It's often the case that (as with all advertising) "if someone else is doing it then it must be right". Which isn't the case at all. I see people all the time commanding top spot and then retreating to lick their wounds after a few days because they exhausted their spend for no return. Only to be replaced by the next "tryer". I think Ishop is on the mark when it comes to better ways of measuring return on investment. Put it this way. Both you and I could have the same budget to spend on promoting the same product. But if your website is crap and doesn't convert then you haven't got a chance. Adwords is only a small part of the mix. Measuring cost per conversion is where it's at and it looks like Ishop and myself are building the same product
Hey StoreBuilder - Maybe we should join forces JohnSmith- Sounds as though you've had some bad PPC experiences. But don't be the fox who can't reach the grapes..... I'm not a freelancer - I work in the Internet Division of direct marketing company that does much more than just PPC - DRTV, DR Radio, lead gen, email and more. I'm the PPC guy and telling you that PPC can work. It's working right now for the clients I do PPC for. I manage the bids and run the reports every day. 5% conversion is indeed high, but we're getting as high as 6% on some pay-per-lead campaigns, with click rates as high as 12%. For ecommerce, a conversion rate of 1-2% is pretty standard. For a powerful, well-recognized brand, or for a very specific search, however, we see better. If someone types in JohnSmith's Blue Widgets Size 10 and we take them right to your page that sells JohnSmith's Blue Widgets Size 10 at a competetive price point and BTW, make sure you buy from the offical JohnSmith Blue Widget Site! -- then we see a definite bump in conversion, typically almost double. For leads where no credit card is required, I see 4-6%. Sign-up for mortgage qutes are examples of these. For leads where a CC IS required, I see the same rate as ecommerce: 1-2%. Columbia House DVD Club is a good example. Sign-up for 5 free DVDs and get a 6th one for $1, but you have to put in a CC. The ad copy you write has more to do with the quality of your clicks than you might think. The idea is to write copy that discourages impulse clicks while at the same time encourages serious shoppers. Example: Real JohnSmith Widgets Buy from the offical site; 100's in stock, all sizes. Free shipping. Ads like that will drive people that are shopping for JohnSmith widgets. Always start low and build up. Put a budget cap in place right from the get-go. If you're making money with a $5 a day budget, then you'll probably make money with $10 or $20 or more. Once you get a significant enough sample to see what works and what doesn't start your adjustments. Do your keyword research. Take advantage of granular, highly targeted terms. Understand the value of that sale or lead. Use negative keywords and different types of keyword matching options to keep your ads as targeted as possible. Categorize your keywords. Build targeted landing pages. There's much more to it than throwing up a few dozen keywords at 50 cents a click and driving traffic to your home page.....
I've just joined the forum today and i have already found it very useful, thank you for all the advice! I came across the forum trying to find an average conversion rate for Google adwords. I've been using adwords for nearly 6 months and it has worked well for us, however i only know that on a broad basis and since reading this thread have looked into it in more detail. I am a novice! But now have a great deal of data to work with. One question i would like to ask is if any one knows how to track the ROI per keyword using Googles conversion tracking or whether it is possible. I think it can be done but can any one tell me how?
Welcome Becky, Im sure someone else will answer your questions, but meanwhile, post an introduction thread and introduce yourself.. Then look around the site (especially the tools button above). Some of the best tools online for your site, are right here. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ - the keyword tracker is my (and many others) personal favourite.
Driving traffic to your site is only a consideration to whether adwords will be effective. In certain industries I am sure adwords is worthwhile and others it is not with all other things being equal. The industry I am targeting, adwords has resulted in good download rates for the products I targeted but after that you have to deal with the conversion rates of the products once they have been downloaded. I got 20-30% conversions (Actually downloading the software I was advertising which is awesome) but considering I have to also deal with the conversion rates of downloaders that actually purchase after trial periods expire (usually 1-3%) it is just not worth it. As has been mentioned adwords can be a valuable marketing tool as long as you have all the information needed to determine if it is working in your specific campaign. Just throwing money at google/overture etc. without a small trial period and exhaustive research will just empty your account.
The site is far (far far far) from done, but I put up a Max PPC Calculator that can give you a rough idea of the viability of running some PPC marketing. http://www.sytesurge.com/ppc-bid-calculator.asp
ishop, you have some good ideas, but form what I have seen, I get a 5% CTR. if it gets lower google will slow my campaign and then I will be screwed cause my ads wont show up at all. I could tell people a price to discourage freebie hunters, but my CTR would plummet. I could lower the price of the item I am selling. Teamshop, downloads are pointless if you can't convert them into sales. I download many products on the web, but rarely ever buy. most people are the same. Infact it will cost you more money because you have to pay for the server fees and such. You say it isn't worth it, which is my point all along. Adwords blows. No one makes money except for "8-year-old discovers adwords strategy makes 426,000 in a single month without a website!!!111!!" type ebooks. But im not going to quit adwords...yet. I'm going to try out .1 cent bids cause .3 cent bids really ad up. Wish me luck
Hey Johnson Google doesn't slow a campaign until it gets below a .5% CTR. I have successful campaigns that are doing a .83 CTR and a 1.17 conversion rate, successful in that I am meeting my client's requirement for their target cost per conversion. And your dead wrong about no one making money as the checks I get at the end of every month from my own affiliate marketing efforts can confirm. But hey, keep thinking so and tell all your friends, because that means less competition for me.
I meant to say .5% 5% would be amazing..lol Do you advertise with adwords? Im sure you are getting checks. But there are 10 people I can name on this forum who havn't made a single red cent with adwords. Anyway, nice website.
