The Conversion Optimiser: Playing to win

Bingo Card Creator used the Google Conversion Optimiser to increase profit margins by 150%.

More than across and down

While working as an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor in Japan, Patrick McKenzie noticed that vocabulary bingo was popular among his students. The only problem was that it took 45 minutes to create enough bingo cards to play. To save time, Patrick decided to write software that would automate the card creation process, and Bingo Card Creator was born.

While Patrick envisioned his main market to be educators – and the majority of the company’s customers are primary schools – others have used Bingo Card Creator in ways he’d never imagined. “A Fortune 500 company used Bingo Card Creator to create an icebreaker activity,” Patrick says, “and a health-related government agency used Bingo Card Creator to help educate senior citizens on the importance of a healthy diet.”

Sole player

Patrick’s marketing efforts are focused on getting new users to download and try a free trial of Bingo Card Creator. As a sole proprietor, Patrick can’t dedicate all his time to marketing, so he relies on organic search results and Google AdWords™ to drive traffic to the Bingo Card Creator website.

During his first year using AdWords, Patrick was pleased with the thousands of leads generated by his campaigns. He also tried running ads on Google’s Display Network, made up of millions of high-quality news pages, topic-specific websites and blogs. However, promoting and developing his product, he quickly realised that it can take significant time to optimise Display Network campaigns so that they only run on sites that generate high conversion rates.

Game on

To reduce the amount of time it took to monitor his AdWords campaigns, Patrick decided to try the Conversion Optimiser, a new AdWords bid management feature. “It was just what I was looking for,” he explains. “I can specify how much I want to spend to acquire each new customer, and this feature will adjust my cost-per-click (CPC) bids based on the likelihood of a conversion resulting from each of my AdWords ad auctions.” The Conversion Optimiser predicts conversion rates based on factors including the search query and the conversion history of particular sites.

Right away, the Conversion Optimiser had a positive impact on Patrick’s business. In just the first month, it helped Bingo Card Creator decrease the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by 25 percent. Today, the company’s unit profit margin is up by more than 150 percent, increasing from £2.50 to £7.50 per unit.

Bingo!

“I’ve been particularly impressed by how the Conversion Optimiser has improved the performance of my ads on the Display Network,” notes Patrick. “For instance, a Bingo Card Creator ad was featured on a Halloween party games web page on About.com, a Google Display Network site.”

And Patrick no longer has to spend as much time managing his AdWords campaigns. “I’ve cut down my involvement with the Display Network from a very stressful, mandatory daily session to a leisurely, weekly session, which I can skip if I want to,” he explains. “[The Conversion Optimiser] algorithms take care of finding the gems and discarding the trash without my intervention. I really can’t stress how powerful this is for a time-pressed small businessman.”

Because of the success Bingo Card Creator has enjoyed using the Conversion Optimiser, Patrick has increased his company’s AdWords budget five-fold. “It might not be obvious that I should be happy when I spend more on advertising,” he says. “However, if ROI continues to stay positive, you naturally want to spend as much as possible as long as it maximises absolute profits.”

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About Conversion Optimiser

The Conversion Optimiser is an AdWords feature that helps advertisers manage advertising costs. Advertisers simply specify their maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) bid, and the Conversion Optimiser sets all their keywords' cost-per-click (CPC) bids automatically. The Conversion Optimiser makes adjustments in CPC bids based on the likelihood that a conversion will result from each ad auction. In addition to decreasing the time that advertisers spend on monitoring and managing CPC bids, the Conversion Optimiser can help improve AdWords campaign performance. For more information, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60150&hl=en_GB.

About Google AdWords

Google AdWords™ is a performance-based advertising programme that enables businesses large and small to advertise on Google and its network of partner websites. Hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide use AdWords for text, image and video ads priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Built on an auction-based system, AdWords is a highly quantifiable and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. For more information, visit http://www.google.co.uk/adwords