Ok, here's the story. Please help me out!! I started AdWords for the first time a few days ago. I'm trying to sell an app for iPhone about cute pets. I picked the relevant markets (UK and US) and loaded it with many, many keywords. The ad copy essentially said this: Cute Animals 4 Your Phone Get Cute Pics of Dogs, Cats, and More with the Cutest App Ever! URL The keywords were at first every permutation of Dogs, Cats, Puppies, Kittens, Animals, cute, pics, etc. The landing page was just a single line of hyperlinked text - something along the lines of "Click Here for <app>!" which takes you to iTunes. I started bidding at $0.07. After the first day, I'd had something like 110,000 views and 100 clicks. I was happy, thought great, I can play with this now. The next day, it all plummeted to zero. I started reading up and tried many things. What I'm concerned with is that my Quality Scores were somehow poisoned by that first day or two - and nothing I'm doing helps. - I tried breaking it down to very specific ad groups. - I changed my ad copy slightly to basically be composed of most of the keywords. It now reads: Cute Animals 4 Your Phone Get Cute Pics of Dogs, Cats, & Animals with the Cutest App Ever! URL - Even though I never got a poor score for landing page, I changed the text there too to have almost all the keywords: "Click Here for <app> - cute pics of Dogs, Cats, <more> for your iPhone!" - I changed all my Broad Matches to Phrases - When I try a new ad group with one keyword, and the ad is full of that keyword, the estimator tells me at my price I should be getting 80-150 clicks per day... And still impressions are stuck at zero. I have followed all the recipes that they advise- my ad has the keywords I'm searching on, my landing page does too. It's like nothing I do moves the needle at all. The only thing I did do once was change my bid to unlimited just to see what happened, and I got a few hits at some ridiculously high prices (for me) - something like $5 per click. Right now, I'm bidding $0.10. But that first day, when I got 110,000 impressions, I was bidding $0.07! What exactly am I doing wrong??!
Your landing page is all wrong. One hypertexted sentence of keywords is not an adequate landing page. Nothing will improve until you get that sorted out and make a proper web-page.
Ok, so I know this is a heavy question, but can you guys help me with an extremely basic landing page- that adds meta tags, etc. -just what I need - while keeping it essentially a single link? To clarify, I don't want or need an actual fleshed out website right now, since the goal this month is just to funnel visitors straight into iTunes. I've been tracking my visits to exits (i.e. how many visitors are actually clicking that one link), and it's above 10%, so I'm happy for now. Anyway: My current code is just this: (all caps is my generic replacement for this posting) <html> <head> <title>NAME</title> <style type="text/css"> body {font-family:Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif;} </style> </head> <body> <p><b><a href="LINK TO ITUNES" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview ('OUTGOING');">BLA BLA BLA CLICK HERE FOR MY APP BLA BLA BLA</a></b></p> (ANALYTICS JS CODE) thoughts?
Learn HTML or better yet, buy yourself a web site building tool and build a site. Google will not like you too much if all you have is a link saying to download your app. I suspect not many people would download it as well without more information.
You don't understand- over 20% of visitors are now clicking the link, which goes to a *very* fleshed out iTunes page with all the info they need, and the sales are coming in- I just don't have the resources yet to flesh out the site itself, especially as the iTunes landing page has it all. Yes, learning HTML is a great goal, but in the meantime, I just need some help tweaking that minimal site to add what google will need- a "basics" AdWords landing page (metatags, etc.). The bare minimum acceptable site to support that one link, using your guys' experience with AdWords. Thanks!
> the iTunes landing page has it all. Then, why not send your clicks to that iTunes page? You would not need to maintain your own page. 20% are clicking the link on your page? I'm surprised it's that high. How many of them actually make a purchase however? Seems to me your campaign is at most 20% effective. My advice is to make that iTunes page your ad's landing page. Your QS will improve, your costs will go down, more people will buy and you'll make more profits.
Hi Big Brother, One thing that will help your Quality Score is to build out your 1 page to about 4 -5 pages so it is more like an actual website. The reason for this is Google has been giving 1 page sites really, really low quality scores since they are often just affiliate links that lead other products. Why they deem this inappropriate I have no idea. They just do. You wouldn't need to spend much time creating this. Create a terms and conditions, about us, contact us, the landing page, maybe an additional resource page and you'll be good to go. Agreed with Lucid as well. Try to get your keywords into the into the meta. Also, try to get hyper specific with your ad copy and the keywords you target. For example, make one ad specifically about cats, one about dogs, one about monkeys. Then create really landing pages, one about cats, one about dogs, etc. It takes a little bit of time, which trust me, I know it sucks. Good luck!
