Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Squeezing More Leads from the Display Network

The challenge

One of our clients was getting millions of impressions each week in the Display network and had a very strong website that converted visitors into leads at 11.5%, at a cost per lead of $25.51. The client could afford to pay up to $29 per lead and still be profitable, so they were eager to find more good lead sources in the Display network.

The solution

One look at their account told us that the first big opportunity was to manage their placements with greater control. Their display campaign was run entirely on Automatic Placements, which had done a great job of finding lots of relevant sites. Now it was time to move the converting sites into Managed Placements so we could bid appropriately at the site level. See Chapter 13 for information on graduating placements from Automatic to Managed status.

Here's what we did:

1. Created a new “Managed Placement” campaign
2. Identified placements that had generated conversions and moved them into the new campaign
3. Excluded all those placements from the Automatic Placements campaign to force Google to send all traffic from those placements to the new campaign
4. Monitored the managed placements and raised or lowered bids to maximize the number of leads that cost $29 or less

The result

Table 19-2 tells the first part of the story. Impressions increased from 6.5 million to 8.4 million, and clicks went from 5,294 to 6,524 in one week, an increase of 23 percent. Although the conversion rate dipped ...