In October and November my business is usually pretty slow. We can spend the same amount in PPC ads in September and October and get drastically different results in terms of sales. So this time of year, we're looking for ways to save some money and we're willing to test some ideas we've been too afraid to try during good months. Long story short, I recently switched all my keywords from broad match to exact match. Then I used the keyword tool to scrape together every possible keyword I could find. My impressions and clicks dropped by half. My daily spend is now a half to one-third of what it used to be. But my click-through rates have skyrocketed. Has anyone else tried this? How did it all turn out?
Most importantly, what has it done to your conversions or ROI. That's the only stat that really matters.
Yep, there's no point in buying tons of non-converting clicks! I'm always advising my clients to focus on ROI, but do they listen ...? Another thing to try is add negative keywords. Have you done that too? You should see your CTR go even higher ... and the ROI usually gets better as a consequence of the negative keywords, but always keep an eye on it. H
Since the vast majority of our sales are done by phone, it is extremely difficult to track ROI. It's not simply a matter of tracking a keyword from ad click to online order. We're in the process of setting up phone tracking through a company called Who's Calling, but until that's in place, it's all a big nebulous mystery as to which keywords actually result in phone orders.
Very nice suggestion Sarathy. You can find more information on that here :http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html
I just looked at that FAQ for the calling feature....would that mean you would use your computer microphone and talk through there? I wonder if people aren't using that feature because they don't know how it would work.