I've never run Adwords campaigns before, but I am itchin' to get some google users to a (theoretically) sandboxed site. This site is content driven (therefore revenues come from ppc ads). I know that there is a fine balancing act here between keeping adwords costs low and ppc revs sustainably high. My problem is tracking the success of my (search only) adwords campaign. I don't think you are able to set up a ppc click as a conversion. Is there a good metric for this kind of situation? I mean better than just observing how many people are referred from Google (I'm not in G's SERPs as of now). One other easy answer is to see if click-through's go up, but my CTR is all over the place from day to day, so I'm not sure how well I can trust that either. Any thoughts on this or any other aspect of managing adwords campaigns for content-driven sites? Thanks,
If you have tracking on your PPC you can append your adwords link to make it clear that it came from Adwords. I use an Adsense tracker can see where my clicks came from. I use something simple like www.mysite.com/myproduct/?adwords_abc. I don't just use ?adwords as it triggered Adsense to serve ads relating to adwords not myproduct.
Are you using Adsense and Google analytics? If so, you could track Adsense clicks with Google Analytics. As a side note, I've said many times that using Adwords to drive traffic for the sole purpose of generating Adsense clicks is "chasing pennies". No one that I am aware of makes any significant ($x,xxx - $xx,xxx) revenue using that method.
The particular site I'm testing with is running YPN at the moment as they are paying significantly better for this niche (at the moment) tbarr60, no, I don't have a tracker, I'm not really familiar with them- will read up. GuyFromChicago: If I switch back to Adsense, I'll try using my analytics account for that. About chasing pennies, I'm just looking to get more revenue short-term until the site ranks in G and Yahoo (MSN gives me all the love already). Anyway, my grandma always told me "watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves". I have other sites that don't need this kind of life-support and not all of them rely exclusively on PPC income. Also, I will be adding affiliate stuff on the site in question, so I am diversifying. What do you see as the most appropriate use of Adwords?
Personally, I think Adwords campaigns stand a greater chance of being successful/profitable when they are being used to promote a site that sells a product or service. I've even seen this model work (profits in the $x,xxx per month range) with affiliate sites. I'm sure people are making small amounts of $ with the Adwords to drive PPC revenue model...just not my cup of tea. Most of the time if I don't see the potential for $x,xxx per month, with a reasonable expenditure of time and resources, I don't move forward with the plan.
Hmm, That's an interesting perspective. I'm not sure I know how to earn x,xxx per month online yet. I have just in the last fiscal quarter bumped up to xxx p/m, though I aspire to your level. More learning to do, I suppose.
Congrats going from $xx to $xxx - it's a nice feeling You're making progress so just keep doing what you're doing and always experiment with new concepts and ideas. If you're like me you'll fail more often than you'll succeed for awhile...but the knowledge you'll gain from those failures is more valuable than anything you'll ever pick up in any forum, book or blog. There's no substitute for first hand, real world experience. Good luck!