After spending hundreds of dollars , count less trial and errors you'll get your best converting keywords , and best converting products and some one will steal them with some clicks within seconds. Ah! What a pain , man! I think Keyword Xray , AdSpyPro , Chris GCD etc tools are destructive for serious internet marketer. They have [the new mafias armed with these tools] conquered my Niches and best converting keywords! My positions for best converting keywords in Adwords are kicked off and conversion rate is down the profit line , bids for those keywords are sky rocketing. Have you faced any problem like this? Now i am searching desperately for other new niches , new products - again repeatation of trial and error , split testing with different Ad copy , different landing page , different keywords , different bids!!
? What's the amount that everyone else is bidding got to do with you? The most profitable bid for you is totally independent of the postion that your advert appears in. See this page for an example: http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/...is-no-harder-than-on-uncompetitive-terms.html So you don't need to change anything on your campaign. The impact of somebody outbidding you is that you make less money. If their margins are similar to yours and they don't have a higher QS than you, then they are losing money as well by over-bidding. So you are making less than you could, they are making less, Google is getting a less relevant at the top and nobody wins (I call this the numpty effect: http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/...the-numpties-are-ruining-it-for-everyone.html. There appear to be people over-bidding in just about every major market - in some cases, my sweet-spot is as low as 8th...
It seems you are selling your own item CustardMite. Anyway thank you for the links. yes you may be correct , perhaps they are also losing money. As i am a long time player for these keywords and have good QS and CTR - i hope they will fled away very soon. Yet - am losing money from my previous profitable campaigns.
My help pages don't cost anything, so it's not really selling, per-se. If a profitable campaign has started losing money, then either 1) Your conversions are worth less to you 2) Your clicks aren't converting into conversions as well as they were or 3) You've increased your bids to above your (conversion rate * profit per conversion exc. ad costs) If it's 1), it's a business issue, and not really an Adwords problem. If it's 2), then you need to look at your website. If it's 3), then you need to recalculate your sweet-spot. Now that I think about it, there's a fourth option. If you actual cpc is substantially lower than your bid, then a new competitor just BELOW your advert can push up your cpc even if you don't change your bid. In which case, you need to adjust your bid to reduce your cpc...
No actually , i am not saying about the links in your reply post. I've seen your screen shot on the pages you have given link to. You have quite good conversion rate. Yes i have adjusted my bids. Lets see what changes occurs after 24 hours.
There's nothing special about a keyword. Any keyword/phrase I can come up so can anyone else. Pros focus on elements of a campaign where they can potentially have competitive advantage or USP. The tools listed in the opening post have no impact what-so-ever on profesional marketers. I personally think keyword research (in terms of relation to PPC) is hyped way too much. I can show a 10 year old how to use tools like wordtracker to generate a massive, semi targeted keyword list.
Generating a targeted Keyword list and tracking performance of each keyword and finally yielding a good list of keywords with high conversion rate is different thing. A campaign with thousands of keywords is absolute waste of money unless you track keyword conversion to get a converting list of keywords. From my experience i've got that at max 10 to 12 keywords from every 100 keywords converts and these 10 to 12 keywords also has different individual performance level.
I'll have to disagree. Tracking performance is a spectator sport. That same 10year old I showed how to generate a list of keywords can just easily be trained to delete ones that don't have a number above XX% in the column called conversions. I'm not saying the keyword selection process isn't important...I'm just saying it's one area in PPC where no one has an advantage over anyone else.