The Most Important Element of Your AdWords Campaign is...

I don't know that I would refer to that as an element of a campaign. For the purpose of this poll I considered an "element" as something you could control/set. Analytics or analysing the data, while of the utmost importance, is more of a result/outcome than a setting.

 

Yes it's an result/outcome but when you think of it, even with the best title tag, the biggest budget or the best landing page, you will not be able to check it without this. It may seems to be not a part of a campaign but in the end it's the only thing that is gonna help you to check if your on the good way with all the elements above imho. But your right about the fact that it's an outcome and not necessarily a part of the campaign.

 

Not sure if this should be under other, but the most important element of Adwords has to be continuous testing, Title Text is important, but you will never know if you have the best until you test.

Nice poll

 

Testing isn't an element of the campaign either, per se.

It is important though, but in the case of testing advert text, even this won't tell you the whole story.

Testing will tell you the effect of your clickthrough rate and conversion rate, but not your Quality Score.

The 'best' advert can't be identified exclusively through testing, particularly if a new, 'better' advert has a better conversion rate, but worse clickthrough rate. It'll hit your Quality Score by an unknown amount, so you'll never be sure whether your new advert is more or less profitable than your old one.

Any thoughts on this? Should we only accept a new advert if it improves Clickthrough rate or Conversion rate without worsening the other?

Or am I heading too far off-topic here?

 

Conversion rate, at least in most cases, is the deciding factor for me.

 

Would a small improvement in conversion rate offset a 20% reduction in clickthrough rate?

Bear in mind the impact this would have on your QS, as well as the reduced volume of sales...

In general, I agree with you, I just wish I had a better grip on the relative weightings of the factors in the QS calculation.

 

Would depend on what the drop in CTR did to my QS and in turn my actual CPC. In most cases I'd chance it and see what happens. At the end of the day I try and focus on conversion rate and back the other stuff in at a level that makes it work.

Not a science imo, more of an art. It's like marketing!

 

Just got the latest version of Perry Marshall's book through, and he says "After 30 or more clicks on each [of the two adverts], delete the poorer of the two ads, and write a new one to try and beat the winner.

No mention of conversion rates, and quite a dangerous approach, imho.

I agree with you - it's far more complicated than that...

 

My interpretation of the poll / question was which part of the campaign is the most important but I also provided an answer ("keyword selection") based on the choices provided.

Given this detailed definition, I'd agree that conversion is an outcome. Keyword selection remains my vote.