Hopefully this isnt too personal of a question. In the two years of my websites existence, I have never used adwords. I have used overture ads and invested a very small amount of money in them. I think I will get better results from adwords, and would like to run ads for a couple months as a trial. Would a budget of $100 per month be a trivial waste of time? Since jagger, my rankings have been down, and I have a football website so 2 months would get me through the busy time until my sites activity takes a normal drop for a couple months. I guess what I am basically looking for is experienced adwords clients to give some of their tips and tricks to make the most of your money. If the 2 month trial works out in terms of a good ROI, I will definately continue with it.
I don't think $100 is a waste of time. The good thing about adwords is that it gives you immediate traffic and, depending on what it is you are selling or trying to accomplish, if it is worthwhile for you. A e-commerce site could know almost immediately how it is doing for them. I have sites with a daily budget of more than $100, others rely on organic traffic. I would suggest turning off the "Content network" to start with and if the "Search" works for you, then you can experiment with it.
A few quick tips: Be sure to choose your keywords (phrases) carefully. Take advantage of all of the matching options. Learn how to use the dynamic keyword insertion features. This will bold the searched terms and increase CTR. I would stay away from the Content Network (at least in the beginning). Google Adwords tips Are you going to try Adwords for the site in your signature?
I am relatively new to all of this (had this site for almost 2 years now), so maybe it isnt as crowded as I think. A high percentage of the traffic is sucked up by the large networks though (cbs sportsline, espn, nfl.com, fox sports, etc..). Outside of that, there are some very successful site that have loyal traffic, and one site in particular that has absorbed many of the sites buy partnering or buying out the competition. I dont think it is, by any means, too crowded for me to succeed though. I am considering adwords for the purpose of having my name up with the competition for the final couple months of the season though for the primary keyword.
I appreciate the information. I turned off the content network feature, as suggested. Not sure about the search yet. It is on right now. I am thinking about turning off the search network as well. not really sure which approach is the best here. My main concern with this feature is competitor clicks, but not sure if that is a big problem or not.
don't worry about competitors clicking if its only few because you can't possibly eliminate that. However, if you see a large number of suspicious clicks (cross-check thru your logs), let google know.
$100 is fine for a test run campaign with Google. We usually drop $200-$500 for test campaigns over a period of a month before putting in any big budgets. As for how much we spend, roughly $200k/month, but that's across about 1000 campaigns from a few hundred clients. The average per website probably works out to about $1000/month per website. The content networks can be good for some keywords, but overall they're useless and just waste money. If I find a good site for a specific set of keywords, I'll just create a campaign and target that one site only instead. Other than that, use the Conversion Tracking tool. Very very useful, saves you comparing data from your backend to the clicks from google and sticking it all in a spreadsheet to do the calculations.