Last Updated on July 20, 2017
Analysis of a bunch of AdWords accounts CR% where not all the accounts had everything tracked (but they did have some conversions in place) showed that:
- Median Conversion rate was 2.18%
- 27.5% of accounts had a conversion rate of 0-1%
- The top 25% of accounts had a conversion rate of 5.34% or better.
Analysis of hundreds of accounts CR% where all the accounts had accurate conversion tracking showed that:
- The median conversion rate for a well-tracked AdWords account is 3.16%.
- Only 15.2% of AdWords accounts have a conversion rate of 0-1%.
- The top 25% of accounts have a conversion rate of 7.82% or better.
“The problem is, most companies spend the majority of their AdWords budgets on search terms that have never produced a single conversion. These search terms are typed in by the wrong sort of traffic and—as a result—they never convert.” – Search Engine Journal
Action Points
If we have a lower conversion rate than 3% here is what to look for:
- Are we tracking action a visitor can take that has value for the client?
- Is the landing page conveying the message/value prop of the clients services/product effectively, and are landing page best practices in place?
- Does the message of the ad match the message of the landing page?
- If you answer yes to the above, then take a look at the keywords. If the traffic isn’t converting on a well optimized landing page then there is something wrong with the source of the traffic.
Takeaways
- In accounts that were tracking conversions effectively 61% OF AD SPEND IS WASTED ON SEARCH TERMS THAT HAVE NEVER CONVERTED!
- The average AdWords account wastes 76% of its budget on the wrong search terms.
- “Wasted ad spend and cost-per-conversion have an exponential relationship… for every 10% increase in wasted ad spend, your cost-per-conversion increases by 44-72%”
- This trend holds true for every industry, conversion rate, and average cost-per-click.’
- “As we reduced one client’s wasted ad spend from 91% to 68%, their cost-per-conversion dropped from $160.38 to $38.58… in a matter of weeks.”
Campaign negative keywords
- Use these for groups of campaigns that would need the same negative keywords. Ex. 3D Printing Campaigns in GoEngineer.
