OK, A little background. I started with about 40K keywords for ringtones. Loaded them all up in big groups of 1000, and of course had a TON disapproved. talked with Google, looked at their PPC tutorials online, and decided to tighten up the ad Groups for better Quality Rank, ad relevancy, etc. So, I did that and Google is still disquallifying all of my terms for low QR, on words/Ad Groups that should clealry be relevant. Example: my site: Ringtones.25x8mafia.com my average bid = $0.20 my ad: 10 Bonus Mobile Ringtones No credit card required. Download 10 100% bonus mobile ringtones now. ringtones.25x8mafia.com AdGroup: Mobile Ringtones (146 keyword, 137 inactive) examples inactive: ringtones for mobile, ringtones for mobile phones, mobile ring tones, mobile phone ringtone, etc. active: mobile phone tones, cheap mobile ringtones, etc. there does not seem to be any valid reason for the inactive words as compared to the active words. I see other sites that have the same general approach as ours, and it is my guess they are not bidding $0.40+ a keyword - even at a 2%+ total conversion they would have to be getting huge payouts from the ringtone providers to be just marginally profitable. (at $0.40, they would need @ $20 commision for each customer just to be breakeven on the ad cost) All help appreciated.
1) Where did you get these 40k keywords from? - You probably are completely lost in your 40k keywords. You don;t know the keywords that worth to pay $1.00 and the keywords that don't. start from scratch go to keyword tool and begin searching "ringtone" and adding relevant keywords one by one. 2) your ad is a problem: what do you mean with "Download 10 100% bonus mobile ringtones now."? probably it is very clear for you and only for you - I would not click in this ad. This is killing all your keywords CTR and Quality Score. Try adding 6 different ads per adgroup, if you have 1 poor ad in the group, the system will not show it. 3) your display URL is a problem: "ringtones.25x8mafia.com". you are in this business paying $$$ to AdWords but don't want to pay $8.95 to register your own domain? 4) Your landing page is a problem: Don't looks attractive, pay for someone to design a professional ringtone layout or buy a template. Also you do not have content there this is why you have so many inactive keywords.
1) we built out on own list and used keyword Elite. I We took the 40K -> 10K of the most relevant words, and split them into 250+ ad groups for maximum relevancy 2) Interesting point on the ad - in our first run, we had multiple ads for each adGroup. 3) that is my own domain, one of many we own. www.25x8Mafia.com is our main blog we use to right about ringtones, music, etc. the subdomains are for the speciic sales pages. 4) Design points are interesting. We do have content - both the article in the middle of the page and the link at the bottom which talks about articles and information. Know if you are saying the content is not enough, I understand that. We looked at what others where doing in ringtones and tried to mirror a similar design for what we saw in terms of the top PPC placements - we found very little deep content on any of them.
You ad copy can be better. Read Micromag's posts above. Your landing page takes too long to load and can be improved. Do you want to cut out all your dialup clickers? Your display URL looks cluttered, however it -may- actually increase clickthroughs since it may attract attention. Although I would actually register a specific domain for your landing page to get the targeted clicks. Some people may just click because they want to know what 25x8mafia is. As Micromag said, start with a smaller number of keywords so they're manageable for you. Once you start converting with those, then you can worry about bringing extra keywords in to increase volume. On that note, you sound like you're new to adwords, I'd suggest you try an alternative market since ringtones is extremely tough to break into for beginners and literally calls for the best optimization in every area.
What would be a smaller thing that would be good a newbie. Not something that would make a ton of money but just something were I won't lose money that would help me get started in this field.
Good point about the domain name for the landing page. It was our intent to try and brand 25x8Mafia for other mobile/entertainment offers, which is why we went the path of subdomains. Landing page loading issue is frustrating. I am speaking with Yahoo about how to increase my bandwidth. It could also be that I use our blog as a content repositry and pull from it ussing rss2HTML for content, which may be causing some speed issues. My partner and I are relatively new to adwords - 6 months. We had success with selling software via Digital River, wanted to find a market that was larger to grow in. I guess what suprised me was that google put a low QR on it immediately. My thought was perhaps we did something fundamentaly wrong on the page or in our load that set off some Google red flag. so questions that I have at this point are: 1) Is the ad Copy that bad in terms of effecting QR? 2) Is using a subdomain negatively impacting QR? 3) If we wanted to start with a smaller set of AdGroups with a total of about 500 keywords, do we need to create a new campaign? Is having other adgroups with inactive keywords a problem - does google look at the whole history of a campaign when assigning adGroups? 4) Does loading speed effect QR? Thanks for the feedback.
