If you're selling shareware via AdWords, please join our new Google group dedicated to this topic. A recent thread showed how -- in some cases -- you can cut total ad spend by 65% with only a small impact on sales. We've also discusssed the impact of the free trial period on managing campaigns, and a number of other relevant topics. The group is named "AdWords-Shareware", and you can find it here: http://groups.google.com/group/AdWords-Shareware Cheers Pete
You could use AdWords to push your forum and the quote above is a nice Commercial headline. Probably you did a long research to find this 65% number.
GuyFromChicago: At first I had thought this was just an issue for software sellers, but it turns out to be much broader. My problem was with worthless clicks from search.com, and it turns out this site covers *everything*. This site was accounting for 70-75% of *all* my clicks, so it was a big deal. Here's what I found, in brief: If you're getting worthless clicks from a Content site, and want to get rid of them via the Excluded Sites option... You can't depend on the referer domain name from your web logs to tell you what to enter as an excluded site. In cases like this, you have to do some research to work up the site ownership tree, and add everything you find. It looks like you have to find - by trial and error - the domain name under which the site signed up with Google for AdSense service. In my case, I wanted to eliminate clicks from download-pdl.search.com. Adding this to the excluded sites had no effect. I eventually killed them by adding: download-pdl.search.com www.search.com www.download.com www.cnet.com www.zdnet.com I don't have the time or money to test which of these actually pulled the plug, but I'm pretty sure it was www.download.com. It wasn't either of the first 2 entries. What added confusion to all this is that both Google support reps I dealt with insist - in spite of the evidence to the contrary - that download-pdl.search.com is a Search partner, and cannot be excluded this way (and can only be excluded by opting out of the Search network entirely). One of them even confirmed this with their technical experts. According to them, this is why excluding www.search.com had no effect. As far as I can tell, this is complete nonsense. All the site's clicks are reported in the Content network stats, and as you see they can be excluded if you figure out the right domain name to enter. (Funnily enough, www.search.com does *look* like a search site). The reps have also not responded to the question: "How do you figure out what to add to the excluded sites list?" It seems we need a link on the AdWords site where you can enter a referer domain name and get back the answer. I'm waiting for Google to acknowledge that this is all correct, but hopefully this is the end of the saga. Pete
In my opinion the use of the Excluded Sites option to filter low performing sites is worthless. This list porpuse is to filter your ads in competitor sites (only 25 max per camapaign ) and I already tried for 1 year to use it to filter low performance site and is not efficient for it. A good way to filter low performance sites for a content campaign is to create several Ad groups with identical ads inside and put diferent keyword inside then. So measure the results and eliminate the Adgroups with low ROI - you do not need to delete it just delete all keywords and put different keywords again. This method is hard to setup but is very low cost efficient for content network campaings. A Extreme example that I did: I used Google API to create 400 identicals Adgroups with identical 10 Graph Ads and 2 text Ads inside each - in the end all groups has about 90,000 keywords. Now I get 900 clicks per day on EUA area at $0,01 each click and $0,08 per conversion (trial download). I'll never do it again, very hard to setup... But at least produced nice results.