Hi there.. I have been using adwords for about 2 months now and have this little tiny problem... You see if I choose to have my ads only show in North America I get very few hits even though I have a healthy budget. But, when I have my ads shown worldwide (Content network as well) I get a ton of hits and conversions. I'm not complaining, but I seem to be getting a lot of people from India joining my site and that is fine, but later when they realize that we only look with U.S. companies at this time (which it clearly states in my welcome email), we get a lot of unsubscribes and people asking for information pertinent to India. My question is, how can we get (Or better target) U.S. and Canadian traffic? Oh yeah, forgot to mention that, during North America's "prime time" hours of say 7am until 5 or 6 pm my ads barely show, then once India wakes up (+12.5 hours ahead of us) the ads start showing agin...It's almost as though the ads have a preference to show there when my settings have the entire world selected?! Thanks in advance for any help that can be given or "magic cures" anuone may know of.
In your campaign setting there is the option to show your adverts evenly or accelerated - which of these settings are you using? You should be using accelerated, else Google may be holding back your adverts until later in the day, or doing other strange things.
The settings are set to evenly... If I change them to accelerated will it make a difference at what time of day I do that? I would hate to change it to accelerated and have the same effects or worse
Ok - make sure your daily budget is affordable in case you get tons of traffic. Then set your targeting to North America (and Canada if you want) only and then switch to accelerated. You will then pick up everyone who searches for your keywords. If you leave it on evenly spaced, Google will not show your advert to everyone who types in your keywords! There is no good reason for this. If this works well and you start running out of budget before the end of the day, drop your bids slightly and you'll get cheaper traffic!
Just when you thought things we're bad, they get worse.. Adwords is so annoying! I log into my account this morning and all of my keywords are not showing and they want me raise to raise the bid price to $12.00 !!!! My CTR on the search network was well over 7% so there is no reason at all for this to happen! I deleted that campaign and started a new one with the settings you recommended, we'll see what happens.... Sometimes....Google makes no sense to me!
$12!! crazy. Are you comfortable with how Quality Score works? $12 bids sounds like either its an area Google regards as poor (in terms of other peoples campaigns getting bad CTRs) or Google doesn't like advertising your business genre or simply that your campaign isn't set-up correctly.
I'm pretty sure I get Quality Score...And, I'm fairly confident that my campaign is set up properly... I have a Stock Newsletter, so maybe google doesn't like it, who knows... If it's not too much trouble, maybe you could go over the way to set up a campaign just so I know exactly what you mean by that. My CTR was high (7 or 8%) or atleast I've heard that is good.
OK, this is ridiculous....! I just set up yet another campaign and they want a $12.00 Bid! What can I do to change this?
Likely cause - Stock Newsletter = data collection = you will get hit with high minimums as Google does not like your business model.
I think GFC is right - it must be your business Google doesn't like. Unfortunately there's no way around this. Maybe another search engine like yahoo or MSN would be better - but I don't have exp with those.
Basically, it sounds like creating a new campaign is not working because the Quality Score of your account is poor. The "Account" Quality Score takes into account all of your keywords and ad copy. So, even though you may have some keywords with a great CTR, all of those other keywords with poor CTRs will raise the bids on your "good" keywords. The good news is that you can repair it. Scroll to the bottom of this page and follow steps 2, 4, 5,& 6. As far as targeting goes, I would keep your targeting to areas where your clients are. The most likely reason the clicks are cheaper is because when you allow world-wide targeting is because there is not as much ad competition in those markets. However, even though you get cheaper clicks and more conversions, it does you no good if those clicks and conversions are not your audience. In other words, this targeting practice would be comparable to bidding on "britney speers", rather than "stock newsletter". You'll get lots of click, but they won't be the ones you want.
I would also suggest you try advertising at facebook as you are able to target at a very detailed level, including people within a certain country, age, demographics, job, etc.
I set up another completely new account and google still wants $12.00/min bid. Even tried changing the targeting to regions that I know don't get a lot of competition, and got the same result. $12.00 clicks...crazy..! I was only using 5 keywords, and they all had "Great" rating as far as quality score goes, so I guess I'll try changing up the landing page to see if that makes a difference
OK, so after a ton of time with google support, I changed my landing page, keywords, and ads, and I also added some negative keywords. Google told me that it would take a few days probably for their system to update, so I waited a week and.........NOTHING! Any advice, I'm really stuck here, and I don't know what else to try?!
Your landing page and business model most likely has some serious issues. Also once a URL has been slapped it very hard to recover. The best thing to do is use a new URL and create a better landing page, you do not need a new account