It's a very valid point- the reason I don't do that now is because I was afraid it would get flagged by the ad providers. I had originally done exactly that on facebook- the link was just the iTunes link. The problem is, that directly triggers a launch of iTunes, which is sort of a gray zone (or a flat out no-no) for some of these services (launching a helper app). Oh yeah, not to mention that who knows what would happen to my landing page score!! Thoughts? Ok on Google?
20% CTR, that's nothing to sneer at. maybe it's just me today, but damn. if he direct links his adwords to a vendor landing page that he doesn't own it's against the TOS of adwords and probably the affiliate TOS for the app he's selling. great advice, there.
There's site over at http://YourAccountisBanned.com/ that tells you how to work around an account banning. You can also join a class action against Google.
No, it's not. Here is the guidelines page and show me where it says that: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs Now that is possible. As for my 20% comment, I'd prefer 100% of the visitors I pay for to see my sales message (or the merchant's in this case) instead of having them see a page with a simple "click here" and vast majority not doing so which is wasting 80% of your advertising dollar.
Ok, I did some refresher reading this morning. It's not against TOS, it's just discouraged and unlikely to be helpful as mentioned here: https://adwords.google.com/support/...er=14844&cbid=-xwc3mh1hdner&src=cb&lev=answer For the reasons given on that page most vendors discourage affiliates running direct-linked adsense to their offers, going as far as making it against their (the vendor's) TOS in many cases. It's good for me to think in the morning, so thanks for forcing the clarification on me. All right, that makes more sense. Despite the landing page being poor, here's how I see it: A common campaign path (funnel?) = ad -> lander -> vendor. That's the structure that's set up here. I have no idea what the CTR is on the ads is (clearly), but 20% of people hitting the lander move on to the vendor, that's a fairly effective landing page. Also, I think it helps that this is a case where "PUPPIES!" pretty much sums up the whole sales message. Call it an exception, definitely not a rule. I wouldn't bother to try this exact setup on an MMO or clickbank-style product, lol.
I don't see how you read anything there that suggests Google discourages linking to a vendor page. They are not discouraging it, simply pointing out that if others are doing the same, only one ad will be shown for one domain. But check with the vendor too as it might be against their TOS to use PPC to promote them. > 20% of people hitting the lander move on to the vendor, that's a fairly effective landing page. I'd agree if it was a page with more than a "click here" message. Actually, I don't know what a typical percentage would be so is it really effective? So I don't really agree. You're still losing 80% of your traffic you know won't ever convert. I still wouldn't use PPC however to promote it even if 20% typical, or even 50% or 80%. I'd use PPC and send it directly to the merchant. Wasn't that the whole premise of the Google Cash book a decade ago? That is, ad > merchant's landing page.
They're not discouraging it passively by talking about it, they're discouraging it actively by working to make it an ineffective strategy. If you're new I understand you may not be aware of this, but this practice is generally discouraged and pedantic insistence on specific semantics in the TOS is just being silly. Sorry I mentioned it but as I already stated, it was a mistake. This is so well known that I thought it was part of the TOS. And yes you're right that was a good strategy, a decade ago... At this point, it's mostly frowned on as an affiliate/PPC strategy. So much so that many vendors do not permit it at all. I would call that a "discouraged" practice. LOL, it's either good stats or it's not. Unless it's a straight redirect what's on the page is irrelevant. Now THERE's the missing link. No idea what you're talking about. Somebody better get dlm over here. Since you're billing yourself as a PPC pro, I'll help you and your clients out a bit. 20% of visitors met the lander's conversion goal, which is to move them along to the "pitch" page. 20% conversion at ANY SINGLE STAGE of the process is doing good. Could it be better? Absolutely. But it could be (and usually is) a LOT worse.
my 2 cents: get a cheap website with domain: iphone-cute-animals.com install wordpress (probably using Fantastico) use a free fast loading theme (themeforest.net for example) install all in one seo plugin use permalinks make the title of yourblog: Cute Animals 4 Your Phone Create a post about what you sell and put the link to get the application Include the keywords in the heading (h1) in the text and in the link to iphone store maybe 2-3 images will help You can probably hire a guy to do it for less than 50$ Adwords: Forget the first day! Delete your ads recreate them use lots of variations phrase or exact match with negative keywords Use more specific keywords than you do now Create separate groups for the ad network and the search network Hope u find this useful!
Will you do it for $50? Seriously though, I was going to hire someone at much more money to essentially do all of that, but if it's as easy as you say, I'd gladly pay you about that. I already have a great domain name and a placeholder home page up.
I don't do this kind of projects my friend ;-) I'm sure you'll find a guy to do it... If you want my services it will cost you at least 500$ and I'll do much more than that