, which was to advertise for any term that is associated with our product, wrongly thinking that through our blanket approach we would find many customers who were looking for our product.

Because we sold masquerade masks, we chose lots of terms that had to with masks. The problem was, we had terms that included all types of masks.

Once I went through and line-by-line checked on the performance of each of our terms, as well as the relevancy to our product and the conversion rate that each of these terms was likely to yield, I deleted probably a dozen search terms that were bringin us almost no sales, and yet were costing us thousands of dollars per year in advertising fees.

I then did some simple keyword research, and added about a dozen or so new terms that were much more specific, much more precisely targeted to people who were searching for our product, and much less competitive than the terms that we had previously been bidding on.

Here are some of the terms that we were advertising for before I made the changes:

• masks
• face masks
• animal masks
• Halloween masks
• party masks
• masks for men
• masks for women

And here are the terms that I replaced them with:

• masquerade ball
• masquerade ball masks
• feather masks
• masquerade masks on sticks
• handmade masquerade masks
• wedding masks
• masquerade wedding masks
• quinceanera masks
• prom masks
• masquerade prom
• masquerade sweet 16

What was the result of deleting the old, general terms and replacing them with new, specific terms? A few big changes happened once I made this important change:

1. Our Click-Through Ratio, which is the number of clicks your ad recieves relative to the number of times the ad is shown, immediately jumped from .9% to 2.5%, an astounding 170% increase! While this number does not neccessarily lead to more conversions, what it does show is that we were reaching a group of buyers which was much more targeted and interested in our product. Our ad was connecting better with the people who were seeing it, which definitely means that those people are much more likely to buy once they got to our site.
2. We immediately stopped wasting $100 or more per week on clicks from people who were not truly looking for our product and who were not buying. Probably only 1 in 20 people who are looking for masks are looking for masquerade masks. Because we were bidding on keywords like ‘face masks’ and ‘masks for men’, we were reaching an audience of people who were looking for Halloween masks, scary masks, and other types of masks, but NOT masquerade masks. Whenever one of these people thought that our ad looked good and decided to give it a click, we spent 25 cents on a person who simply visited our site, realized we didn’t have what they were looking for, and clicked away. Eliminating these general terms immediately saved us thousands of dollars per year in wasted advertising fees.
3. Our cost-per-conversion went way down. Therefore, profits went way up. Because we were reaching more targeted visitors who were really interested in our product, it took far less clicks for us to make a sale. This, of course, is beautiful for the bottomline.
4. Our keywords were less general, less competitive, and therefore cheaper!
5. The phone started ringing off the hook! We began getting literally double the volume that we had been doing before I made the changes, and spending the same amount of money on advertising. Also, the quality of our customers went up as well due to the keywords that I targeted which focused on people who were planning masquerade mask events, rather than those looking for one or two masks. We began receiving orders for hundreds and thousands of dollars instead of the $30 orders we normally got.

Bottomline, once I made these simple but effective changes to our Adwords campaign, the money started rolling in!

If you are planning on using Google Adwords or any PPC program to advertise your business on the internet, it is imperative that you do the keyword research and market research that is necessary to optimize your campaign for success. Never fall into the trap of thinking that using general terms will bring in a high-volume of targeted customers; targeting more specific keywords and phrases will always bring you more money for less clicks. Don’t wait to try this out…if you have a PPC campaign right now, immediately tighten up your keyword terms and watch ad expenses go down, and profits go up!

What have been some of your experiences with PPC? Has it worked for your business? Do you have any good tips or stories that you can provide to the reader community here? Please share with us in the comments section!

If you are interested in making more money right now with your PPC campaign, you can take a look at my consulting services here. Please contact me and let me know if I can help.

Tags: Google Adwords, Internet Marketing, Marketing, niche marketing, PayPerClick, PPC Consulting, PPC management