How To Increase Ctr & Roi, Making a better campaign that converts to ROI Options

[1dmf]

Hello,

I'm struggling to get a working campaign on Adwords, we seem to have very few impressions for what is a highly competetive market place (Mortages, Insurance, Loans), the few click we have do not seem to be converting and I need help understanding how I can improve my ads / campaign / site and of course ROI.

The current steps I have taken are a follows...

1. Written the site using semantic, X/HTML & CSS, utilising heading tags, alt tags, title tags etc.. (NO JS)
2. Produced targeted pages for each product group, eg BTL, FTB, NTB, Selfbuild
3. Created targeted ad groups for each product type, with ad variations and all pointing to the product specific pages.

We are no.4 in generic google listing for some of our keywords, but I just don't seem to be able to increase our CTR & ROI , what else can I do?

What possibly am I doing wrong? or is simply a case of having to increase daily budget and CPC?

All help is much appreciated.


Regards,

1DMF

Reason for edit: removed website as per forum rules

[nina]

I would probably spend my initial time making sure my landing pages are optimized for the terms people are searching on, with easy conversion.


What does someone have to do to be a convert? Request for info, sign up for a newsletter, ask for a quote? There should be lots of options that do not require much commmittment from them.

Make sure your website is easy to navigate and meets your customer's needs. Then you will start to convert!

[Ignoramus]

Hello,

I'm struggling to get a working campaign on Adwords, we seem to have very few impressions for what is a highly competetive market place (Mortages, Insurance, Loans), the few click we have do not seem to be converting and I need help understanding how I can improve my ads / campaign / site and of course ROI.

If you are getting few impressions it simply means that your ads aren't showing. This could be because..

1. The keywords you have selected aren't the right keywords for people searching in your market.

2. The keywords are ok but you have used the options of 'exact match' or 'phrase match' to qualify out a lot of searchers.

3. Your cost-per-click is high but your daily budget is low, so your ads rarely show.

The 'industry average' for conversions seems to be around 2% or less so you may or may not have a problem with your offer and landing pages - it's just that you're not getting enough traffic to tell.

[Ignoramus]

Addendum..

We are no.4 in generic google listing for some of our keywords, but I just don't seem to be able to increase our CTR & ROI , what else can I do?

The fact you rank well for some keywords/keyword phrases is good but, in a very competitive market, it might also mean that those words/phrases are fairly unique. In short, they are not commonly used by searchers. If the same keyword (phrases) are used in your adwords campaign that might explain the problem.

[1dmf]

Thanks for the replies,

I have created targeted landing pages and they are obvious "call to action" pages, a simple form to be submitted, that's it. (even google toolbar auto-fill completes 99% of the form!)

I did post a link for you to have a look, but didn't realise you were'nt allowed. it's the independent site in my signature!

I have created product specific pages, simple call to action, easy navigation, i'm running targeted ads for some as 'phrase match' keyphrases , I have to , google sees 'buy to let' & 'let to buy' as the same thing with broad match, but they are two completley different products.

I know the market place and keywords I am bidding for such as 'mortgage broker' , 'remortgage', 'mortgage advice' is highly competetive and CPC is unbelievably high, I can get the keyword "MP3 Downloads" for 0.03p Per Click for one of my other sites, no chance for these key phrases.

I know my daily budget is a strangle hold, and really need some advice on whether i've done all I can in terms of optomised, targeted adverts and landing pages and if it's simply now a matter of getting a bigger budget to play with.

Ignoramous -> well one of our high ranking keyphrases is "professional mortgage advice" , if you were looking for a professional mortgage broker to give you advice , is this not something you would type?

Persoanlly I thought i'd done pretty good , but it doesn't seem to be yielding much results, any ideas peeps would really be appreciated

Regards,

1DMF

[Ignoramus]

Well you got 3 impressions from me today and one click. Sorry about making you pay for the click.

When (in Google) I entered 'professional mortgage advice' you are quite right. Your company appeared at number three in the organic listings. Well done.

However, your adwords ad was nowhere to be seen - at least not on the first ten pages.

When I entered 'buy to let' your adwords ad appeared on page 4 of the results the first time and page 3 the second time.

Your 'buy to let' ad contains the keyword phrase but so do all your competitor's ads. Your home page and the landing page for that ad look fine. There's always room for improvement but they certainly didn't send me running screaming.

Those are not your problems. It is this...

Your ads are competing for attention and position in a market with a bucketload of similar offerings and companies - many of whom are household names in the financial services industry. They have huge budgets and, unless you have very deep pockets you are unlikely to compete with them for your main keywords.

Even if you doubled your adwords budget I doubt it would do you much good. Sure, you would get more impressions but if your ads still appear on page three, four or more and look just the same as everyone else's they probably won't bring you more traffic.

You have some choices to make...

First, given the nature of your market, is an adwords campaign really for you ? You've shown you can do well in the organic results for some competitive keywords. Would you be better off devoting your time and money to maintaining and improving your organic position for those and other keywords ?

Then, if you keep or even increase your adwords budget how do you compete ? You really need to have your ads on the first or second page of Google to get results. As you know, Google computes an ads position based on keyword bids and CTR.

