Hey guys, I've ran into a problem that's racking my brains. I recently bought an adwords-motivated sales site that sells an ebook to help explain hairloss. The owner before me was spending £200 a month on adwords and taking around £950 in turnover. I copied his account perfectly, set the budget optimiser to 30 day cycle @ £210. But, I ran it for a week and only made about 40 clicks or so (they were charging me around £2 per click). The person I bought off says this is way more than he was paying and I don't even seem to be on the first 2 pages of search results. Everything is exactly as his account was. I backed out after 7 days with cold feet but after finding this forum I get the feeling I may have just been a little too early in giving up? Please can everyone tell me their thoughts or reasoning for this. tom
He may have decided to sell because of that reason... The quality score kicked in and he doesn't feel like trying to improve the quality score of the landing page and hence cashing in with selling the site. Originally he may have been getting a lot of clicks and better position (with lower paying clicks), but since the early success it has started to become loss making and he has simply moved on to another project. If it is a website (or is it just an affiliate page?) - then you would have to look at adding value to the website and promoting it as well. It may have been a wise move to stop it for now to evaluate the possible causes - hopefully someone here can help you or advise much better than me at least.
More likely: He built up a good campaign performance history allowing higher quality score and hence lower CPC/higher ranking with the same ads. You started a new account with no history so you have to start from scratch again. Prices will come down once you have some steady high CTR clicks.
I agree with TOPS - the new campaign you began needs to build up some impetus before your cost per click rate goes down and your positioning improves to the point where you will be turning over the same amount of traffic as the previous owner for the same budget.
As an example to back up my theory, I moved content to a new domain and redirected it. I left the old ads to the old domain running and like you, copied new ads into a new account pointing to the new domain. Old ads were much cheaper and ranking much higher than the exact same new ads. Performance history is very important for AdWords - that's why a lot of new advertisers get frustrated quickly. You have to pick your keywords carefully at the start and only expand once Google knows your campaigns are quality. Else it can get very expensive.
Thanks guys especiallly TOPS30 as this is what I suspected! Hmmm well he reluctantly agreed to give me a refund of what I paid so now's the question of whether I should start again (which I would rather do to be honest as I hate giving up when I think a product WILL sell) I know this guy is telling the truth as i've been involved with a lot of conartists who never answer their mail, or to get my refund of what is now only about £210 (a weeks wage for me). What I intend to do is start the campaign again (did this last night and interestingly enough my ads are ranking higher starting this time than they were the first time but price is still around £1.80 a click) and scrap the refund. I'm a bit of a maverick but I think I can always punt this on. I'm going to use the budget optimizer which is what he was doing before. I'll set it at £210 for the month meaning £7 in clicks per day. How long roughly does it take for your prices to go down? Regards tom
Depends on competition and your click volume I guess. Ideally he leaves his ads running for a while and you just pay his bills. Or you sign up with AdCenter and MIVA and pay there for traffic.
Not to derail things but - is Miva actually a viable source of traffic? I've heard some nightmares regarding it.
my CTR is currently 0.52% according to todays clicks. 8 clicks, £8.45. Any suggestions on what to do now? Do I need to improve that CTR to lower my prices? regards tom
Does google allow to do that? lets say I have a shopping mall, and I make a duplicate of it under a new domain, changing almost nothing, wouldn't both sites get banned for having duplicate content - on the organic search of google, maybe MSN and Yahoo, and the campagins would get disabled on adwords?
Not sure. It's all confusing. I want to know if my click price will lower with a 0.52% ctr or not. Confused tom
Having duplicate accounts and then ads for the same domain to trick the system is indeed against their TOS. I have ot move thousands of ads over and they have no automated way of doing that so I get away with this transitional period. I have no plans to keep the old ads. They're a pain in my ass even when they're cheap.
wow man .52% ctr is bad., Try using some Exact match options and let your ctr improve., Concentrate on improving your ctr What keywords are you targetting., Prioritize your keyword into: most important somewhat important least important., start seperate campaigns for these., Then start grouping your keywords into relevant adgroups., Initially have a High CPC bid for the adgroup, so that your ads will have complete rotation, as the ctr improves your cpc will automatically come down.