Google AdWords: The Power of Bid Adjustments

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Contrary to what some people may believe, Google AdWords isn’t a marketing avenue that you can throw an unlimited budget at and be successful. It takes a carefully crafted campaign involving eye-catching ad copy, quality landing pages, selective keyword targeting, high converting extensions and intricate bid optimizations that focus your campaign on the people who are most likely to convert.

We commonly see new clients come to us with accounts that have exorbitantly high AdWords budgets, but they are designed to throw money at anyone willing to click on their ads. There is no focus on quality clicks, and without proper optimization, these campaigns often struggle to reach higher positions in Google search results. Usually, their CTR, or click-through-rate (how often someone clicks on their ads when they are shown in search results), is at or below the law industry average of 1.3% and their unique conversion rate commonly falls below the average of 4.3%.A Google Advertising Programs webpage highlighting Google AdWords, showing examples of how ads appear beside search results, with linked text and a cursor pointing to an ad.

Enter Micro Bid Optimization

At PaperStreet, one of the ways we increase the volume and quality of conversions in your account is through the use of micro bid optimizations. With these, we analyze the last three months of data in your account to find the geographical locations, days of the week and devices that have historically resulted in a conversion. We can see that Wednesdays and Thursdays may be the best days for your firm, that the zip code on the edge of town brings in more calls and that you’ve had better results from people using mobile devices.

With this information in hand, we go through each of the individual areas where your account performs well and add small adjustments to your bids. For a person who falls into any or all of these particular areas, the cost for that click will be slightly higher. However, that person statistically has a much higher likelihood of contacting your firm compared to the standard searcher. We can also look at data on an even more granular level to target specific age groups, genders and sometimes different income brackets if your legal practice area would benefit from them.

Negative Adjustments

By analyzing the data in your account, we can likewise do negative bid adjustments if there are specific areas that tend to use a lot of your monthly budget but produce very few results. For a campaign targeting life insurance fraud, for example, we may want to remove any age brackets below 45 years old or put a negative bid adjustment in place so that less of our budget is spent on this audience. This helps you use your marketing dollars wisely on the people who you want contacting your office, while reducing the number of people who may be shopping around, researching or have cold feet.

Our Results

It is because of these micro bid optimizations that PaperStreet has an average CTR of 3.5% –  nearly three times the law industry average. We also have an average conversion rate of 11.7%, which is more than double. Instead of spending your budget on anyone willing to click on your ads, you should be optimizing your clicks based on the actual user data available in your account.

By fine-tuning your campaigns, you can expand your conversions, increase their quality and spend less on wasted leads. These micro bid adjustments are just one of the many areas that PaperStreet looks at when optimizing your account to bring you more success online.

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