I wanted to follow up on this a little more - we where considering serving up dynamic content for each of our tightly focused adgroups to help improve QR. We had not yet gone down the path of writting or purchasing good content, and developing the code to dyanmically serve it up, because we did not see a lot of content on any of the affiliate ringtone sites that where advertising by PPC. How are they optimizing QR with such little content? example: position 4 for "bollywood ringtones" via google: http://www.free-artist-ringtones.com/free_ringtones_quigo.php?q=Indian Ringtones
The question you've asked is the million dollar question for affiliates, figure this out and you're set @chrisenhoover 1) It's your ad copy and bid that're affecting your QR the most. 2) No, your subdomain is not reducing your QR, if anything, it's improving your QR since it's in your URL... although some may contest this. You are getting more bold text so this may increase your clicks. 3) It's up to you how you want to manage your campaigns. I'd suggest you just tweak your existing one or pause your campaigns that you cannot manage at the moment. 4) Loading speed doesn't affect QR, it will, however, affect your conversions and whether people even bother to stay long enough for your page to load. Your loading speed has nothing to do with what bandwidth Yahoo gives you, and it directly proportional to how large your site is. Use some gif/jpeg compression to reduce it. Your problem is expecting to get 20c clicks in one of the most competitive PPC niches (at least since Shoemoney blogged about it). Too many newbies will read his 10k experiment and attempt to get into it. They forget that the market is constantly changing... the removal of the word "free" in the ringtone campaigns has made it slightly harder to convert for a lot of people.
Art, good points. My business partner and I have done radio and infomercials in the past - we understand that direct marketing is a "hard way to make easy money". You points are well taken on the ringtone space - we have some other campaign ideas cued up that we are going to explore. We had not moved on yet as we are having such a difficulty with approval in Google. It was our thinking that we wanted to get a firm handle on how to generate the online traffic. When we would run infomercials, we would always focus on getting the phones to ring first with the ads, then figure out conversions. We are attempting to apply the same logic to our online marketing. I had not spent anytime optimizing the website for load. I know slow sites drive me crazy personally - I will look into what we can do for it. In terms of our QR, how important is relevant content? While I understand it can help, I see a lot of ringtone affiliates with what I would consider to be very light or no content at all. It is confusing that I hear on the boards and from the search companies content is critical, but see something very different in terms of the top ads. What am I missing here?
All good advice from the previous posters. Honestly though, you could implement everything and improve the ad, url, landing page, etc., and I would bet you still couldn't touch .20 clicks. It's simply too competitive now. Cut your losses. Either come up with a different model for the vertical in which you can afford .40-1.00 clicks, or don't waste your money.
that is the $64,000 question I have been asking. From a conversion point of view, $0.20 is high. Using a goal conversion of 2% and a minimum of $10 per lead, that is my breakeven point. The part I am having a hard time with is $0.40 really the new minimum for the space? Most of the inactive for search are asking us to move to between $0.30-$0.50, with a few that want $5 a pop. The ones that want $5+ i clealry see as a relevancy issue to the content of the landing page - and I understand that. What I dont understand is why i am getting hit with higher bids on words like "POPULAR_MOVIE_A ringtones", but "POPULAR_MOVIE_B ringtones" is going through ok at the lower cpc. I have no more content on one movie vs the other, so it is not clear to me what the decision process is for google.
All, thanks for the help. We loaded some of the adGroups into an older account and immediately got approval at the lower CPC. We had switched to the client center, and where managing different verticals as different clients - well the lack of history hurt us and our CPC. Other suggestions on content, page speed, ad copy, etc. are being looked at as we continue to roll out.
How do you load that many keywords at once with Keyword Elite? I tried loading a thousand, and it froze while uploading, so I had to shut it down after a couple hours .. When I upload 100, it seems to be okay ... Please help!
Whiteshark, we had the same issues. We had a 3 step process: 1) used Keyword elite + manual efforts to generate a list of 43K keywords 2) Used Keyword Companion to sort. This is a luxury item - if you are good with excel just use that 3) used Google tools to load keywords, used MSN import function, and sent to Overture for them to load