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by leeoniya 2344 days ago
> CTR is the most important component of Quality Score

this is because that's how google gets paid.

you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion.

some tips:

make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.

avoid broad match like the plague. we use mostly phrase and modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months.

don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.

also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.

because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market.

and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI.

YMMV

1 comments

While Google may be paid per click, the value of that click (how much companies are willing to pay), is directly dependent on their conversion rates. So Google is incentivized to get you the most converting clicks as possible.
i think it's safe to say that the incentives are not exactly aligned.

if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it.

there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad" sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

lots of things that can easily save you money do not exist in their backend. imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.

Do you have any recommended reading for things you can do to easily save you money before spending your first cent on ads?
ok, i guess there is a way to target to specific mobile devices:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7101715?hl=en