AdWords vs. online marketing?

I would like to get some of the DP members input on this?

I have spent about $80 on adwords and have gotten 231,000 impressions, 210 clicks a click thru rate no greater than 0.16 and a profit of under $3.00

Is adwords worth it? or should I just get out there and just promote through other avenues?

Thanks

 

You have 3 choices:

1) Stop your campaigns, learn adwords and resume your campaigns after your really know how to manage it

-or-

2) hire someone to manage your campaigns

-or-

3) give up from AdWords

 

I appreciate your being frank but you didnt answer the question.
Is marketing through other avenues better than adwords?

 

sorry,

In my opinion AdWords is the more efficient way to sell online stuff in the world - but depend of what is your business.

What is your business about?

 

Better luck next time, may be you have missed out on some tricks, because is definately more worth than this better to be carefull about fraudal activities.

 

You'll eventually find that the majority of people who advertise on Adwords do two things: bringing in targeted traffic that they otherwise can't get through organic (search engines) means to sites with high-paying keywords so they can convert (buy traffic for low prices, convert on high paying ads); or they're sending targeted traffic to landing pages in hopes the visitor will buy something from a third-party merchant, and they collect the commission. It is very rare that someone will go through the effort to buy traffic through Adwords to a "regular" site (i.e. sites not geared for high-paying keywords or merchant-heavy sites).

But to really answer your question, Adwords is probably not for you, and you should find some other avenue of advertising. What is your site's niche? You can try advertising in popular sites in your niche to bring the targeted traffic. It will be cheap, last longer, and the traffic will probably be better anyway -- you're already getting people who are interested in this stuff, since you're advertising on a site similar to yours.

 

Hey Jack - you have always come up with good answers... but today you have me scratching my head

If you say that "But to really answer your question, Adwords is probably not for you, and you should find some other avenue of advertising."

and then follow with "What is your site's niche?"

its a little confusing... but I get the gist of it... other marketing avenues... the site I am promoting is the one in my sig playpost.com

thanks

 

looks like you do not sell any product in your site.

The direct conversion adsense->adwords do not works so do not try to do that.

You could try to use AdWords to populate your forum, but this is very hard to do as a single new subscriber normally costs $0.50 ~ $1.00 in adwords.

 

thanks MM
that was helpful

 

Hi Yomick,

Your site can be an interesting case study. Like most people are saying, your website (in its current state and revenue model) does not justify adwords expenditure. The only reason u can use adwords is to get the initial set of forum members and then have some recommendation scripts in the forums to increase the user base.

Off the topic... but u shud try to monetize your forum using some other techniques as well. Using just adsense may not give u the best results. Use some industry specific affiliate banners along with adsense. There are tons of other ways to monetize forums. The Ebay editor kit (if used well) seems to work great for forums.

 

Forgot to add... other avenues of marketing:

1) You may have something good at hand. Your website looks promising. Make a press release for your site. You can get a free one at prweb.

2) Become a regular at forums similar to yours. You can gets tons of visitors from them

3) Include some tell-a-friend script in every page of your site. Word of mouth still rocks

I can go on and on. But the bottom line is - you need to pay to create a user base for your forums. There are tons of free marketing techniques to do that. Explore them and you will be a happy person.

 

As many have said so far, Adwords is not for everyone.

Here's how I use Adwords when confronted with a situation like yours:

I setup an adwords account and populate that sucker with as many keyphrases as I can come up with. I make sure to buy a good position for the words I "hope" will do well. Then I let that campaign run for a month or two.

After that period I analyze my web files. I use Google Analytics, but there are other tools. I see which users from which search engines stayed the longest, which keywords were best converting. By that I mean which search terms gave me the most "pages per visit" and which keywords have the lowest bounce rates. In your case this would include monitoring the navigation of your visitor - which ones made it to the subscription page.

Using that data I now have a good profile of what my natural search engine optimization should be. By that I mean I take those "best converting" keywords and then optimize my pages for natural search engine traffic.

Hope that helps a little!

 

Thank you very much. I will start with your suggestions.

 

yomick,

from your stats it appears that your average CPC is $0.38 - that is a little high just to drive traffic to your site. If you have some spare cash and desire to get some people attending your forum - AdWords can help. First of all you can not afford drive expensive traffic because you're not selling anything - you're just a forum and as we know forums don't generate very high revenue. So, here is what I would do:

1. Generate extensive list of broad matched keyphrases - you have a lot of topics and each of them can have quite a large number of 1, 2, 3 and 4 word keyphrases. I believe AdWords account/campaign allows you to have up to 20K keyphrases. This will give you good chances to get exposure.
2. If possible divide keyphrases into groups identified by type of sport or/and team. This way you can create ads for each group with the sport/team name and it will perfectly match search query, otherwise you'll have mismatched ads to search queries.
3. Write multiple ad copies for each group. I write as many as I can think of - usually it up to 8 ads for each group. Here is great article (with examples) how to write ad copies. If people will understand from your ad that this is a forum about sport/team they are looking for - you will have better chances to get registrations and avoid unwanted waste of money. Make sure you use all synonyms to word [forum(s)] too.
4. Since you're broad matching - generate extensive list of negative words (and plurals). Search for your keyphrases and see which words you don't want your ads to be triggered on in the search results. Use keywords generation/suggestion tools at Google and overture.
5. Make your maximum bid very small - I wouldn't make it more then $0.10, may be even $0.05.

This should give you a really good start on driving some traffic. I'm sure you'll be appearing at the end of sponsored results, but having a very large keyword list and straightforward ads will increase your traffic, forum registrations and eliminate unwanted clicks. You might even not spend a lot of money or get fewer clicks, but you will get legit registrations hopefully. Read ShoeMoney's article on 40K experiment Part 1 and Part 2 - quite interesting too.

I wouldn't disregard AdWords right away if you don't mind investing some into it.

P.S. Monitor your account and stats daily. Add new negative keywords that appear in your stats. Make judgments and changes based at least on a couple of hundreds clicks (1000 would be better).

 

Thank you very much. Yeah I was just throwing "it" up against the wall to see if it would stick. wanted to see it in action... found out real soon that I had seen enough.

Really appreciate your input
Thanks

 

I see that the FREE press release will have me way down at the bottom of the releases.

Anyone every pay for this service at prweb.com and was it successful or helpful.

Also I see that they have different packages... one for $200 that is a "SEO package" and it includes googles news, yahoo news and prweb disctribution amongst many other extras... any input or experience with this?

Thanks

 

I've only used the free service that PRWeb provides, but it has helped me to generate backlinks and drive traffic to my sites. I think the most important element of a press release is timing - if you have news that is truly worthy of a press release, it will get picked up. If you don't, I doubt that paying to give it high visibility will help much.

Just my two cents, for what it's worth...

Sam