Hi, I am a newbie in the Adwords game and I have a question: I have two affiliate campaigns which are currently profitable, though only on a small number of sales: one sold two copies and the other three. I would like to generate more impressions and thereby more clicks so I can see if they are truly profitable or just experienced beginners luck. When I started I had about 700-850 impressions of my keywords which raked in 15-20 clicks. Today I have 100-200 impressions of the same keywords and I can't get the number of clicks I want. It may be because more people are marketing the same affiliate products of clickbank as I do and google only shows one of us at a time,but I'm not sure. I haven't changed my keywords or lowere my CPC. I raised my daily budget for both of them (currently 40$-50$ each), but that didn't do the trick (even though google said the budget was OK). In some ad groups I hold positions 1-4, so I don't think increasing the CPC is the answer. My Quality Score runs from great to OK and I have CTR in the area of 3%. What can I do to raise the number of impressions? Thanks in advance, Jonathan
What you really want to do is raise the number of clicks that convert to sales, regardless of impressions. For instance, I'd rather have 10 clicks / 50 impressions / 5 sales/day , rather than 50 clicks/1000 impressions/ 2 sales/day. It's all about your ROI, which really factors into how many clicks do you need per sale. If you can't get the number of clicks you want, you need to investigate. Are your keywords triggering your ads for your best-known converting phrases? Is there other competition edging your ads out? Has the traffic for those phrases just plain dropped off? Has your ad dropped to the second or third page due to increasing number of competing advertisers? I would tend to guess you may be able to find more keywords that relate to the customer's buying cycle, separate these into tightly-controlled adgroups, and then give it a whirl. Again, though, focus on the customer, what their needs are, and how likely they are to be in a "buying frame of mind" when clicking on your ad. Focus on getting clicks that convert to sales, even if your impressions are low. -T