I have been working with adwords since the middle of the summer. I still consider myself a beginner at this which means I am basically thowing money out the door. I know that a high QS = higher page location. That history of the campaign and ctr are very important. I sell a variety of products on my site, some are in very competitive markets driving cpc up and some are relatively inexpensive. My account on adwords were very solid (decent conversion numbers) until one day when everything went to Poor. I had to start a new campaign which i have setup different adgroups for all the products i advertise. Here are some questions I need help understanding and figuring out best way to apprach... 1) How does constantly changing budget, bid scheduling, paused and unpaused adgroups, deleting and adding keywords affect my campaign as a whole. Is this type stuff affecting my campaign in a negative way. 2) If I am in a very competitive market, is it better to use broad, similar or exact search keywords. I was using exact and sales seemed slow, so then i switched to similar and sales were slow but better on some days than exact and I kept it that way and decided to try broad and that was a disaster. 3) I hear that someone made 30 sales in 1 day of the same product I sell, and then i look at my sales for the same day and I made something like 5-6 and spent a huge amount of my budget, but the cost per sale was huge. 4) I have between 15-80 keywords in each ad group, is this smart? 5) I let google optimize my ad groups, was this smart? 6) I hear negative keywords are good and i have some, but since i sell a variety of products and they are all in the campaign, some negative keywords could negatively affect some of the adgroups. 7) I was looking into using the google conversion optimizer, does anyone have any advice in regards to this? 8) I have so many questions, and I just want to be as competitive as I can without throwing away all my profit on adwords. I see other websites selling exact same products showing up in the 1-5 range constantly. If i want to be anywhere near them, I have to spend at least .50 to.60 cents more. All my QS are 7/10 and my ctr is around 1.02% all time. On 1 sale i net about 30-40 in profit but usually costs me between 20-30 per sale. All competitors are making similar profits, and my average cpc is between .85 cents to.95 cents. My budget is between 125-200 since i change it daily. As you can see if I get 50 clicks and only sell 1 product i lose money. Either my competitors have endless money, or they are doing something I am not. Direct me to a place of higher understanding! Thanks
That was a lot of questions... Might be worth asking them one at a time if you want a decent set of replies. One thing you absolutely should NOT do is let Google do anything for you automatically. Group your adverts manually, so that the advert is HIGHLY relevant to the keyword (generally, including the keywords in the title of the advert is a good idea, at least to begin with). You can enter negative keywords at an Adgroup level. Just put them in the keyword list with a -sign before them. Remember that you can put a negative sign before an exact or phrase match, to restrict its effect. E.g. -[widget], -"blue widget" Your Quality Scores are OK, but there's always room to improve. DON'T USE CONVERSION OPTIMISER!!! Apologies for shouting. Assuming that you've read the official Adwords Guide: http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/adwords/learningcenter/ then you may want to check out my free guide to Adwords: http://www.adwordsprofessional.com/google-adwords-introduction
I know this is going to sound like a cop-out, but I think you should really consider finding other ways to advertise your business. There are some websites that offer services in writing effective Google Adwords, but not many people are using Google Adwords anymore because it is SATURATED with businesses trying to make money. Google knows this, but does not care. Instead of saying, your ad will most likely not be seen because there is just too much competition, they take your money anyway. May I suggest advertising in other ways that will save you hundreds of dollars? Maybe you should think about paying for paid blog reviews. What you do is you find a blog that is relevant to your business/product/service and you ask a blogger to write a short blog post with links to your url website. There are many blogs with decent traffic (at least 500 views per day) that can pull in traffic for you and it is effective marketing as well. This paid review will only cost you $5-$10 each and you will get WAY better results than Google Adwords!
Interesting argument... "Adwords is saturated with businesses trying to make money." Isn't this quite common amongst advertising media? Adwords can be profitable, regardless of your budget, if you have a good product range and price, and a well-designed website (which will give you a good conversion rate, so you can afford to compete in an auction like Adwords).
Just think VERY CAREFULLY about it! If Google catch you at it you could find yourself banned from the SERPs altogether - it has already happened to some very big companies. I wish!!! Put in the most generic keyword phrase for my "niche" and it returns 45 000 sponsored results! Still, I suppose "not many" is a rather loose and relative term.
In short: leave ad groups alone for at least 3 weeks so your ads can be shown on partner network. You do not allow that by constantly changing keywords and adgroups. Check web logs for visitors from Google. Look at keywords that brought to you visits. If you not agree with some of them add them to negative keywords list. It is essential! Number of keywords is not important at all. Even more is for broad or exact. Google will show your ads whenever it can.
In reponse to some of the of your questions as numbered: 1.) Short answer is all these things in theory should not affect your campaign overall 2.) Depends on your product. I usually stick with exact or phrase as this allows me greater control over the campaign. There are instances though when broad is better.(Some say when you first start a campaign so that you can find keywords you didnt think about [I beg to differ as solid keyword research should allow you to bid on all relevant keywords]) 3.) This will be (most likely) due to your inability (or lack of experience) in reading your reports and seeing what need improvements and acting on this. Hire a manager who is also a marketing pro to compete more aggressively with your competitors. (Feel free to PM yours truly) 4.) No - tight clusters are better - see my blog for more info or Google: "oddoneout tight clusters" 5.) and 7.) Google is not a charity. They want to make money and will offer you tools that are meant to assist you but really assist Google shareholders. Hire an account manager to optimise (and indeed restructure your account) 6.)Negative keywords will help to reduce your cost per sale and may require adgroup based (as opposed to campaig based) negatives. You should however focus on the "bread and butter" aspects of your campaign before worrying about these though. 8.) Spend money on getting help. Learning the system can be expensive (but worthwhile in the long run). Hiring someone to setup a proper campaign though is a shortcut that will allow you to have a successful campaign but also learn from experience. I know many of these forums, including myself, can do this for you at a reasonable price.