I am a new user to Google Adwords and have been advertising my website for about 2 months now. On the face of it, adwords looks good as it enables you to create or edit adverts quickly and also to adjust budgets...however the reality is somewhat different... 1. Every single time I create or edit an ad...the ad gets disapproved for URL not working. Strange as the same URL is working perfectly for all the other ads they are currently running! I could understand this maybe once or twice but not for every single ad I try to create/edit? I've written to Google many times (not easy to find their email and can't talk to them in person) and they seem to just have this semi-automated, stock reply of ...we've now approved your ad and we'll look into the problem. To be honest I'm just getting completely fed up with them. 2. The financials don't look like they'll ever stack up either! I sell chocolate and the bids they are suggesting for my text ads are £0.70 to £1 per click. At a 1% or even 2% conversion rate that would cost between £50 and £100 to make just one sale! My products retail at around £13-£20 so there is no way this would ever work. Am I missing something here? Now people will say that the big companies can afford the higher bids and it must work otherwise they wouldn't do it...but numbers are numbers! ...no company would ever pay £100 to sell one £20 item, they'll just go broke. 3. I see lots of advice about going for cheaper keywords...but if you sell chocolate surely you have to have the words 'chocolate', 'Valentine's', 'Christmas' etc...I can't see why going for obscure long tail words would help my business..again am I missing something here? 4. Is the suggested bid figure based on what others are really paying or is it simply Google taking a chance and trying to squeeze money out of new inexperienced advertisers? As you can tell, I would appreciate some advice...thank you
1.) Wow, that must be annoying, I am fed up of adwords 2 2) I find that I spend a huge amount of adwords and don't even make the money from it. One time I spent over £60GBP on adwords but not one sale. As you say, Googles recommended financials are always a high bid.. But I guess they want to make better revenue. Supposedly the suggested bid is to get your ad noticed more rather than being outbid by others but i'm not so sure. 3) You want to go for the keywords, like you say, chocolate etc etc. Otherwise your ad will rarely be served up to a potential customer. The fewer adwords though, the more often your ad will appear. Another thing I also love is the way adwords are quick to withdraw the money from your bank, almost too quick. But adsense on the other hand took 3 months to receive my money! Also, did you know the fact they have the sponsored ads highlighted and near the top of the page seems great for advertisers, but its a sales method for Adwords. Statistics show that people click on the first few links within a search. Hence the top, adwords can rake in some more money!
1. Are you typing the URL in? Don't trust your fingers. Go to the page and copy the URL from your browser's address bar and paste it in the destination URL. 2. If you are only getting at most a 2% conversion rate and paying that much, then PPC is probably not best for you. Seems to me that chocolates are not the kind of thing people will buy online. However, maybe you are advertising locally. Adwords can then become a cheap way to brand your business. Don't think of immediate sales. Think of them remembering your name and coming into your shop in the future. Also think in the long term: they buy once and then they come back buying again. That £1 investment can really pay off in the long run. 3. You are thinking too generally. If you are selling white Belgian chocolates, bid on that term "white belgian chocolate". May not be much cheaper but you'll convert better. If you bid on the single word "valentine's", that's wrong and you are wasting your money. You should bid on "valentine's chocolates". 4. I think you are talking about the keyword tool's cost estimate. If so, your cost is based on your QS and the next lower advertiser's QS and cost. See Adwords FAQ for more details. It's based on an average QS and current conditions. You can beat those estimates with higher QS and the way to do this is to have ads with higher click rates. Using less generic keywords as explained above will help.
Anyway, there's no other PPC provider that allows buying very high volumes of traffic in any niche, that's why you guys will need to work something out, MSN and Yahoo are also good options, but only for low-volume traffic.
It seems a lot of problems come from not taking time to learn the system. I am convinced it pays off to invest time learning. Thanks for sharing your insights, guys - you obviously learnt from experience!
1. I would reccomend doing some keyword research to find some more obscure long tail words. Key for adwords - the more words in the keywords you are bidding on, the more targeted the traffic, the more likely a visitor will buy. Not sure what you cost for conversion is for "Chocolate", but I would test it against "Chocolate gifts" and "Chocolate gifts valentine's day" (for example) This is the tool from google I use: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal It will give you tons of suggestions Bidding on misspelled words can also be a goldmind. "cocolate" might be worth trying. Hope that helps!
I have had mis-spellings go for more than correctly spelled keywords. I have never used it but maybe you should try CPM. You only pay by the impressions. You really have to be really careful with adwords. You can loose a lot of money fast. Even faster if you have a small profit margin on the products you are selling.
