I picked some popular heavily traffic sites and my Ad appeared right on the home page. About 260,000 impressions, only 176 clicks, spent almost $400. I feel ill. Is this typical of CPM advertising or did I get taken to the cleaners? In the past CPC worked out so much better but of lately Google takes too long to approve them and I miss the event or I just can never get them to display. The site is an informational site listed in both Yahoo and DMOZ, but I need to raise awareness of the site and of increase increase traffic. I guess next step is press release.
This is a typical CPM situation in beginning. is hard to make it work you need to spend some bucks first researching the sites that really convert for you. Do you has conversion tracking? if you don't have is very hard to know if you are spending your money in some thing that worth or not. I would begin with search network first until you know exactly how much you pay per conversion - so you go to CPM - and remember to go slow and establish a daily budget that will not catch you again. On CPM begin with 200 sites on your list and go researching and removing the sites that do not receive click or do not convert until the best 20 ~50 sites - after that you will pay cents per click - but as I said you will pay a lot until there.
The site that was getting most of the impressions is my exact target audience and top site in my same category. Conversion tracking? I am not selling anything if that is what you mean as my site is informational and interactive. I was just going by the stats provided by Adwords reporting. For the last few years I seemed to do much better on the search network. But I wanted to ramp things up a bit. Thank for info.