Hello everyone, This has been a very useful forum. I have been reading your posts and contributing. I have to say without this forum I would be lost when it comes to internet marketing so I big thank you! Now I am in a difficult situation, a bit of a dilemma really and I need your help. I wrote and published my first ebook! It took me months of extensive research and writing to finally get it done. I am very proud of it. It is in a very good niche which isn't competitive or saturated as some others such as "how to make money online" or "how to make $1,000 a day with internet marketing". Nothing like that. I am offering a quality product. There was a gap in the market and I filled it. My ebook provides a clear benefit that is tried and test. It certainly has value. Furthermore, it is very specific and eve has sub-niches. There isn't a similar product out there to my knowledge. So as I said I wrote and published the ebook. It took time, but I finally did it. Then I built a sales page. That took time as well. But I believe a wrote an excellent sales copy. I even set up an auto responder on the website, to be able to capture e-mail addresses and provide a free report, to give me an opportunity to pre-sell the ebook. I basically applied many of the techniques and advice discussed in this forum. I also made sure my website was search engine friendly and that I used the right keywords for my niche. So I believe I have a great product to sell, a good sales copy, a good website. All I need is traffic so I can start converting my visitors. I decided to turn to PPC and to adwords naturally to achieve that goal. Of course I will also work on SEO, article marketing, back-linking and so on, but that takes time to see results. I am aware of that. However, in the meantime I want traffic in order to start seeing conversions. After that, my next step is to put it up at the clickbank marketplace and attract affiliates. Which I hope to be able to do- as its a quality product in a niche which isn't as competitive as others. But in the meantime, I am using Adwords. Now regarding Adwords. I have read many ebooks on the subject. I even did some affiliating marketing for a while and made a bit of money using adwords to market products. However, adwords has been going throuhg a lot of changes recently. I am finding it more difficult to use. Unfortunately, none of these ebooks address these issues. These ebooks are in a way obsolete as they took about the old Adwords- and don't discuss on how to succeed with the current rules and policies in place. So I started using adwords for my ebook. I used word tracker to get a good list of keywords. I also used adword's keyword tool which I find useful. I made sure I included exact words and phrases and not just broad keywords. I am confident my keywords are good. I made sure my website was optimised for those keywords. As a result I didn't have to bid much for them. Google will set a high price if your website isn't optimised for a keyword, something ridiculous like a minimum bid of $2.50 or $5.00. I didn't have that problem. In fact, my minimum bids were on average 10 cents to 25 cents. However, I couldn't go with the minimum as I wanted a higher ad ranking and exposure. I heard the trick is to bid high first then after your traffic is converting, gradually lower the price. So I did that. In fact, I bid as high a $1.00 on some keywords, because I was sure they would convert well. Then you know when you do an Estimate Traffic Search on Google. It says how many potential clicks you will get in a day. Well it said something like 700 for me. I had about 1000 keywords and all relevant. So I was exciting. And I put the daily budget at a reasonable level and Google said it was okay. So far so good. Now the next part should be I get my clicks, I get my traffic and hopefully I am converting. Unfortunately, that is now what happening. My problem is I'm not getting traffic. It has been three days now and Google Adwords is not even giving me enough impressions. Almost NIL. It is so frustrating. And the ads are very relevant. In fact, a lot more relevant then some of the other ads that are being displayed. The website is optimised. The CPC is right. I am confused. Why is this happening? In the first two days I got 9 impressions. Now finally yesterday I got 4 clicks and in fact the CTR was high at like 5%. Because my ads are catchy and very relevant to the keywords. I thought Adwords would reward me and display more of my ads, but nothing so far. It is very frustrating! When I contact Adwords, I don't find them helpful. They simple send me a link explaining that ads are affected by CPC and quality score. I know that. I made sure both are fine. But they are still not displaying the ads Please any tips or advice would be very much appreciated. I really want to kick off this ad campaign and I thought I did everything right. Am I missing something? Why isn't Google giving me the impressions I need in order to get the clicks? Google Adwords says I am supposed to be getting 700 clicks a day- I am getting nothing even remotely close to that. 4 clicks in nearly 4 days. Also it says most of my ads will be in position 1-3, my average position is like 19. Some are even at 50. Why? I also will mention I have the content network disabled. I have been told to stay away from it and only focus on keywords as they offfer much better conversions. Again any help would be much appreciated. Thanks again.