I have been hearing alot of frustration from advertiser at google. Alot of people been having alot of problems. I have ran some campaigns with success there but I use other ppc services as well. Some people have said the greatest day of their lives was the day they quit advertising on google. I plan to use them in the future though... 1. http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160732 ; maybe part two of that? 2. Definately too high of cost for what you're selling. Get keywords specific! Clean out your underperforming keywords after you have enough info to determine which ones hey are. 3. Long tale keywords generally means less competition, and if you are good at finding them they can pay dividends! When taking the long tale approach here's what I do. Obtain 1k long tale keywords with satisfactory search volume. Adgroups of about 25-50 kwd's. So that's basically 20-40 ads I have to write. Run them long enough for information. I almost always geo target depending on the search volume. Pause camps that have underperforming keywords and delete them. If no kwd's have generated a sale in an adgroup, delete the ad. Hope you find the winner! Your success rate should be very low as far as which kwd's convert I would expect to keep 2 or 3 of those ads running and delete the rest. Hope you find his useful! 4. I have NEVER set my price at what they recommend. I will usually go for about 70-80%. Also, when I'm in there cleaning up my adgroups mentioned above I will often drop my costs as well to better reflect my remaining keywords.
I would seriously get someone to look over your campaigns...It is a cheap price to pay instead of wasting all that time and money on trying to learn yourself... I got burned by adwords...went away to study it further...than went back and got 100% better results already..... Also have you considered that your landing page might be the problem with sales...???
yeah i had the same problem with it but you gotta make sure you comply fully to the standards and you don't lose anything if you keep trying!
Thanks to everyone for the replies above. I've also had another strange thing happen with Google Adwords yesterday. I'd managed to get an ad working ok. I'd set it a max auto CPC of £0.25 per click of which it was auto bidding at £0.18 per click and reaching its full quota of £2 per day budget (approx 12 clicks). With this (relative) success in mind, I increased it to max £0.30 CPC and a budget of £3 per day. It then dropped the auto CPC bid to £0.14 per click and has generated 0 clicks since!! What sort of logic is this? Now before anyone talks about low budgets please bear in mind I'm a start-up business and in my mind Google has to prove its worth to me before I invest more money. The question I'm asking is why should it do something so illogical has reduce the bid and generate no clicks for me or indeed any revenue for Google?
One of the problems is that Google doesnt like conservative campaigns. In other words if you spend a low amount and bid a low amount and dont have many campaigns etc that has a major effect on your Quality score. Thats one reason why the big guys with big budgets get better QS's and lower click prices - apparently a Keyword with a QS of 10 can be as much as 30% cheaper than the same keyword with a QS of 7/10. You also have to watch out for lower performing keywords pulling your overall QS down. I start off with a lot of K/words in a campaign and quickly whittle the under performers out until I get down to about 10 or so well convertng ones. Personally I set my daily budget at £100 to start with and bid as high as £1 a click to see what converts, but you have to keep a close eye on it and pull any ones that are running away very quickly. It seems expensive but try running an ad in the loal newspaper for example - its often more expensive and you are guaranteed nothing. Invest, learn, refine and then prosper in the long run. Good luck
I was just starting Google Adwords for our website, and I think it was competitive since we are in cars business. I don't know yet the outcome.. but it was worth trying I guess since this is part of marketing. And about your website maybe you are not targeting the right keywords for your ads.
Adrian, the logic is that you expect the same response from your ad every day. That just isn't the case. And with a small budget, even worse because your ads are shown so infrequently and so randomly. You are not getting very much statistically valid data, if at all. I understand you want to test Adwords and let it prove itself but you need more data, and not just one day's worth on a handful of impressions. Here's what I recommend. Don't use the auto CPC. Use a bigger budget so that your ads show throughout the day. Run them for at least one week, two is even better. You'll find out what happens on weekends for example and at all times of the day. But before doing that, you must use relevant keywords with ads that compel the reader to click (what's in it for them?). That's how you'll get high click rates and high QS.
Google Adwords can be very expensive - esp if you do NOT get any Traffic that actually pays or clicks or does what you want them to do...........PLUS - those publishers whom push ADSENSE (income from your adwords money) do some things that are not always up and up --- costing you good traffic, depending on your keyword. One of the best ways to get traffic is look around and think outside the box a bit - I use trafficswarm and a few other exchanges and onebuttonsignups.com as well, all these things help my ROI
In order for Google Adwords to work you need to spend a lot of money and have high priced products to sell. Good luck in the future
Also try not to change the ads and keywords. You need to build up history with them. And when you make changes most of them reset the history and scores.
Good advice so far. You do need to think of return on advertising investment in terms of the lifetime value of the customers gained. Especially with your product, having an opt-in email program would be worth looking into. Who wouldn't want to opt in for special offers on chocolate? So even if someone doesn't buy now, if you can collect their email through your AdWords campaign, it could pay off later.