I've been running a little online store for a few years, it's really a hobby for me not my full time job. Small time stuff. When Google changed their Froogle/Shopping feature to require AdWords, I complied and connected my Merchant Center products to AdWords. I set up keywords, a small budget of $5 per day and everything looked fine. I can easily see my products when I try to search Google shopping and my prices are competitive with other sellers. After a year of this and spending anywhere from $50 to $100 per month I have had a total of 5 conversions. I have hundreds of paid and free clicks. Is the simple answer here that it's just my site is the problem? Or are there some things in AdWords I can tune to help this? I read somewhere that it would be a good idea to not participate in "search" but use "content" instead -- but I don't know what that means, or if it would apply in my case. Any pointers, even pointers like "you need to go read this tutorial" would be greatly appreciated. I'm willing to learn on my own I just don't know what I need to learn.
First thing I would ask is whether or not you created your campaign as a product listing ad campaign. If you did not then I suggest going to You Tube and search for a couple of tutorials on "Product Listing Ads". These ads will allow images of your product to show up on google.com. If you already have product listing ads I would suggest doing some research on your competition to ensure your pricing is competitive.
Firstly, the budget you have is very less although your price are competitive, they might be tracking many keywords to increase their store's visibility. When yo have hundreds of free and paid clicks, then you can create a "Re-Marketing" campaign in Google Adwords. This will allow people to see your ad whenever they visit any website. Search is the Google Search where sponsored ads appear whereas the content are the placements or websites where your ads will appear that matches your keyword if your ads are set to be appear based on keyword. You can just go to the learning center of Google Adword. Just read step by step and you can do it as a start.
Thank you for the replies; yes it is a product listing ad and my images do show up. My pricing is competitive but I am small compared to Amazon and others who carry the same products, so maybe people are clicking on my ad but then I fail to close the sale. It just seemed odd to me to spend hundreds of dollars on clicks and only five conversions. My budget is allowing me to have first-page search results on the keywords I use (it's a niche set of products), so I'm happy with the results I see on Google when I search for my own items, or look in 'shopping' on Google. I will look into the other pointers, thanks.