Hi, I'm more or less a beginner with adwords. I have basic SEO experience and was beginning to think I understood it, but after 2 or 3 weeks of time consuming effort with adwords on my new website I've realised I actually really don't know what I'm doing. My first page bid has increased by a factor of 20. My ad impressions have dropped by a factor of about 500-1000. First I was using broad keywords. Then when things started going bad I moved over to phrase matching and in some cases exact, and also putting the keywords into the ad-titles, and focusing on the most relevant long tail keywords. And now I've just moved over from CPC to CPM, in the hope that it will repair my quality scores but I'm totally guessing. What on earth is going on? Please ask anything that will help! Thanks
Changing to CPM won't repair the damage, it'll just make sure you keep running through money without even getting clicks. First off - have you separated out search and content campaigns? Unless you have a very particular reason for wanting to have content, I'd suggest you just concentrate on getting search to work first. If google have been putting the price up that much, they've been telling you your ads aren't relevant - the keywords don't match the landing page, your ctr is bad, google don't really want to show your ads. Go back to your keyword list - extract a list from the site using google's keyword tool - concentrate on relevancy above all else, divide them up into ad groups with no more than 3 keywords per group, and write an ad for that group with a specific landing page in mind - you should have been putting the keyword in your ad titles all along, but you know that now. Don't ever use broad match unless you're using it for research, but now that you have done that you should have enough data in your reports to know what NOT to include - use phrase and exact and add negative keywords.
Your statement itself is the answer... why not learn the adwords tutorials & also go through the sticky FAQ on adwords... Anyway check on the search query report & look for the keywords your ad is being displayed for & work on improving the CTR. CPM will not help repair any damage. If you are not careful, you may lose money with CPM.
Sorry for the delay - thanks for everyone's replies. I've tried mixtures of search and content, but ended up focusing on google search to try to work out what's going on so I'll keep it that way until I've got to grips with it. My CTR wasn't that bad - it was 1-2% for search. What might have messed it up was when I applied the same ad groups to content - the CTR dropped to something crazy like 0.05%. But I think that's when all the damage was done and I haven't been able to repair it, now my CPC has gone up to impractical levels even for search. When I used google's keyword tool to get keywords from my url it literally just came up with one keyword. My site is very specialist, which explains it. However from my initial period of getting inbound visitors, it became clear that my site can be of significant interest to people searching for a more mainstream version of it. So I sell "unusual blue widgets" which it turns out is of interest to people looking for generic blue widgets - they just need to be told about it and have it brought to their attention. Sadly very few people are actually searching for unusual blue widgets. Before posting this topic I'd just started creating lots of adgroups, each very specific to just a few narrow keywords - but no use now that the adwords system hates my site lol. My CPC's were about 3c, now they're a minimum of 10, but more like 20-50c. My service is largely free so I can't possibly break even attracting visitors at that price. I think I read the Adwords FAQ before so I'm pretty sure I've covered off the main points there. Is there any chance that I'm actually doing the right thing now, and that I just need to let the adwords system cool off for a couple of weeks after my foul up on the content network with the 0.05% CTR?
The low ctr on the content network was never your problem - content is expected to get a lower ctr, it doesn't count toward your search Quality Score even when they are in th same campaign.http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9559 This is your problem - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1457342 what is happening to your campiagn is exactly what I predicted would happen last week - you're being penalised for arbitrage.
Thanks Magda - I guess now I know for certain lol. I have to say I really want to shout at Google for such a stupid system. I'd still be paying for clicks, and the advertisers on my site would still get their customers. Where's the problem?? I'm sure you know what I'm saying and that I'm being stupid - but if you ask me, it's ridiculous. Time for alternatives to google me thinks....
Stop your campaigns right away, unless you have money to throw away! And if you do, could you throw some my way? No, seriously, adwords can be very very dangerous. Here is a tip I learned the hard way, use long tailed keywords, and your site better be super relevant or else, Google will punish you big time. Remember, Goggle want unique, original, hand written content, content, content, and this INCLUDES pay per click sites.
Lol... next time I feel like using Google I'll ask you for your bank account and just make a deposit to you instead. Honestly I'd rather throw bills in the bin than let google waste it again. Blood suckers.