I'm not going to get too specific, but I'm finally figuring out some strategies for keeping my incoming traffic down below 5 cents per click. Thanks to some people here on DP that posted advice a few weeks ago! One of my ads gets very few impressions for searches, but gets a good click through ratio. However, this add consistently averages about the fourth position on a particular group of content pages that only cost me about 3 cents a click. Needless to say, I don't need huge conversion rates to get my investment back. Honestly though, most of these visitors seem to hit the back button and escape immediately. Another strategy I'm using is getting very specific on keyphrases. I'll create an adgroup specifically for a large keyphrase. The page it goes to will be very much about that particular keyphrase. I won't get a lot of clicks for said keyword, but even though I'm bidding up to ten cents I'm seeing 2 cent clicks. The trick, I think, is to have topics related to high value items, but not have to bid on those high value keywords yourself. I hope that helps someone. Anyway, as for me, I'm going to work on slowly building my cheap inbound traffic system. It's cheap, but I'm not getting all that much of it. Isn't that always the tradeoff?
so what your saying is choose keywords for niche's that are very competitive keywords and have topics around them and pay 10c and you get 2c for adwords?
Could you please post the thread url? I would also like to check it out... I tried searching but couldn't locate it! Thanks
Hmm, I'm not in the following industry (not sure anyone around here is), but maybe it will be illustrative. Let's say I find some interesting news about ice cubes. I write a blog entry all about ice cubes. I buy really cheap traffic through adwords to get people to read about ice cubes. I target the adwords keyphrases so that they are specific to that one blog entry. Magically, people who are using ice cubes generally tend to be the people that might need air conditioning, fridges, party supplies, catering and so forth. So, I'm getting the people to the blog cheap, but the blog will expand into related items that I can't get cheap traffic for. Those other topics should be competitive topics that fetch a good CPC on Adsense or that otherwise can be converted to value. Your job is to find realistic relationships between topics that let you exploit the ability to get people into your space at a cheap price. I don't know if the bigger guys do this, but I'm still operating on somewhat of a shoestring budget and don't have a lot of choice.
The old relative industry trick... learnt that back in Marketing 101 back in Uni. People would associate fuel with cars. DVDs with DVD players, then with TVs.