You can ramp up your keyword bids to improve position and experiment with the ad to improve CTR. This will exhaust your budget quicker and result in fewer impressions (assuming you get traffic from a better position). Better than getting a lot of page five impressions but no clicks.

You could drop some of your keyword/phrases and focus on just a very few top performing ones. Spend your money on the known winners. You might try geographic targeting or restricting your ads to running at certain times of the day. In short, trade coverage for position. Unless you're rich, you can't have both.

However, none of this might help against the big boys with their larger budgets and higher CTRs.

It might be a good idea to spend some time investigating 'the tail' That is, those keyword phrases that few people use to search but often produce better than average conversion rates. Bids on these phrases can be cheap and get you a good position - just don't expect too many clicks.

Hope that provoked some thoughts.

[1dmf]

Thankyou so much for your very informative reply. (well thanks except for the click (IMG:style_emoticons/default/whistling.gif) )

I had been coming to the same conclusion and also had been banging on for months in every board meeting that we need to do other advertising and marketing outside of the web, as you would promote a company before the internet was invented, and this will help to reinforce my case.

Thanks for the kind words on organic listing, it has been a steep learning curve with SEO as well as semantic, X/HTML / CSS , and yes there is always room for improvement , but on the whole, i think i've done well for an amature!

I think narrowing down some keywords / ad groups and concetrating on more specific targeted ones is something I need to refine, though this process was something I am currently doing regarding mortgage products, i.e. lower CPC for equity release as it is something we do but not our core business, along with insurance and loans.

I have negative keywords for pet, travel, car insurance and also for things like credit cards as we do not offer these services , so i'm certainly trying to really focus our campaign and make it as targeted and relevant to peoples searches as possible.

You have cetainly given me food for thought!

Thank you very much for your valued input , it really is appreciated.

Regards,
1DMF.

[jehochman]

(Mortages, Insurance, Loans)

How are you different from the other 8 million loan brokers trying to make a buck on the Internet? Please answer in 100 characters or less.

[1dmf]

Well I beleive it is explained on the home page , 1st paragraph, what makes us different is we are a nationwide mortgage compliance network which is Authorised by the FSA to supervise and impose mortgage regulations on our Appointed Representatives.

This give us a unique position where we can guarantee the quaility of the brokerage, their brokers and the advice given as we monitor and inforce regulations on behalf of the FSA.

but if you mean how do we say that in an Adword advert, hmm , I stated out with an advert that was more geared towards saying things like "Nationwide Pool" , "FSA Authorised & Regulated" , "Local advice in your area" and such like, only they didn't produce much traffic and Google Adwords Team said they were no good because they didn't target a specific product nor did it have the keywords in the advert nor have keyword targeted landing pages.

Which is why i now run different adgroups for each individual product, matching the keywords in the advert text and pointing to a keyword / product specific landing pages -> so now instead of 5 pages indexed and in my sitemap.xml we have 25 pages , product specific and the side section now internally links to these pages, which before it was just a static list of products available.

If you have any insight into what wording you would use on an advert, i'm really open to suggestions and would appreciate any help you could give.

[Ignoramus]

If you have any insight into what wording you would use on an advert, i'm really open to suggestions and would appreciate any help you could give.

I haven't really thought this through but here's an idea...

As I understand it, your company operates as a national (UK) chain with a network of local advisors.

Let's assume that on keyword phrases like 'mortgage advice' you are going to get flattened by the competition.

Set up a series of phrase matched keywords like 'mortgage advice in Sussex', 'mortgage advice in Cardiff' and so on - related to the location of your advisors.

Maximise your bids on these phrases.

Change your ads for each phrase match to something like 'Unbiased mortgage advice in Sussex' or wherever.

When a searcher looks for simply 'mortgage advice' your ad won't be shown. So what. It was going to be lost down the pages anyway.

If a searcher looks for 'mortgage advice in Sussex' your ad will show with the others but..

a. It will be (hopefully) on the first page because you have bid up for that phrase.
b. The 'in Sussex' part will be highlighted in the ad - the competition's won't be - so you are drawing the searcher to an ad directly relevant to the query.

If possible, on your landing pages, change the referals to match the geographic location of the query. For example, quote from Mr Smith of Worthing, Sussex, Ms Jones of Anytown, Sussex.

People like local. People like references (even if they're made up !)

Small point - 'extensive' is spelled 'exstensive' on your site. Little things like that can put people off.

[1dmf]

We did that, we had put a mass of "morgage advice in XXXXX" XXXXX = every county and major city in the UK , we got ZERO impressions, which is when I approached Google adwords team for help and they suggested the way I have now done it.

As for references -> I could not put fake quotes up, if the FSA found out we could be fined and lose our authorisation, and in any case that's just wrong! , the quotes we have are genuine, and we intend to keep it that way.

Typo - thanks, doesn't matter how many times you get people to proof read, there is always one that gets overlooked , many thanks.

I've emailed your comments to the staff and called a meeting to discuss the way forward. I'll let you know how it goes.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,