Google Ads for bookkeeping courses [2020

In 2020, I started working with a company that offers educational services for bookkeepers and accountants. My client is a reputable company in 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan and a leader in their field. With a strong SEO traffic of nearly 200K users per month, the majority of whom were visiting informational pages, they sought a new and scalable traffic source to boost their lead generation. This led us to begin working on their Google Ads campaigns.

The client’s website has numerous product pages offering courses for both current bookkeepers and those looking to start a new profession. There are over 30 course pages in total, and most of them are promoted through Google Ads.

What has been accomplished thus far

Due to the extensive website structure, significant time was devoted to conducting comprehensive keyword research in order to encompass all relevant keywords within the client’s niche.

At the very beginning, I incorporated the website structure into our Google Ads account, resulting in two campaign groups (by level):

3 campaigns for beginner courses
3 campaigns for advanced courses

We target three separate locations, so each campaign group has three separate campaigns. This allows us to tailor ad copy to each targeted location.

In 2023, we reviewed the account structure and revamped everything, merging the beginner and advanced campaigns. Over the years, Google’s keyword matching has become looser, making it quite a hassle to map keywords to the corresponding campaign. To address that, I made my peace with the non-ideal keyword mapping and did quite the opposite: let Google figure it all out. Doing so defeated the need for oversegmentation, and we significantly decreased the number of keywords, basically moving to a more broad ad groups with a higher number of keywords in each. At the end of the day, this allowed us to aggregate more data within fewer campaigns, resulting in improved performance.

Currently, our campaign structure is as follows:

3 non-branded search campaigns
1 branded search campaign
1 Performance Max campaign

To level up the performance of the non-branded campaigns, I went further and created a Portfolio bid strategy to feed even more data to the machine and better leverage smart bidding.

The PMax campaign was a game-changer. When I launched it, it diverted traffic from non-branded search campaigns and caused a slight increase in CPA. However, after a few months, both conversion volume and CPA returned to normal. What’s more important is that PMax has been generating over 100 additional conversions per month, which are about 50% cheaper than our non-branded search campaigns.

Since, as I mentioned earlier, the client’s brand is well-known, many competitors tend to use it in their paid search campaign. To make it harder and more expensive for them, we have a dedicated branded campaign (with a whopping CTR of 60%). Of course, the brand is excluded from the PMax campaign via brand exclusions and negative keywords. I have an article on how to do that.

Here’s the campaign performance for the last six month:

Results

Since launching our Google Ads campaigns, our campaigns generated over 6.5K conversions at an average cost per conversion of $6. Despite increasing competition, my campaigns consistently outperform the previous year’s results, which is probably the best demonstration of effective Google Ads management.