Wakefly BlogA PPC Deflategate Story: Lowering Cost per Conversions

Unless you have been living under a rock the last few months you may have heard a little something about Tom Brady and the Patriots (allegedly) deflating footballs.

Heated debates rage on as to whether or not they actually adjusted the balls PSI (highly possible) and whether or not deflating them would actually give the Patriots an advantage (doubtful). I’d like to talk about another type of deflation, the deflation of your cost per conversion in the PPC game. If you couldn’t tell that was my quasi attempt at newsjacking, but hopefully, now I have your attention and we can discuss some strategy. Most would agree that dramatically lowering your cost per conversion without sacrificing too many total conversions is a great thing. In order to achieve this goal I have just one word for you, “Bing”. Here is a case study demonstrating how duplicating your Google Ads campaign in Bing, may just give you the results you are looking for.

Bing Theory:

One of my clients is an online clothing retailer. I was recently tasked with optimizing one of their campaigns to increase total conversions while lowering the cost per conversion, no easy task. My Google Ads campaign was successful, but I couldn’t see any easy solution for my new problem. I needed to come up with some sort of A/B test and suddenly the word “Bing” popped into my head. Historically with other clients, I noticed Bing campaigns having much lower impression volumes, but stay pretty competitive in all other metrics. I decided to copy my exact Google Ads campaign into Bing and test which publisher would perform better. I used all the same keywords, ad copy, and site links to keep it as even as possible. Then I convinced the client to break off a small piece of budget to test my Bing theory and the results were even better than I thought.

The Results:

Just I expected the impression numbers were much lower in Bing than in Google Ads, 58.97% lower to be exact. That being said, the total number of conversions was only 17.5% lower due to a much better CTRs and conversion rates. Remember, my main task was to lower the cost per conversion numbers without sacrificing too many conversions. Bing’s cost per conversion was 58.66% lower at $13.63 versus $32.97 for Google Ads over the same time span. In order to get that great looking number I only had to sacrifice 7 total conversions. The ROAS was much higher in Bing as well jumping 83% from a 4.3x to an 8x.

Conclusion:

If you want to take a page from Tom Brady’s book and deflate your cost per conversion numbers, Bing may be the best place to get the job done. I understand that this is just one instance of success and this may not work for every client or campaign. And by no means am I recommending shutting off Google Ads entirely to replace it with Bing, but if you have a client that understands the big picture, this is a good way to make the overall paid marketing results work better. Want some more tips and tricks of the trade? Feel free to contact us about digital media services!