Google Adwords Industry Benchmarks 2019. Mark Taylor, CEO of eSales Hub, takes you through a video comparing Wordstreams Google Adwords Industry Benchmarks 2019 against our own.
Video Transcription
Hi and welcome to this week’s eSales Hub video so this week
I’m looking at industry benchmark comparisons and specifically Google Ads industry benchmarks for 2019.
Now Wordstream do an amazing job of putting this data together and they’ve been doing it since 2016. I’ve got to be honest to you it’s one of my go-to industry benchmarks that I use to see how well our campaigns are doing. They’re just updated the 2019 stats if you go to their website you see here they’ve updated this, literally a couple of days ago. So I thought it’d be a really good idea to have a look at our client performance and see where we generate leads and compare it to the benchmarks that Wordstream have produced.
Wordstreams data I think is worldwide. Basically it’s got a heavy slant towards the US. I don’t also think it covers more generic search terms rather than just local search and I really wanted to see actually if you’re measuring calls and form fills right the way through to sale what does that do in terms of conversion and does local search provide you with the competitive advantage? Do you get a better click-through rate and a higher conversion from local search compared to Wordstreams own benchmarks?
So what we’ve done in this video is I pulled together data from all of our clients. Now as you’ll notice not all the industries that Wordstream benchmark are actually in our client range so we don’t have a dating client as an example. So we can’t report against the benchmark but I’ve chosen March 2019 as the data set purely because it’s a 31-day month
there are no bank holidays – there’s nothing that can make the data a little bit squiffy .
With click-through rate, what we’ve done what we’re going to show you is reported against exactly what’s in the Google Ads interface. So we’re just taking out the data from the AdWords interface and we’re putting it as a comparison.
Now on the conversion side Google do is is that essentially I say, I mean Wordstream, what Wordstream do is report on what is in Google as a conversion. Now as you well know within Google ads you can set many different things a conversion. You can set form fills as a conversion, you can set sales as a conversion, which is what we do as a business, because we’re tracking calls on form fills and we’re tracking those calls that the physical sale. We track the call right the way through to so we’re uploading our client sales data back into Google AdWords so what we’ve taken as the conversion is actually the sales conversion that someone is getting from one of our leads. So that’s what we’ve compared against.
Now would you believe we actually measure conversion hourly and it’s the conversion we’ve measured is the unique user to lead generated and then the sale being generated and as I mentioned we track both calls and form fills so we’re giving the total holistic view.
Now I don’t know if Wordstream actually collects data from calls as well as form fills? I’m guessing anything that they’re collecting is obviously whatever’s is in Google ads and not everybody uses call tracking software and particularly not the tracking software that we have developed ourselves. We track the specific keyword and search term right the way through to sale and put that data back into ads, Google Ads. That’s why you might see a bit of a difference in the data. But let’s compare apples with apples, let’s look at the click-through rate first.
As you can see here straight off the bat you can see the click-through rate that we’re getting is quite a bit higher than what Wordstream are reporting. There could be a couple of different reasons for this. One of the things as you know, we specialize in local search the more relevant and targeted and that is the Google Ad is, the higher the click-through rate you’re gonna get. Now Wordstreams data is an average, so you get have some really poor campaigns that are dragging the average down but as you can see here local search is definitely giving an advantage on click-through rates. Having a relevant ad that’s targeting to someone from a Geo talking point of view definitely generate a much higher click-through rate. And that’s definitely what we’re seeing. I mean from my point of view having run local search and other campaigns for brand and a more non-local search previously, you can see across the range, yeah we are getting a much much higher click-through rate and I think it’s because the ads are just way more relevant to the user because Google’s data themselves says that about 66 percent of people expect ads to be local to them and I think definitely our strategy of targeting people with with a locally based that it’s paying dividends with a higher click-through rate. So from that point of view I definitely think local search gives you a competitive advantage.
What gets more interesting is the conversion. Conversion as I mentioned, we’re actually measuring the conversion that we are putting back into Google Ads. That’s the sales conversion. Now as you can see here I’m not sure if Wordstream use sales conversion or whether they’re talking about page conversion, or they’re just talking about an event conversions. It could be a form fill it could be a call it could be anything really that the user has set-up in the account and decides to measure. But as you can see here across the board we’re pretty much in double figures in everything that we do. You know from a finance point of view you can see it’s one of all those categories at 11% but when you’re talking about personal loans, mortgages, logbook loans where the industry averages is kind of you know in the six to seven percent conversion. So to get eleven percent sales conversion is pretty good. Some of our highest are the automotive industry you know, driving MOT’s and car servicing bookings, we have a clients who are literally getting almost two out of three leads that we provide them they’re getting a sale out of them. And again for me it’s about the relevancy. That’s the great thing about local search – it really enables you to really target your message that local market so you can adapt to different trends, you know different needs, different things in that market to drive that conversion up because in the end a generating leads is great and should be part of your strategy. But you can be a real busy fool if that lead isn’t turning into a sale. You can make yourself think you’re doing a great job driving all these leads but if they are not converting and you know it isn’t always the sales teams problem. We know from our own data there are some key words that will drive a hell of a lot of leads but they just don’t convert. We don’t always know the reason why they don’t convert, but we can see keywords that absolutely do convert into sales conversions because we’re tracking the click-through the call and then once that calls been finished we can then see the sales conversion, the invoice money that’s attributed to that call, then we’ve got a very very good idea and a very good data line that we can then insert back into Google Adwords to get that quality score improvement by sharing our conversion data.
Some people are worried that by sharing their sales data back with Google they’ll just put the price up of the keywords. On average see an 8 to 12 percent drop in in cost per click when we share invoice values to Google per keyword. So it does make a very, very big difference.
For me the big takeaway from is from trac king these benchmarks is it’s about tracking phone calls from Google and it’s not just about form fills. It’s not just about tracking a conversion it’s what does that conversion mean, and it’s not just how many calls but what are genuine sales calls. Not every single call is going to be a lead it could be a lead. Some are duplicate calls, it could be some phoneing up to find a job, someone trying to sell you something. That’s the beauty of our system it spots those and doesn’t count them towards your figures. But then it’s taking that genuine lead and then tracking it right the way through to sale so that you can insert that value back into Google Adwords and just get a whole bunch of benefits from using the Google AdWords interface.
So that’s our advice. As ever please do leave your comments at the bottom of this video if you have any questions please do get in contact but thanks for watching our video.