Not very many. Also, alot of these big click spenders have conversion projections that are faulty. Say you sell a widget for $2000 and pay $4/click. Sounds easy right? just 1/sale out of 500 clicks to break even, but you should get a sale in 1/100 clicks? Wrong! You blow through your budget and no sales. Now to save face, you create a second similar campaign. Now you project you can make 2 sales for the 500 clicks to compensate for the unsucessful first campaign. Just an extra sale..shouldn't be too hard? Wrong. So your blow your budget again. no sales. Down 4000 in the hole, zero sales. Now you try it again. If you get 3 sales wou will have broken even. however, as you repat this process, it becomes increasingly difficult to fullfill your projections. Soon you will need 10 sales..etc. the converison ratio follows a bell curve. That is-68 percent of internet marketers have a conversion of .05-2%. However, only 10% have a conversion of 6 percent or higher. And a palty .05% have a converison of over 15%. Its this kind of mindset that is keeping adwords afloat. Eventually, advertisers will simply pull out.
Heh... I should have figured you meant .5 I do advertise with adwords for my affiliate sites, but the first time I attempted it about 2 years ago, I failed miserably because I didn't know what I was doing. Since I got hired on by the marketing company and have learned the ins and outs of PPC, I went back and tried again, this time with success, at least success as far as I can tell nabsed on sales levels and items. I will admit that making money through AdSense as an affiliate is extrememly challenging. One, because a 3-10% commission doens't give you much profit to work with, and two, there's no way to implement conversion tracking. The best you can do is track inbounds and outbounds to see if AdWords visitors are going off to the affiliate sites. If I see a visitor come in on a key word for Blue Widget, and go out to an affialite site, and the next day a Blue Widget sale shows up, I'm making the assumption that it worked. But who knows? It might not. All I know is that my daily sales average (minus advertising expense) is higher now than before I started using AdWords.
Johnson, That was my point, in my case Adwords isn't worth it but just because it wouldn't be cost effective for me doesn't mean that for others it wouldn't be viable
I tried different campaigns ranging from 50-1000$ per day to find the sweet spot over the last year. About 180$ a day seems to be it for us. We use googles code that tells us how much we spend to get money back (conversions)
Is there anything in stall in Google Adsense for the newbies who just produced some contents after participating in some forums and then made a blog,but get 20 visitors a day or so and NIL Click.What can be done!!! to those like me
I've followed this thread with great interest so far, especially iShopHQ's comments, and being on the affiliate end of the spectrum, I was wondering about this very thing. The way I see it, an affiliate has also an added level of complexity- conversion of the merchant's landing page. Example- Given a 10% conversion on my landing page, (arbitrary number) I need to buy 1000 clicks to get 100 clicks to the merchant's landing page to get 1 sale, (assuming he has a 1% conversion). So, if my average commision is 30$, this means I can pay a max of 3 cents a click to expect a break even. Extremely challenging indeed! Obviously, there are lots of variables and permutations to consider, and maybe I am missing something, but I just don't see how people do this. I suppose the trick is to fine tune your own landing page to squeeze every last micro-percentage of conversion you can. If anyone can comment or give their 3 cents worth of advice I'd be appreciative. donna r
I spend about $2,000 on adwords and $2,500 on overture per day, I much prefer overture. I get twice the traffic for only $500 more per day and their system is much more simple. I think the keys to success on a ppc campaign is having a descent margin in your product/service, a smokin easy checkout process, and you can't have paypal, you need to take credit cards via a merchant account. Also, I think the best way to make a ppc campaign work is by maximizing your revenue per customer. You already have the customer there, get them to buy as much as you can. For example, buy 1 widget and get your second widget 40% off. Packaging products together is also a good way to raise your revenue per customer. Most people that buy online only buy one thing, if you put together a nice package containing 2 or 3 widgets for a lower price than if they bought them individually, they will buy. When you increase your average revenue per customer then you don't need as high of a conversion rate to be profitable..... rbfallon
Hi DonnaReed, As you mentioned, you need to squeeze every click you can out of your landing page, but a big part of your success is going to depend in the keywords you are targeting and bidding on. Be as absolutely, positively as granular as possible on yout key terms. Don't try to drive traffic on Widget; drive traffic on Medium Blue Widget Red Fringe and land the clicker on a page with a big picture of a Medium Blue Widget with a Red Fringe with the information they need to know to decide if they want to click through: Image (a picture is worth a thousand words) Product description Store (or stores) that sell it - Store logos are nice here Price Discount (if there is one) And an obvious click here link that inserts you call to action: Click Here to view this Medium Blue Widget with Red Fringe at Joe's Widget Shop! If you get specific product searchers landing on specific product pages, I think you can get a >10% click through. You can implement a redirect script as well, to actually track click throughs to your affiliate partners. Above all, don't be aggressive with your bidding. They highest I'm paying is 12 cents on an itme that retails for 200+; the vast majority of my bids are under 10. Most at at 5-7, I don't do Overture because I just can't pay their 10 cent minimum.
Hi IshopHQ; Thanks for the landing page tips. Interesting. So try to get mass quantities of "long tail" search phrases. On these very specific and granular keywords, I assume that search volume must be pretty low. In that case, won't Adwords disallow or slow them? And if you are only paying 10 cents or so, won't you be on the second page of SERPS when they do get a search, thereby also risking a less than .5% CTR? Or do you find little to no competition for them? Great idea! I hadn't thought of that. If you have a seperate URL for each KW, then you could have virtual KW-level tracking.