Hi Everyone, I have mainly been relying on organic Google search results for traffic and sales to my website, but this is not giving me the type of income that can pay rent or own a home etc. (but it does provide food money, gas, and auto insurance and enough for small needs that come up). What would be great is if I can figure out how to advertise on Google Adwords so I can pay the minimum in clicks, and yet get a lot of sales. I have only experimented with Adwords here and there, but nothing serious because I have a very small advertising budget. I understand about ad relevancy and landing page optimization etc. But no matter how much I try to create relevant ads, and landing pages that match the keywords in the Adwords ad, and title, and campaign name etc., I always seem to have to pay at least 50 cents for my ad to be on the first page (but last position) of the search results, or $1 or more per click to make it to the first position in the search results. And yet you read about people saying how you can get to the top ad position on Google, and only pay a penny per click, or 5 cents or 20 cents per click at most. But as far as I can see, ad relevancy and landing page optimization, and keyword selection alone won't give you cheaper click rates even if everything is perfectly relevant and optimized etc. So I did some searching on the web for more information about this, and apparently you need to be financially rich if you want to see huge stats like earning $100,000 a month using Google Adwords. Here is why. After doing some online research here are a couple estimates I found related to how much money you need to spend paying for Google clicks if you want to see a certain amount of sales come in. One person's testimony I read mentioned that he made almost $2,000,000 in one year in sales simply by using Google Adwords. To get that much in sales he paid about $500,000 in Google clicks. That is about $41,666 in Google clicks a month, or paying $1300 a day for clicks. Another person I read about said he made about $90,000 in one month by advertising on google adwords. And he said to get that much money he had to spend $25,000 in Google clicks. That is the same as paying $833 a day in gogole clicks. And earning about $1,080,000 a year in sales. I don't know about you but I don't have anywhere near that kind of money to spend on clicks. Anyway by using the above mentioned stats I broke it down thus (cutting it in half each time): If you spend $12,500 (half of $25,000) a month on clicks does this mean you will earn about $45,000 (half of the $90,000 mentioned above) in sales? And if you spend $6250 a month on clicks does this mean you will earn $22,500 in sales. And then: $3125/mo on clicks = 11,250 in sales $1562/mo on clicks = $5625 in sales $781/mo on clicks = 2812 in sales $390/mo on clicks = $1406 in sales $195/mo on clicks = $703 in sales $97/mo on clicks = $351 in sales If you are single, never married, no children, have no credit card debt and no college debts, and are content with basics like food, clothing, shelter (rent), and perhaps a car and individual health insurance plan, then you don’t necessarily need to spend a thousand dollars a day on Google clicks. More along the lines between (using the above stats) $400 a month and $800 a month on Clicks (between $13 a day - $26 a day) would be enough for you to make enough money to support the above mentioned lifestyle even if you lose your day job and/or prefer to only earn money online. I realize it also depends upon which type of product you sale. You can sell a product that is worth $1000, and get sales. Or a product worth $10 and get sales. Or advertise an affiliate link and receive a $40 commission....and so on. But my point is that I don't have a huge budget. If I take a risk and spend, say, $600 a month in Google clicks that I will $600 on Google clicks, and only end up with 600 clicks and no sales. This is why I am a little skeptical. But on the other hand if Google sees $600 in my Google account maybe that is when you get the lower cost in clicks? I think you see where I am coming from. Anyone experienced in Google Adwords who is reading this I would appreciate some feedback on these matters if you have a chance. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
You can't expect to get the same profit margins that someone else received. They're likely extremely experienced veterans who know how to maximize their landing pages to take advantage of every click possible. You need to figure out your own site's profit margins by using small advertising budgets, then slowly building them up higher and higher. You'd be nuts to start off with that huge budget. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Do a $5/day budget and try different keywords, ad variations, and landing pages. Also, don't expect 5-20 cents a click for good keywords in any popular niches. That's too cheap too expect. 20-60 cents is more reasonable.
start with a small budget, even better start with yahoo search marketing and test your keywords and sales letter there. Since you'll know your convertion rates then go to adwords
I wouldn't personally start with Adwords, but that's just me. MSN has always been better for testing small campaigns.
