How to Reduce Cost per Conversion in Google AdWords with Filters

When you’re managing paid campaigns, there are moments where you have to make quick decisions based on your campaigns’ objectives, budget, and target CPA. However, in order to take effective measures, its important to take all factors into account and then take actions.

Strategy Based Filters in Google Adwords

It’s important to understand what you are trying to achieve before you build a strategy. So, before you begin, identify your purpose from some of the choices:

1. To reduce cost per conversion
2. To keep your position between 1-2 for branded keywords, or
3. To spend more on converting keywords and less on others, etc.

In this post, I’ll be sharing a set of Google Adwords filters that can be used to increase the return on investment (ROI) on your Google Adwords Search campaigns.

Also on TechWyse

Top 10 Ways To Fail With Google AdWords
Google AdWords New Ad Extensions in Beta

To do this, I will first need to find out the keywords that are sucking my money and not getting me any conversions. To identify this, I will use the following filter and then label them.

1. Conversions = 0
2. Clicks >= 10 or {30% of daily clicks}

Keywords

Using this filter, I can see the keywords that are only getting me clicks, but no conversion. I am going to label them as “Bad Keywords” and then pause them for now.

Remember, if your objective is branding, then these keywords would be great for generating traffic to your site. However, we are trying to reduce the cost per conversion. Therefore, we will need to pause these keywords for now.

Note: Pause these keywords, if you have enough history and data to show that these keywords have never generated a single conversion over their number of clicks.

Identify Keywords with Highest Conversions

My second step would be to identify the keywords with highest conversions and optimize the bids to spend the maximum budget on them.

Use the following filter:

1. Conversions > 10 Or {10% of your daily conversions}

Now, label these keywords as “Good/Imp” or “High Conv”. These keywords are important for bringing conversions in your account. We want to make sure that the bids are competitive enough to show our Ad copy in top positions of SERPs.

Once you see these keywords, apply additional criteria to the same filter.

1. Max CPC < Top page bids
2. Average Position worse than 2

Select these new set of keywords and edit their bids to raise to top page bids. Please note that if your history shows that you do not perform on top ranks, then this may not be a good idea.

Once done, time to spare some money to get for more conversions. For doing this, let’s focus on the keywords with good Quality Score.

Create a filter using the following criteria:

1. Quality Score >= 7 or 8
2. Max CPC Bid > Top page bids
3. Average position better than 2

Now, select these keywords and reduce their bids to their actual top page bids because this is what you should be actually paying based on your QS. So, why pay more?

Note: If you do not want to target position 1, you can remove the third criteria.

Do not forget to select these keywords and label them as “High QS”.

Labeling Your Keywords

Using Labels for Adgroups, keywords, and even campaigns would make them look different from each other. This helps to increase the visibility of the data you want to actually see while you are looking at a table with so many numbers and metrics, which in my case is everyday.

Here are some examples of different labels you can use to optimize a set of keywords.

For “performing keywords” I like to use labels such as “Fav”, “Imp”, “Most Conv”, “High QS & Conv”, etc. For non-performing keywords, I usually label them as “Bad Keywords, “Low QS & Conv”, etc. Honestly, you can name them as you find fit, but the goal here is to separate them from the crowd.

Conclusion

Using filters based on your strategy could actually make things less complicated. The idea here is to cut our cost for non-performing keywords and spend more on keywords that are performing well and meeting our goals. I call this a balancing strategy to manage keywords bids.

Let me know what you think of the above strategy and if you have some other variations on filters for managing your keyword bids. Here is another great article that talks about useful filters that you can try to improve you return on investment.