You need to improve the landing page quality. I lot of people thinks that they know what is a quality landing page, but they don't. Traffic estimator don't works. ...you may also get more answers next time if you do not write a so long query.
Possibly you arnt getting the clicks or impressions because you are in such a niche market and exposing that market may be difficult. You said it has been 3 days in my experience i didnt get any clicks or impressions for up to a week so i would give it a litlle more time and then check again.
Frankly some sites get tons of traffic with catastrophic landing pages, I'm sure it has nothing to do with it. Sometimes you need to let a campaign "settle down" before traffic start to show up, usually it takes 24-48 hours, but I had a campaign recently that only after a whole week (with no changes from my end) traffic started to show. By your description it sounds like you made it all "by the book" so you may want to give it some more time.
God, your post was soo long First of all congrats for your e-book and I hope that you will succed. About the Adwords campaign hextraordinary told exactly what you asked for. Give it some time. It is like a new shop which looks great but the buyers( Big G) are used to it. Once it will get used I am sure that you will have many click and sales for your e-book if you are saying that you did a great job.
You mentioned 1000 keywords. Try having 20 keywords in each ad group and make a minimum of ten ads. Make as many landing pages with this keyword. (could be the same landing page with just a higher emphasis on a particular keyword) Relevant as possible and tightly focused. Try to make sure your page is quality score compliant having legal disclaimers, privacy policy, anti spam policy and the like.
YES! i really don't think having 1000 keywords works too well any more. I try and keep each ad groups keyword list to between 50-200. for really targeted ad groups they might contain a total of 15 keywords. Your going to have to just play around with your keyword list to work out what works well for your niche. Again it comes back down to test everything.
What position was your advert appearing? If you're getting no impressions, then either nobody is searching for your keywords, or your advert is appearing too low down and nobody digs that far to see your advert. The landing page won't impact the number of impressions that you get - but it will impact your Minimum Bid Quality Score. As a result, your minimum bid will be higher. But that won't affect your campaign as it's already lower than you are willing to pay (and the landing page doesn't affect the Ranking Quality Score, which determines your position). As Micromag says, the Traffic Estimator is completely useless. All of the recommendations on this page will improve your campaign's performance, but only your keyword list and advert's position will impact the number of impressions that you get.
Thanks a lot all! You have been extremely helpful. I am in the process of redoing my webpage and changing my keywords. I know my original post was long, just wanted to put it all there. I have two quick questions that arose from your posts: 1. Having a legal disclaimer, anti-spam and privacy policy on the website does that effect quality score? 2. Most of my keywords are phrases or exact matches? Could that be the reason why I am not getting enough impressions? Google says the ads are okay and most of them show in first posistion. Perhaps should I expand to broad matches in order to get impressions? yes that traffice estimator is useless and misleading on Google. Thanks again for your help.
A Privacy Policy appears to be very important, according to a test run by Cianuro - see this link for details: http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/fear-the-bots-for-your-quality-score-sanity/ Regarding your second question, it's possible that broad match would give you a lot more traffic. Switch it on for a few days and see what happens. If you get a lot of traffic, look at the "Search Query" report, and see what people were searching for, then either add them on exact and phrase match, or add them as negative match. Broad Match is quite a good way to improve your keyword list, though it can be very expensive and poor quality initially...
You can see the minimum bid quality score by selecting that column in the 'customise columns' drop-down within your adgroup. You can't see your ranking quality score - but it uses mainly the same inputs as the minimum bid quality score, so it's as good a guide as you're likely to get.
Just click customize this column where you see the keywords. From there you can click "Show Quality Score" .