Do any of you work in a niche where there may be less than 10 total clicks per day on an ad, per item? I am getting this figure from the AdWords Traffic Estimator. Is this just asking for trouble? I am looking to get involved in a very specific niche and I was wondering if this is just too little search traffic per product, per day. Because of the targeted nature of the search, and low cost per click (estimates no higher than ~$1.50), it doesn't appear that I will need to budget more than ~$10 or so to cover all my clicks. However, with the relatively high cost of the product ($800-1000), I would only need to convert to a sale at a rate higher than ~3.6% to profit. One thing to note, the product I am interested in promoting is much less expensive than usual, and is a really good value that is easily recognizable. Plus I have a 7 day cookie which allows buyers to mull their decision over. I am going to be preselling the product on my own site, as I can actually endorse it and similiar low-traffic, high-cost products myself. Is an estimated sub-10 clicks per day simply too low-traffic a niche to get involved in?
I've found the traffic estimation tools to be off, significantly, in just about all cases. I would suggest running a small live test campaign to better judge the traffic potential before making a decision on how to proceed.
For an $800-$1000 product, I think 3% conversion rate for PPC-driven traffic is very optimistic....it depends on the product and the landing page, though. The amount of traffic itself is not a problem per se, because the traffic level is not necessarily related to the conversion rate. So it may be that you need to work on multiple niches like this to be able to get the overall profit you want. As GuyFromChicago said, test it out for yourself and see how it goes.
Depends what the conversion rate is.....if your product is cheaper, better etc than other products in this niche then you might actually get a good conversion rate depending on the traffic you get and your sales process. I agree that the traffic estimator tool is frequently out. Often when I setup campaigns in new niches I know nothing about, I find that the results are very different. In other words you don't know till you try, but testing a product in a small niche is far safer than going into a niche (like finance) where the cost per click is very high or a niche like travel where there is a tremendous amount of traffic.
Okay, so what I am hearing a lot is that I need to test for myself and then I can have a better idea of what my strategy should be. I am probably going to start with a few related items that are low traffic, high price, yet are stilll competitve within their niche as far as price and quality go. One quick question - when you say the traffic estimator is frequently off, are you referring to the amount of traffic or simply the prediction of my bid prices, or both. Like if it says I can expect to pay about $1.50 per click, could I check it my first day and see I have bid once for $9 and pretty much shot my budget for the day? I would imagine this is possbile, but the actual amount of traffic probably differs more than the bid estimates themselves. Whatever the case, there is only one way for me to find out for sure - trial and error.
If you set your maximum CPC at $1.50 -- then you won't pay $9. At first set your bids lower than you think and see how much traffic you get...then play around with different bid prices till you find you have a profitable campaign.
Both. In my opinoin the estimator should come with a disclaimer, "this tool is for entertainment purposes only".