These Numbers Don’t Lie

It’s summer and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the freedom being an entrepreneur affords me by spending a lot of time with my kids. And since we’re having so much fun, they’re growing up so fast and summer is quickly coming to a close, this month I’m gonna cut to the chase and share a relatively short, but very important lesson with you.

Over the last year or two I’ve been trying to impress upon you the importance of conversions and conversion optimization.

Yes, having a great AdWords campaign, getting lots of organic traffic, etc. is wonderful, but if you’re not converting that traffic, all the traffic in the world ain’t gonna help you. It’s one thing to tell you that, it’s another thing to show you the difference a modest bump in conversions can make for a business.

I’m going to share some real world numbers with you from an AdWords campaign we’re managing for a client. There are two sets of numbers here. One is from May 2014, the other from June of 2014. Take a look at them here and then we’ll dig into them in some more detail (click the image to see a larger version)…

So what are we looking at here? First, look at the first few columns: Clicks – Impressions – Clickthrough Rate (CTR). Notice that these numbers are virtually identical month over month. Clicks and CTR were actually a little lower in June, though not by much.

Then look at the 4^th column, Cost Per Click (CPC). That actually rose quite a bit from May to June, with CPCs going up $0.12 (CPCs are generally on the rise in AdWords by the way so this isn’t uncommon to see).

Okay, now turn your attention to the last 3 columns starting with the very last one which is the Conversion Rate. We were able to improve the Conversion Rate from 9.75{a950ddf0e7a23367a7e0f17377d3737fa8b8b1820bab9af7071f88951eb5d84e} to 12.60{a950ddf0e7a23367a7e0f17377d3737fa8b8b1820bab9af7071f88951eb5d84e} (through a combination of onsite changes and optimizing the AdWords campaign itself).

Let’s look at the impact that change had… This business’ cost per conversion plummeted from over $40 to about $32.

And the campaign generated 14 more conversions in June than in May.

So basically, despite fewer clicks and higher CPCs, their cost per conversion dropped 20{a950ddf0e7a23367a7e0f17377d3737fa8b8b1820bab9af7071f88951eb5d84e} and they increased their total conversion over 25{a950ddf0e7a23367a7e0f17377d3737fa8b8b1820bab9af7071f88951eb5d84e}.

The bottom line here is this… for just about the same amount of ad spend, this client stands to bring in an extra $5K to $10K in revenue due to this boost in conversions!

If you still don’t get the importance of working on boosting the conversion rate on your site after this, I don’t really know what to tell you.