Google Search Ads for Software Development Outsourcing - Costs, Conversions and CPA stats included Hey, fellow members of the growth marketers, I wanted to share with you one of my projects. 🙂 At the beginning of this year, I got a new client, a software development company from Europe. How I won the client I run Google Search ads for keywords around the topic of “Google Ads management freelancer” and a client submitted the form on my website. We went on to an introductory call and I prepared a personalized presentation. In the presentation, I added initial keyword research. Although I never talked to the client before. This turned out to be a great move because it helped me to stand out from the competition. Later in our collaboration, a client told me that initial keyword research was what persuaded him to start working with me. Because it showed my way of thinking. Middle of March - Start of the collaboration To start, I implemented the client’s initial feedback and did more detailed keyword research. While picking keywords I focused on specific services rather than going super wide. For example, instead of using keywords like “software development outsourcing” I decided to focus on “AWS consulting” or “.net outsourcing company”. I grouped keywords into ad groups by theme, aka STAG. It helped a lot that client already had landing pages for the services I picked. Next, I set up the campaigns. I started with 10 campaigns. I used a new campaign for each service and location group (EU, North America, etc.) combination. On the initial setup, I used the Max Clicks bid strategy with no cap to test the field and see what kind of CPC I’d get. I didn’t select a campaign goal. I made sure that advanced location settings are set to “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations”. I disabled Google networks. I set the language to English. The daily budget for all campaigns combined was approximately 200$. Since we are targeting CTOs, on the ad group level for the US and Canada I disabled the audience with a lower household income. Initially, I didn’t set up any other optimization. Next, I created the ads and ads extensions. Before hitting the enable button I fixed the conversion tracking in Google Tag Manager. No micro conversions, only real conversions - contact form submits. 1st of April - Starting the campaigns. Usually before starting I don’t set up too many negative keywords, just obvious ones. In the first few days, I focused on polishing out the search terms, adding negative keywords, or pausing the keywords that were attracting the audience with the wrong kind of search intent. During the first few weeks of running ads I also regularly check Google Analytics, Clarity/HotJar, and other analytics tools to make sure everything is working fine. For example, I want to be 100% sure that UTMs are set up properly and that ads are linking to the appropriate landing pages and stuff like this. First conversions In the second week of running the campaigns we already got 2 conversions. After that, I felt like we were on the right track and switched the bid strategy of most of the campaigns to Max Conversions. The reason why I didn’t go for Max Conversions from the beginning was that I wanted to give Google Algorithm some knowledge about conversion before going for Max Conversions. 30th of April - End of first month We received a total of 5 conversions. The CPA was around $900.4 out of 5 were sales qualified leads. On optimization, I focused on refining the keywords. My goal was to make sure that 90% of my search terms had good search intent. 31 of May - End of second month I didn’t change the budget. Usually, I tend to change my budget once per month so as not I don’t mess up Google’s Algorithm with too many changes. So, with the same daily budget, I also had 5 conversions, coming to a similar CPA. 30th of June - End of the third month Same budget. We got 8 conversions. CPA: 570$. July After 3 months of running ads and optimizing keywords, my keywords were in good shape.I was quite happy with the terms in the search terms report. I refined ads and set up different options. 6 conversions. CPA: 700$. End of July and August - Conversion rate optimization I would rate the client’s landing pages 3.6, not great, not terrible. Since my spouse is a senior UI/UX designer I was able to upsell my client’s new landing page design. We made a lot of improvements. It took a while to develop them due to the August holidays. We created new landing pages and directed traffic to them. I was thinking about doing A/B testing but in this case, improvements were quite obvious so I decided to go directly to new pages. In August we created a few new campaigns and created a great guide to use as a lead magnet and it worked well. We raised the daily budget to $250.I set the ads schedule so the ads run only on weekdays. We received a total of 11 conversions. CPA: $500. Up to this point, we have 2 leads at the end of the pipeline. Very close to signing the deal. Next steps - September Since we published new landing pages in the second half of August I’ll let the ads run with minor optimizations in September to see the impact of the new landing pages. Then I’m going to create experiments and I’ll test out if I can get better results with Manual CPC. Feel free to ask me anything.