Hi, I've been using Adwords for a few months. But I'm not too sure how to bid the keywords right. Based on your experiences, can roughly share your opinions? 1. When keywords don't show, it can be no one searching for the keywords, or the bid is too low. So how do we know whether to increase the bid of such keywords (long tail)? 2. When do you lower your bids for keywords? I usually lower my bids if my average ad position is 1-2. Am I doing right? I just want my ads to appear in the first page. 3. When do you decide to drop non performing keywords? I had thousands of keywords for each campaign. If I waited for every keywords to be clicked 100 times, I'll be broke by then. The tricky part is we do not know the conversion rate, so if the conversion is 1% and I decided to drop the keyword after 99 clicks, I'll be losing a potential good keyword! Really need some help here. Thanks!
What you are asking can be complicated sometimes. This is an art. I had the problems related to the cost pay click that I should pay vs. the number of visitors it brings. First, identify clearly your ROI. You need to know what is the maximum to bid before you do not make any profit. The higher you bid, the more often your ads will be displayed on the ad network. Sometimes I had to bid a minimum just to have the chance to get my ads being displayed. The problem I had is that the minimum required by the ad network was above my maximum for profitability (ROI). If your landing page is not converting enough, then you would need to change your keywords. In that case, you need to bid on less competitive keywords.
candy for (2) lowering your bids...? Why would you do that, let it be placed b/w 1-3 positions. If you are positive then let it be placed there, if you are neutral or a little negative adjust your bids or keywords and if you burnt your budget with no sales, move on and promote something else.
Reason I want to lower my bids is because I don't know what's the maximum bid for 1st position. Let's say it's a untapped market, the 1st position maybe $1, but I'm bidding for $5. Even if I lower my bids to $1.20, I'll still be at 1st position. There's no reason for bidding any amt higher than that. I can use the money to bid on other keywords. So rather fighting for 1-2 positions, I'll rather have my more keywords at first page, be it from position 1-8, I don't mind.
This is my biggest headache also. I don't know what happen. Sometimes my ads have impression, sometimes totally zero. I've been raising the bids to over 300% already. QS remains the same. But still no impression. Can't be no one searching for these keywords at all. Anyone can help ...
I think that is related to the how people bid. I do not what is your market, but it could be easy to figure out. For example, someone is running a large PPC campaign and it stops during the week because his budget limit is reached. That will create an ad space availability instantly. If you bid lower, then the ad may begin to appear at that time. People searches are relatively constant, but ad campaigns are less constant.
1) Check the google keyword tool - is it says only a small number of searches and competition is low then increase wait a bit. If there are a lot of searches and no impressions then you're not showing because you need to increase your bid or Quality Score (QS) 2) That totally depends on your own results - I usually find positions 3 - 4 are best, but that's just for me 3) You need to be ruthless with your KW's. Set a price per sale that you won't go above (i.e. break even at the beginning of the account) - if your KW goes over this then switch it off. If you've got thousands of KWs then you're gonna need a size-able budget at the beginning and must be prepared to take a possible loss as you're sorting your account out. The conversion rate will obviously depend on the niche, but also a lot of it is down to your site. If you site has a historical conversion rate then use this in your calculations.
Just like hardy mentioned you can check the top bid amount in google's keywords tool and bid that. However I like to use the example that candy mentioned - if the top bid needs $1 why would you bid $5 - its because you'll be charged still $1.01 even if your max bid is $5.
This could be a good start for smart low cost bidding with fast exposure of your ads. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1354859
Thanks for all the help! I have a campaign running for 4 mths. These are the sales each month. Feb - 7 Mar - 7 Apr - 5 May - 2 The keywords and bids are consistent. But I'm not sure how come sales keep dropping every mth. I've been trying to improve sales, but in the end sales dropped! I decided to pause the campaign a while to figure out what's happening. So how do you improve sales? Keeping finding tons and tons of keywords? Keep increasing bids? People are able to make 10-20 sales through PPC everyday from 1 single campaign. I'm wondering how do they do that? Thanks for sharing!
Yes after a while competition creaps in and you start to lose out. You Have to keep building on existing adgroups, find more keywords, find more traffic sources. I'm starting to create landing pages and designate someone for seo work.