In my first post about Conversion Optimizer (CO) I outlined a few guidelines when first setting up Conversion Optimizer. I also documented the results of one of my clients I have been testing it on.

Just to recap the steps that I have taken since implementing this feature:

Initially Google recommended a CPA higher than what my original CPAs were.

I stuck to these recommendations, which were R12.35 for each ad group. Later on I dropped almost all ad groups max CPAs to R10.00.

The Results:

• Week 1: Traffic, clicks, CPC and conversions all increased. This was expected as CPCs were higher due to the higher max CPA (Google automatically adjusts the CPC bids).
• There was a decrease in clicks and CPC from week 2 to 3. I thought this may be due to me lowering the CPAs (causing CPC to be lowered, and possibly adverts position, causing a decline in clicks).
• But position has remained stable, and funnily enough, enquiries and sales increased in that period, and cost per sale went down!
• There was a bit of a slump in performance in week 4. This is when I started dropping the CPAs further, so I thought that must be the reason for the decline in performance.
• Just to double check though, I compared these results with another campaign in the same account (that didn’t’ have CO enabled) for the same period and there was a corresponding drop in stats.
• This means that lowering the CPA did not affect the incoming traffic – there seemed to be a slowing of search volume for this particular industry at this time of the month.

The one thing that put me off at first when I started using CO, was the fact that I couldn’t drop my max CPA lower than R10.00 when some of my ad groups were achieving CPAs of R2.00 and lower in the past! But of course I didn’t want to go against Google’s recommendations.

However, now that CO has been enabled on my campaign for about a month, I’ve started to notice that it no longer tells me “traffic may be reduced” when I put the max CPA lower than R10.00. So I’m assuming it just takes your campaign a little while to adjust to the new bidding system.

Although these results are not that significant, my main goal has still been achieved – lower cost per sale and higher ROI. So I would recommend that if your campaigns’ main goal is focused on getting the best return on investment – you should use CO. Managing your CPA is a much better way of managing your campaign. 

I think in managing campaigns we get too focused on CPC bids and how that affects our advert position – I know I am always weary to drop my CPC bids too much in case my advert gets dropped and in return lose out clicks and conversions! So sometimes we just grin and bear a slightly higher CPA than what we really want to ensure we aren’t losing out on valuable clicks that could lead to conversions. But with this you can focus more on letting Google find those “ideal” CPCs and you just worry about setting the right CPA for you campaign – and eventually, if you manage it right, I’m sure you’ll start getting a much lower CPA for the same (or even more) conversions.