Is AdWords Too Expensive?

[cckid]

I have been dabbling in PPC now for about 6 months and have only been able to make about $50 after all of my work. I've promoted products in the health industry, work at home industry, and many others.
My question to you more experienced and successful AW advertisers is, how do you make a profit? It seems to me that keywords are so expensive now! Most of the words I bid on cost roughly 50 cents per click! That's no way to make money on most niches...
If you can throw out any nuggets of helpful information, I would be truly grateful!
Thanks!

[CustardMite]

When you say that the keywords cost $0.50, do you mean that that's the minimum bid?

If so, then you need to improve your Quality Score...

There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to get clicks for $0.05 or less...

[atrain2442]

There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to get clicks for $0.05 or less...

Agreed. However, if the word is in fact that expensive, then you are likely working with a word that is too broad, where competition is high. Exact matching more specific words/phrases can help get you around this if you are looking to stay in the same niche.

[mikesed]

I agree with Custardmite.

Are you just writing ads and sending your clicks straight through to the affiliate site? If so, thats going to be one issue.

To improve your quality score you need to get a good relationship between the keyword you are bidding on, the ad and the landing page you are sending your clickers to. If your keyword is in your ad and your landing page, then your quality score should be ok.

[GeorgR.]

i actually NEVER get a decent position for $0.05 keywords....except that would be some extreme newly discovered niche where there is literally no competitor. Avg maybe $0.25 +/- CPC with decent ad position.

[loshara]

Bids of keywords depend on market that you are advertising and of course on your quality score.

If you are trying to advertise in "make money online" market, then you are going to spend lots of money on keywords, because the market is really competetive which means keywords are more expensive.

[CustardMite]

i actually NEVER get a decent position for $0.05 keywords....except that would be some extreme newly discovered niche where there is literally no competitor. Avg maybe $0.25 +/- CPC with decent ad position.

It depends on how you interpret the original question. You won't often appear very high bidding your minimum bid - what I wasn't clear about was whether $0.50 was the minimum bid, or the amount required to appear high in the search results...

[cckid]

Hi everyone!
I think I opened up a can of worms I didn't even know I had.
So what I meant was that some of the words the minimum bids were .40, .50 or more. How can you guys get words for 5 cents?
This is how I normally do things:
I find a product to promote, create a website, and have adwords send users to my site.
I have tried sending the user directly to the affiliate but that didn't work too well. For example, I tried a program about 2 months ago about working on cruise ships. The minimum bid for those words were $40. Not .40, but 40 dollars. I kind of laughed and thought there was no way but sure enough I couldn't enter that market and would never be able to make money b/c the payout was only $35 per sale. So, how does that work?
Thanks again for all of your insight!

[loshara]

I am not sure, but I think campaign history affects your perfomance, and even you have perfect keywords,ads and landing pages you are not going to minimize your costs, because your campaign was poor in the past.

P.S. Correct me, if I am wrong.

[PPC-Coach]

How do you lower your bids? Increase your quality score. How do you do that? There's a ton of ways, but most importantly, make everything relevent, your keywords to your ads to your landing page to your landing site to your outgoing authority links to your incoming links.

Now you pretty much have to seo your site to get a low qs.

Ever try advertising as a merchant? Bids are a lot lower then advertising as an affiliate... :)

[cckid]

i have noticed that bids are lower as a merchant...i am just curious how people manage to make money as affiliates using adwords. i wonder if anyone would be willing to provide a case study on a campaign they ran and highlight what they did to make a profit. i've read a few books on ppc advertising and these people seemingly made a lot of money ... but i wonder if that was before QS was a factor in keyword bidding.

[sachin410]

what if position is poor in spite of a good quality score?

http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/9277/adcostqj1.gif

[blogdude]

For many keywords $.50 is actually quite cheap. Many are way, way up there and climbing higher. Just look at what was it last year? Mesothelioma, SEO, skin care, hairstyle, viagra, prescription drugs, etc...

Blogdude

[Gydian]

I don't think it is. I spend anywhere from $0.50 - $1.25 CPC for my ads, and I get excellent conversions. I guess it really comes down to what your product is. Just for traffic though, I do agree it's too expensive.

[nickflame]

for me adwords is free- i am NOT talking about arbitrage sh1t here-, just have to replicate the model at a larger scale and i am going to get very very rich soon.

[ski master]

The cost of a click is one factor, the conversion other. Are you getting the right people to your site and is your campaign targeting the right audience.
It is better to get less but quality traffic than thousands of clicks and no conversion.
The expensive click that will get you higher conversion may well be worth it.

[movidalatina]

::speechless::

[bigboy20]

Yeh it is more expensive than others.

[ski master]

SEO is the cheapest way of getting the relevant taffic, lets say you have a budget of $3000 for payper click and it runs out in 12 months, in that time for this amount of money you could get organic traffic that would be better and would be there for a long time to come.
The trick is to balance the SEO with your PPC within the budget.

[CustardMite]

what if position is poor in spite of a good quality score?

Either your competitors all have a higher QS than you (unlikely, if there are 24 of them, and your QS is Great), or they are bidding more than you.

If a click is worth £10 to your competitors, most are going to bid £5 to get them.

So, either you are bidding too little for the clicks, or you aren't making as much as your competitors from the term...

[cckid]

Well, I've played w/ adwords this weekend and found that for all of my keywords, none ranked lower than "ok" while about 15% or more were "great". I also believe that my sites are pretty good but this month I haven't made a dime (although the last 2 months brought in about $450).
I think that I need to take another look at my sites and figure out a more aggressive strategy to earn me more money in the long run. I agree w/ ski_master that SEO is the way to go but that is really a long-term project and really hard to do. I'm struggling w/ learning SEO right now and it's a frustrating lesson to be sure.
I guess nothing worth doing is easy, right?
I'm looking to find a way that I can bring in a few extra bucks a month and thought I had something figured out but it turns out that I now am starting to know that I really don't know much. :)
What niches have you guys been able to exploit to make modest returns consistently?