Google’s Conversion Optimiser
Posted on September 26, 2007
Filed Under bid management | Comments
Google have just released the Conversion Optimiser, a simple tool to autobid campaigns to a CPA target. I think this is Google's first step into true, closed loop bid management; by that I mean bidding to an ROI target, rather than a position (see Position Preference), cost (see Preferred Cost Bidding) or to maximise traffic (see the Budget Optimiser).
If you run a small campaign with a simple objective, then the Conversion Optimiser is probably worth a go. Particularly if running an AdWords account is only a small part of what you do and of course, like most of Google's tools, it's free. However, if you run a big campaign with complex objectives then let me offer a few reasons why you should think twice before you try it out.
- You have to use Google's tracking and by doing so you're letting Google know exactly what their traffic is worth to you. That helps them price it accordingly!
- CPA targets work at an adgroup level, not a campaign level, which restricts volume of acquisitions. You still need to manually calculate different CPAs for different adgroups to maximise your volume. This is not a trivial problem to solve.
- Google's conversion tracking doesn't allow advertisers to weight multiple conversion metrics. So if you have one thing for which you'll pay a £10 CPA, and another which is £20, it can't balance off between those demands.
- It's CPA only; it won't work if you optimise to another strategy, such as ROI, net margin, profit etc.
- It's only as accurate as Google's calculations. Anyone who uses Google's traffic estimator knows that the numbers can be wildly off, which is why at Efficient Frontier we build our own traffic estimation models for every client.
- It doesn't work on Yahoo or MSN.
