Right now, it is about $7 per day for the only set I am currently using. I was kinda peeved at G for their algo changes so I am working with a few others right now...
depends up to $25/day during the holidays, but now around $12/day. My conversion is average, so I have been focussing on SEO more. Have you installed the Ad Word conversion cookie in your shopping cart?
I don't do my own, but I manage AdWord campaigns for a marketing company. Right now I do account management with an aggregate $3000 a day spend; about 18,000 keywords total.
I have spent $3.12 so far in the month of March. I used to manage a much larger campaign, but when the organic SERPs were humming along, I shut down most of my campaigns. My site is geared towards getting first contacts and not direct sales though.
$12/day but would spend more if I knew the actual conversion. Because I sell wedding apparel, people rarely buy the first time they enter my site. Mostly I get people who are shopping around. So my conversion data is practically zero. But I get a ton of people who type my URL into the address bar or use a bookmark, and place an order after going directly to the merchandise they want.
Me? nothing. I think if a site is good then people will advertise it for free, if a site is bad then why pay to advertise?
$40/day on one key word on Google (I just upped it from $30 .... getting more "aggressive" as suggested to me on another thread .... excellent advise ... it was stupid to have been losing those extra sales to "your ad is NOT SHOWN ... you have exceeded your daily budget) Will have to start Overture again ... my site went from #4 to #17 in Yahoo .... in one day. And I didn't change anything. So I will probably spend $10 - $20 there too.
Hi Anthony Sorry for taking so long to get back. The company I work for has a propriety interface they wrote that I use. It doesn't push (not yet) but it pulls everything down and gives me a place to go to get all my reports. I can pick out the words I need to look at (the ones that eitehr arn't meet or are exceedig goals) and then go to the provider to make the changes. Saying 18,000 keywords and a $3000 a day spend is a little misleading, in the sense that like anything, it's the top 10% of keywords that account for 90% of the budget. I don't even look at a keyword until it has a sample large enough for me to make a statistical analysis. Once it has a hundred clicks or so, that's usually a large enough sample for me to make bid decisions on based on how the overall campaign is performing. Let's say those top 10% keywords are turning a 2% conversion. Once a word reaches 100 clicks, I expect two conversion from it. If it has less, I'll bid it down to keep precense, but minimize cost. If it has more, I might bid it up to inclrease volume and see if it kleeps the conversion. If it's right where I expect, I leave it alone. Cost comes into play too. If I'm paying 10cents a click, I can eat 100 clicks without a blink. In my experience, it takes about 60-90 days for a campaign to really settle down. Once you reach that point, it's pretty much tweaking.
I happen to be writing an asp/SQL Server based WAP that will allow aggregate reporting down to the keyword level on Google and Overture. It will be able to show cost per conversion, return on advertising spend, conversion rate, gross margin and more. I expect I'll have a no frills version up and running in about 2 weeks. The biggest difference between my WAP and the commercial ones out there, at least to start, will be that you'll have to manually run your Google and Overture reports at the Google/Overture site and then import them into my WAP to get your advanced reports. Automating a pull feature for auto-updating is certainly on my to-do, but that's probably pretty far in the future. As far as commercial, there's GoToast, by AtlasOnePoint (http://www.atlasonepoint.com/). For 79.95 you get 100 keyword reviews (which could mean 100 words updated once a day, or 50 words updated 2x, etc). For 249.95, you get 300 reviews, and for 650 you get 3,000 reviews. There's PPC Mangement Pro (http://ppcmanagement.com/pricing.htm). I wasn't quite able to figure out their pricing though, as it seems they not only charge for keywords, but also for click throughs. So on first glance it looks cheap, but then when you add in click tracking, the price increases fairly quickly. There's also BidRank (www.bidrank.com). They also seem to charge by the keyword, with a 50 keyword edition starting at 129 a month. I'm envisioning a system that works on percent of spend, though I've yet to nail down numbers. As many keywords as you want, paying based on how much you spend each month with two options; you use my WAP to manage it yourself, or you pay me to manage your bids and load reports for you. More to come as I nail down the specifics. My target customer is people like us, small entrepreneurs or niche marketers who want a system that can help them maximize their PPC efforts, but don't want to pay hundreds a month to get it. We're fairly technical, like tinkering, and would (most of the time) prefer to do it ourselves. So a WAP that requires a more technical ability isn't beyond our grasp, and we'll do a little more of the work ourselves (like downloading and importing reports) to save money.
Fantastic contribution to the forum, thanks for your knowledgeable post iShopHQ So you are developing your own PPC software