Oh Adwords..... Its hard to compete in industries with medium competition. I have written multiple adgroups and have very accurate and intriguing ADS. Doesn't matter because they don't get seen if you bid to make a profit. Lets say my max bid I need to make is .40 cents to break even at a 1% conversion rate. Well I am not on page 7 for the terms that get any traffic. I have a very comprehensive list and it works great on Overture. So I bid .90 cents. I made it to page 5. I bid $1.40 I made it to page 3. I bid $2.50 adn I am on top of page 2. I bid $8.99 a click and I make it to bottom of page 1!!!!!!!!! I would basically have to convert on every click to made a freakin profit. TOP BID at Overture is .67 cents. Amazing. OH i am sure I could leave the $8.99 bid a lone for awhile and get a few clicks and increase my CTR and get a little cheaper click but come on...I don't have thousands just to drop. I did get 1 click in 10 mins and it cost me $8.65. I turned it off. I did another test in a very low paying niche that there were like 9 ads competing. Even with great margins in the industry you would make like $1.65 a sale. Well its hard to make a sale when to get toward top position it cost $1.85 and that put me in 3rd. I didn't even dare go past it. Even in my main industry I barely get any traffic when I am in about 7 position. Overture gives me traffic that converts.
I don't see how people make money on lots of words on adwords. I have products were a #1 position costs $3. If I sold the product, I'd make about $14. 25% conversion rate breaks even MOL. I shake my head at some of the google bids, its crazy.
I am thinking you had to be in Adwords in the beginning to actually get good placement. If you are going for a competitive niche you better have 100,000's of bucks to back you up and assorb major losses.
I actually think it works a lot like this: Relevancy plays a huge role. In order to get high initially, you have to bid high. For instance, I bid on the table mate item below. First 2-3 days, I was paying about 1.79/click. After a few days it went down to 79 cents/click for the same position. I think the relevance of the ad lowered the bid after a while and its a bit more reasonable. That's the pattern I've noticed for this and other words.
Also thats why you bid on the most unique keywords on google... with overture you can use top keyword searches but on google, in order to get a decent roi you have to bid on weird, unique keywords... and a lot to match the volume of a "top keyword"
do you guys bid on keywords which google doesn't have enough data to give you a "preview" of the traffic it will generate?
Well, I do not trust it but I just think if the indicator shows a lot then there might be potential. I can't say much about it but I'm sure many of those "not enough info yet" aren't true cause google get ALL those search each days (they aren't that rare).