Experiment Results: Should I Rank 1st for My #1 Keyword

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These results are unusual.

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There is no right or wrong answer to, should I rank number one for my favorite

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keyword, we found a few things and the client decided to stop the experiment.

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Only after about a month and a half or two months, instead of running

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it until we got five conversions.

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Like I recommended being the most, the most competitive, the most seen

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is not always the most profitable for your business, which is interesting.

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This is something I've suspected for a long while.

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This is why I always.

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There is no right or wrong answer to that question.

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You have to do an experiment.

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Hi Regina here at solutions eight two months ago I made a video.

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It was called should I rank first for my number one keyword?

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This was a question that kept coming up and.

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In that video, I was setting up an experiment talking about all the

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pros and cons of the experiment.

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So now that the experiment that I built is done, I wanted

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to show you guys the results.

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So that's why you're here with me today.

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I'm gonna try to make it as fast as possible.

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The results were pretty interesting.

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Not what I expected to be honest.

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So we're gonna dive into that in just a second.

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Before I go in, if you haven't seen the previous video, I will

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link to it in the description.

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So check that out.

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I'll just kind of sum up that video in case you don't have the time to

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watch both videos in that video.

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I talk about all the pros and cons of running an experiment.

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Clients are often saying, Hey, I just wanna show up first for this

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specific keyword, because this is the keyword that explains what we sell.

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And so I wanna be the first at the top of the page, absolute top.

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And so, I'm always like, okay, well we can test it.

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But depending on the cost per click and your budget, it could take many, many,

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many months to get a good average and to really be able to see whether it is more

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profitable to be at the top of the page.

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Obviously being at the top of the page costs more, but theoretically your

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cost per click should be higher and your conversion rate should be higher

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because your showing being the first.

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For your ad should get the people that are kind of more ready to buy.

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They're willing to click on an ad, which means, they're kind

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of just looking for a service.

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And they're typically like a more high quality lead than someone who has

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been perusing all the search results in Google ads, sort of maybe wanting

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to learn about something and then accidentally stumbles across your ad.

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Right.

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Alar, a smaller percentage of those.

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Those bottom of the page searchers are gonna be actually ready and willing to buy

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and, willing to pay what you're selling.

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So alright, so let's dive in.

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I will show you the results of the experiment.

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And I just wanna preface this by saying these results are unusual.

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There is no right or wrong answer to, should I rank number

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one for my favorite keyword?

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The industry, the seasonality, the amount of competitors bidding on that

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specific keyword at that given moment.

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Your ad copy everything can shift the results one way or the other.

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And so I always just recommend running a quick experiment before

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you decide to make a big decision about your overall strategy.

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In this case, I told the client, unfortunately, because of his budget being

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so low and because of the cost per click in his industry, , he offers SEO services.

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So his cost per click is pretty high, cuz that's a high ticket item,

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high, highly competitive industry.

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So you can kind of take your budget.

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Divided by the cost per click and, kind of figure out how long is it gonna take

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you before you get, five conversions in the experiment so that you can kind

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of see the average cost per conversion.

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Right?

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So it's gonna take months.

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I told him.

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So I'm gonna head over to the experiment down here on the left.

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It's called absolute top impression, share absolute top impression share and.

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For SEO agency keywords.

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That's what it was called.

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All right.

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So what happened was Right away.

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we found a few things and the client decided to stop the experiment.

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Only after about a month and a half or two months, instead of running it until we

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got five conversions, like I recommended.

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And it's understandable.

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And I'll explain why this is not a glitch.

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I'm interrupting , because I need to remind you that I'm always

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looking for people to join our team.

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So if you're passionate about Google ads and you wanna work with the best

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Google ads agency on the planet, please go to so late.com/apply.

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trouble with Google ads and you want professional help, that's what we do.

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You can go to so late.com that's S O L eight.com to apply for your

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free no obligation action plan.

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Any level of value at all.

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Maybe think about giving me a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel.

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If you have questions, comments, concerns, or confessions hit

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me below in the comments.

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And now back to your regularly scheduled program.

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So here you can see the base versus the trial.

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So absolute top.

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So the bidding strategy was different in this one, we told it to just

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target top of the page for this specific keyword, no matter what.

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And we told it to use 40% of the budget.

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Now, first thing we notice is it didn't use 40% of the budget.

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It used about 25% of the budget, which is interesting.

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This is something I've suspected for a long while, because When you're paying

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more per click, it seems to be harder for the algorithm to do the budget pacing.

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We found that out.

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In our own, management, we have to adjust the budgets a lot throughout

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the month to try to spend the right amount increasing it when it

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falls behind, like in this case.

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So it struggles because, it spends its entire daily budget on one click and

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then it's out of money and it misses a bunch of clicks for the rest of the day.

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And then it has to wait until it gathers enough daily spend to get the next click.

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So it's just harder, more bumpy for the algorithm.

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So that was a little frustrating.

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You only spent 25% of the budget, not 40.

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Here was interesting.

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So as you can see, yeah, the cost per click is more, which we expected.

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That's always the case when you're trying to be absolute top of the page.

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And then , the click through rate was lower, which was highly unusual.

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I mean, usually when you're at the absolute top of the page,

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click through it is higher.

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This is why I always.

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There is no right or wrong answer to that question.

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You have to do an experiment.

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There could be some oddity that's different from the norm.

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And one metric will throw off the bottom line metric and sway

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it into the opposite direction.

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Right?

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So co per click being lower.

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Weird.

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Similarly, another thing that's weird conversion rate was lower.

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Now, granted, this only ran for a thousand dollars, so we don't have any averages.

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It only got one conversion.

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But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day cost per conversion

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was significantly higher for the experiment than it was for the regular.

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And the client said, ah, scrap the project.

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Let's just keep doing what we're doing.

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So our original strategy of kind of letting it bid

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lower down on the page often.

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And maybe sometimes we're at the top of the page.

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In fact, I can go back to the main homepage and see

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how often we're at the top.

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Absolute top of the page.

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Search.

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Absolute.

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Search top.

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Okay.

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So we're gonna apply these columns and view

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Here we go.

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Okay.

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right.

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So for this campaign, we're at the top of the page 21% of the time, absolute

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top of the page, only 13% of the time.

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And if we look at Here we go.

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I had to show all ad groups.

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If we look at the SEO agency keywords, which is the one we

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were experimenting against.

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You can see that it is absolute top of the page, thir 37% of the time

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search, absolute top impression, share 10 only 10% of the time.

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And then the top of the page, which doesn't mean absolute top,

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but just before the organic.

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So somewhere in the top three or four then it's 18% of the time.

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So that's interesting.

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It's actually still at the top of the page more often that

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it's at the absolute top, but.

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Most of our impressions don't even show up before the organic search results.

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And yet it performs better than showing up at the top.

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So yeah, just interesting to see what's going on there.

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I mean, being.

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The most competitive, the most seen is not always the most

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profitable for your business.

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So thanks for watching.

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Don't forget to like, and subscribe.

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Hi everyone.

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Regina here at solutions eight.

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I wanted to talk to you guys about how to use performance

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max and make it work for you.

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Even if you are a small business working with a small budget, I'm talking under 5k.