With my personal experience I came to know this when I first started Google's PPC campaign for one of my affiliate website. All of my money just went into vein and at last I had to withdraw the remaining money and stop the campain. In short, I came to know that without any deep knowledge about keywords, if you go for the Google's PPC campaign, then you are just preparing yourself to loose all your money.
It is definitely best to go slow with adwords if you are a beginner. If you must set a low daily budget and stick to it!
Don't feel alone. I think many of us have experienced this. When I started I went straight for "pc games" My traffic was Great!!.........for about 10 minutes until my account got depleted of funds for the day. DUH!!! Very Specific targeting is needed I have learned including the use of the negative keywords. I sell games so I don't want people clicking my ads looking for Free Games or game reviews. So using the negative keyword of "free", "reviews", etc.. helped with this. Since I want people to "buy" I found that going with the exact match with "Buy" in the phrase, though less traffic, converted much better. There is a lot of information out there on this subject. It just seems sometimes it is human nature to learn the hard way
Definitely agree - I see this a lot. Seems deceptively simple - throw some keywords and an ad into Adwords and let it rip. Unfortunately, there is so much more involved than that. The biggest problem I see is where people have not planned their keywords correctly and are using broad keywords which are irrelevant to their site - this lowers quality score, raises bid prices etc. and generally leads to poor results.
I've done this myself recently, my keywords I chose were very broad and I ended up losing $30. Luckily it's not much, I've got $25 remaining and I'll be using that at the appropriate time.
I'm a new user to adwords, can anyone point me in the direction of some good start-up guides/tutorials? Perhaps, maybe even a book?
I bought a lot of e-books on the subject and I sure became semantic-smart. Yet I couldn't make a profit. There's just too many nuances that can just be learned from experience. The problem is that if you delve into PPC without a plan, you'll bound to get broke before you get the necessary skills. My recommendation is for you to join a coaching program. They're affordable and you'll spend much less than learning by trial and error. Make sure you cover the following: profit = revenue - cost revenue = rev per sale * %conversion * number of clicks number of clicks = impressions * CTR cost = CPC * number of clicks Based on the above formula, make sure you get trained to do the following: rev per sale - you must look for a product/affiliate that pays reasonably high. best way is to be a member of a community of your peers that freely exchange this information %conversion - This depends on how well your landing page or your vendors site to convince the visitor to close the deal. If you use a landing site, you have to be well versed in sales copywriting. Then you make sure the product owner's site does the same thing or your effaorts are in vain. click through rate (CTR) - this depends on how well you convince surfers to click on your ads and visit your site. You must make sure, however, that you attract the right visitors so you do not waste your clicks on visitors that are not inclined to buy what you are selling. impressions - this is the number of times your ads are shown by the ppc engines. For goolgle, this would be adsense for the content network and ads on the search engine results. You want your ads shown on pages viewed by the right visitors for your ads. You control this through the keywords you feed the ppc engines. Then you want as much of the right impression as possible by bidding high enough on your keywords but not too high so your cost is greater than your revenues. cost per click (CPC) - this depends heavily on what keywords you want to bid on. some keywords are more competitive than others. for adwords your CPC also depend on what google calls Quality Score (QS). QS is dependent on your historical CTR and the quality of your landing page. So you need to learn how to get a high QS. Of course, how much you bid is also a major factor. the higher you bid, the more impressions you get. but then again, you don't want it too high as to incur a loss. A well known process of super affiliates is to run lots of campaigns in a test mode. They are not afraid to spend money to eliminate losers and when they find a winner is to squeeze profits hard from the campaign. These are the affiliates that earn six figures a month. This takes lots of guts. As you can see there's quite a few things that you need to learn and pay attention too. So it pays to find a program that will focus your learning efforts.
OH GOOD ADVICE . nicely written and described well. by the way I think min affiliate commission to promote a product must be 40 usd .If it is less than that we will looose our own money always because every body who clicks our ad will not buy our products. so select a very high converting product with unique ability to attrack customers . If you are not attracted to buy your product then normally visitors would not buy. thanks
I've never been able to grasp the workings and decent click thru rate with adwords, I prefer to give the site a bit of optimization just to be indexed into the normal search results.
I also got lost at first. I'm still a beginner with adwords. As mentioned above it is better to go slow at starting.
Beginners often make the same mistakes and that's why they lose a lot of money. Things such as: - Putting too many keywords into a single Adgroup and not doing 1-2-1 with the more popular keywords - Not doing just exact match if their budget is low. - Incorrect account structuring. - Not Split Testing, so they never better their Ads. - Poor Ad writing. They don't think from the searcher's POV and instead write cheesy, salesy type ads which often get overlooked as they sound too good to be true. - Not include some filter keywords in their ads, to prevent the wrong type of person clicking your ad. - Not maintaining their account correctly. They set it up and leave it, instead of starting off to check their Campaigns daily, which eventually goes onto weekly, 2 weekly etc.
For affiliate Adwords advertising, you should keep in mind of your CPA. If the CPA is lower than your Affiliate earnings, it's fine. Stop doing it when the CPA is higher than what you will be paid.
It help to generate the traffic . But how do you use the traffic its totally on you. In sale its hard to convert the traffic if you are using "free" keywords.
First of all you cannot thourgh a few keywords up and expect to make money, just dosn't work that way. You need to find out whom your competitors are and what they are doing and what keywords they use before you set-up a campaign. The only free I use is FREE SHIPPING in my adword campaigns, meta descriptions and web pages.
If you are expecting your visitor to pay something, then using the keyword "free" will work to your detriment. you'll just be throwing your $ for clicks that have no intention of buying. In fact, you want "free" to be a negative keyword so you can filter out those surfers looking for freebies. You can use the keyword "free", however, if you are goiing after leads for a promotion advertising free promotions like "chance to win a free $1000 WalMart card", etc.
yes. You need to go through a large number of niches, keywords, offers. The key is to do your tests smartly and cheaply to uncover the gems that will make you big money. Typically, you will test 15-20 campaigns to uncover one that will make it worthwhile. Hopefully, your revenues from these gems will be much bigger than your testing costs. You learn from experience what the least amount of test time you need to decide whether a campaign is a bummer or a keeper.
Hey, you are absolutely right! It is much better to go to an PPC Internet Marketing School to show you how to do it.
That depends if the 'school' has the right teachers. There's some users who post on here who have their own blogs, 'schools', guides etc, but it's not taught in the correct way. I still stand by what I've said before. Keep your money in your pocket and save that for your Adwords account. The DP forum and other similar ones, added to the Adwords Help centre is all you need. Actually, every bit of information you'll ever need on PPC is free via a pretty cool website: http://www.google.com There's an Affiliate section on DP so if you are planning to use your Adwords account for that, then read that section.