Increasing Google Ad spend - is it worth it

[ocelot]

Hi

We are currently spending approx £500 pcm on google ad words however if I increased this spend to £4000 pcm what kind of results would this achieve?

For example would it just be more visits per day as the budget is larger?

Also what is the best way to track the success of an adwords campaign - the ultimate goal of the campaign would be to generate a lead whether this be a phone call, email or using our book an appointment form.

Our service covers a geographical area (Scotland) and for organic search we are doing well 1st pages listings for searches such as pvc doors edinburgh etc so I am unsure whether it's worth increasing my PPC spend or put more resource into SEO,  or even Facebook ads?

[JasmineA]

Matthew, Joram & Branden have all provided really great answers, and it looks like you're on the right track.

Have you connected your analytics account with your adwords account? Here's how if you haven't yet. I know there's been some redesigning going on insight Analytics, but it should still be the majority of the same information. Might take a bit of trial & error though.

IF you've already set up GA & AW then you should be able to see AdWords conversions filtering into your current goals. Go to the Conversions section, then go to Overview. In the refreshed screen, select by Source / Medium. This will give you a decent idea of how AdWords has been helping.

Generally, I would say that if you don't know how AdWords has been contributing to your bottom line, then I wouldn't increase budget. Are you managing all online marketing for your company?

[Branden_S]

1st make sure you are tracking conversions.  You can track leads, sales and revenue amount.

Then look at your impression share % for each campaign & ad group.  This will let you know what share of impressions you are currently receiving, and you can derive what budget you should have to receive 100% impression share. Since you are not increasing your bids, you should receive similar performance as you increase your budget. ...CPC, CPA,CPL metrics.

Next step is to improve your text ads..the higher your CTR, the more clicks you will receive, which will increase budget  ...however this will also increase your quality score, and lower your CPC.   Quality Score takes weeks/months to improve, its not an overnight improvement.  Focus on increasing Click Thru Rate & Quality Score and you will increase spend, while your campaigns perform better.

[Solvari]

You can generate the conversions scripts when you click 'Conversions' under 'Tools and analysis' in the top menu of the AdWords interface. You insert this script on the page that is loaded after visitors have filled in and submitted the form.

With other targeting methods I mean methods that don't use keywords, such as targeting certain interest categories.

[ocelot]

Hi Thanks

Where can I find the conversion script from adwords and where would it go in the site so I can tell how successful the PPC campaign is.

What I would like to be able to do is in analytics filter down by adwords traffic and then glean how many have gone down the funnel, and where in this funnel they have left the site.  I dont want to get too bogged down with analysing stats

CPC has already been reduced and I am hitting the £500pcm budget what I don't want to do is just to double this budget, triple it etc without getting any actual benefit without a ROI.

Joram you mention( or use other targeting methods for display campaigns) can you explain this a little more please with examples if possible.

If I used the budget for banner ads in the UK how much would this cost on average and again what type of ROI would a regional double glazing firm likely to get.

Same with affiliate marketing would this channel be worthwhile as the likes of Anglian, Everest etc offer affiliate programs but these are national double glazing brands.

[Solvari]

First of all increasing your budget will only make sense when you are reaching your daily budget sometimes now and it is limiting your number of impressions and clicks. If you are not reaching your daily budget at the moment, but you'd like to increase your impressions and clicks then you should look into new potential keywords that can be added to the campaign (or use other targeting methods for display campaigns).

Since your goal is to generate leads with your campaign it is important that you start tracking how many leads your campaign generates and at what cost. You can use a conversion script from AdWords to track the number of form submissions.

I think it is important to get insight in the performance of your campaign at the moment, before you decide whether to increase your spend or not.

[MatthewBarby]

This is very contextual. In basic terms, increasing your Adwords spend should just result in an increase in traffic levels. Now, this metric alone isn't always that helpful in your decision making process.

What is important is for you to be tracking conversions from PPC within Google Analytics. You can do this simply enough by just setting up a custom report in Analytics to see where your enquiries have came from and then comparing the PPC conversions over time.

What I tend to try to do is to then work out exactly how much one conversion costs me within PPC (on average, of course) and then compare this to my other online marketing activities, for example, SEO, Banner ads, social media, etc. Once you have done this you will be able to get a clearer idea on which medium is best to put more resources into.

Matt