iShopHQ, Thanks for all the great info in this thread. Another for your list of software to manage campaigns is Search Ignite (http://www.searchignite.com) which I found to be a good system when I used on campaigns for a previous client. It is a web based solution. As far as daily adword spend, $100 - $120 across about 2000 keywords. But like iShopHQ said, just a few keyword phrases, about 5% in our case, account for 90%+ of the spend. Conversion rate for a new member (free account) sign up hovers around 5.6% (right in line with iShops number I believe), direct revenue ROI of 700% and indirect ROI (lifetime value of a member calculation) of just under 1000%.
Ultimately yoour total budget is irrelevant: it's your margin that you should be looking at. If your not trackiing conversions, then adwords and overture are both financial suicide. There is a business expression: 'turnover is vanity, profit is sanity'. This applies well to PPC: I spend about $500 per day on adwords, but it's profitable so who cares how much you pay?... I used to have hundreds of terms bringing plenty of people, but I was just paying for traffic, not sales (this can be described as a private education). Now I track every word very closely and kill them when they go off track. What is important is your acquisition cost, and nothing else. Here's a qustion tho': a keyword has been working great for months and then starts slipping, slipping, slipping... what do you do?
I'm just playing with buying traffic at this point, so no more than $2 per day. My original hobby site gets lots of SE traffic already.
I spend about £15 a day on google adwords and it works really well for us. I also started with a large number of campaigns which only generated traffic and cost us a fortune. I now only use a small number of campaigns that work. However this seems to be my limit. I am constantly trying to increase the number of campaigns to increase the number of sales but to no avail. I seem to have come to a brick wall. Has any one else found this? or am i doing something wrong? it would be great to be able to increase my spend and see an increase in sales but it doesn't seem to work this way. I haven't read the whole of this thread so i will appolagise now if this has alreay been discussed! I'll start reading!
I'm spending $200/day on clicks to my hosting review site. I've gotten a pay-for-performance quote of $30/day for each first-page ranking from a SEO company. The 1st page ranking is sure to generate more traffic than 40 clicks which is what I get for my $200. So can anyone think of a good reason why I shouldn't hop off the adwords bandwagon and on to SEO? thanks
Using the adwords tracking tools what kind of return do you get on your 30$/day investment? The wonderful thing about adwords is you can see exactly your roi. I can see it costs me basically 30cents to make 12$. I would say that is good enough reason not to jump off the adwords bandwagon.
Its still pretty early in the campaign to talk about averages, but I'd say as of now it takes me $.30 to make $.30! I'm breaking even. I've been doing a lot of tweaking to see what I can do to improve those #s, but it's all relatively experimental at this point. However, a reasonable estimate (based on overture keyword tool) of searches on Google for the term "website hosting" is around 300,000/mo. Thats 10000/day. If I'm on the first page and get 10% of that, that's - generously, I admit - 1000 clicks. If I assume that the same # of clicks convert to sales on search results as they would on adwords, then I'm looking at about 7% conversion or 70 sales/day. An average sale of $85 makes that a $5950 day, or $5650 after the cost of SEO. Sounds too good to be true, huh? I'm assuming web hosting must be a much more firecely competed-for click than what you're selling. I'd love a 4000% return! Do you have a site I can look at & learn from? thanks!
I think your confused... adwords will tell you exactly what your getting on your investment wether its 1$ a day or $50,000 a day. Its pretty cut and dry... Now if your product isnt ready to sell or its presented bad then you have a completely different problem. But adwords is straightforward which I thought was your original question...
Nothing right now but it was never big enough for me to look at software management tools. I may ramp up again this fall to take advantage of some things that are happening up here. I provide Steamboat Springs development information .
I'm new to it all so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. For me adwords tracks clicks. I track sales through cj.com as an affiliate for one of my advertisers. So the only way for me to track roi is to see $90 for a sale thru cj.com versus $90 in clicks on adwords. It's easy enough to do the math. The reason it's hard to do averages is because I've been running campaigns only for a total of 2 weeks now. But I'd say 7% conversion is pretty good so I don't think it's a matter of presentation or product. My original question was to ask why (and again, maybe the margins are especially tight in the hosting racket) shell out such big adwords bucks for such little (that is, if I ever see a margin) margin when the cost of so much MORE exposure through SEO would cost so much less. I guess the question boils down to how on target my previously mentioned SEO projections really are. I was hoping someone out there had actually converted from adwords to SEO and found SEO to be superior. On the other hand, your 4000% roi is pretty darn superior. Why diversify strategies with those numbers?
so the big question remains...why spend a bundle on adwords if you can get the exposure by hiring an SEO company (or doing the SEO yourself I suppose) and getting 1st page ranking?
Well, so far this month I've spent about $15 on... 87 Clicks 6,226 Impressions 1.3% CTR Something interesting I noticed...after I turned off "content network" ads last week, my CTR jumped to 2.0% +
I just started with the campain...and realised that the big money I was paying for keywords, isnt quite necessary...mostly from following this thread. I guess the key is to somehow get tons of natural referals and use your appropriate tracking software to determine what people actually are searching for when they reach your site...not what you think they should be looking for. (as well as a million other things...as mentioned before me..heh) I guess I cant say I have been paying for big keywords..because i cant, I have bid and have been included in the search...usually number 3-5 but NO ONE has clicked on me yet. So to answer the post..."nada" Maybe I need to get a real job....NOT!