These people spending thousands a day on adwords didn't start off like that. Just begin with a small amount, and as your revenue grows, let your advertising budget grow as well.
My target is 100% ROI, so if I spend $100 on clicks I expect to net $100 in profit. Then again, if I have a campaign that only earns 25%, I still take that. Cut your teeth with a small budget and work your way up. Don't get bogged down on what other people earn. You'll most likely lose money in the beginning. Strive to break even. Then work your profits up. The hard part is pushing forward in the face of losses. Another thing. Whatever you do, build a list. Lists increase the lifetime value of a customer. You might break even with Adwords but the list could push you over the top.
In that case you should be able to work out your rough conversion rates for your website and base your PPC predictions on those. While the conversion figures are unlikely to be identical between organic & paid it should give you an idea of whether you can make money using AdWords at the predicted click costs.
The key is to accumulate enough of a budget to set up a small campaign and let it run for as long as a month, if possible. You can't calculate trends in just a few days - it takes time. Do your homework, select a large number of keywords for your niches, define some negative keywords to help cut out the chaff, write some 'call to action' ads, try the full 50 if you can manage it - then set the campaign running and wait to see the results. Initially you will undoubtedly make a loss. But look at it this way - if you want to get it right first time you would have to pay a professional to set up your account. But if you want to learn the technique yourself, it's still going to cost you money. If you let your campaign run for a month you should quickly be able to identify which keywords are proving more profitable than others. You will also be able to identify the ads that are attracting the customers. After about two weeks, so as to minimize your loss, you could start to weed out the crap keywords and ads - but I would say a 30 day period is really the minimum amount of data you need to make informed decisions. Armed with this information you can streamline your campaign - use only the keywords that have converted to sales, and only the ads that have done the same. Don't work on hunches, simply go with the cold hard facts. Then start to work on improving your landing page, tailoring it to your keywords, and you quality score will steadily improve - and your CPC will come down. If you are patient enough you will start to see a steady improvement in your ROI, and getting up to an ROI of 100% or above should easily be possible. I started off using this exact technique with a budget of $5 a day. 5 months later my budget is $150-$170 a day and I'm returning $350-$600 a day - so $180-$430 a day profit. It just takes time. Google will give you a budget of $100 initially before they require payment, then $500, then $1000, so you can steadily increase your campaign. When you have got your campaign down pat and you are turning a profit, the leap to $1000+ a week may initially seem daunting, but if you have proven the campaign will work on a small scale, up-sizing is the way to really start the money coming in. Be warned though, the competition is always their and you can never set and forget. Keep up to date with your niche, what the latest developments are and what the new 'hot' keywords people will be searching for are - and update your ads/keywords accordingly. You constantly keep tweaking and tinkering, but just little bits and bobs. Don't change everything in one go, just an ad at a time, a keyword at a time - let it run and study the results. Remember the saying 'if it ain't broke - don't try to fix it' is very true with Adwords. Never take a massive change in direction, particularly when you are paying big money. When things go wrong you will panic, react in a knee jerk way, and then, when you are haemorrhaging cash, you're left wondering what happened and where did it all go wrong! So ALWAYS use the softly, softly approach and just make small changes to a profitable campaign.
I will consider all this advice. One thing I noticed as far as keywords is that when I create a huge list of keywords there is usually only 1 keyword that gets all the traffic, and all the others are either always 0, or 1 or 2 impressions but no clicks. For example if I use "relaxation music" as a keyword, almost everyone on the planet looking for relaxation music online will type that keyword in the search engine. And so it gets a lot of impressions, but uses up my clicks. But when I create a huge list of variations with the keyword "relaxation music" in it, then most people either never type in those keyword phrases, or very few do. For example I could use these as a keyword phrase: buy relaxation music the best relaxation music relaxation music with ocean sounds quality relaxation music affordable relaxation music . .......and go on to create a huge list. And sure enough the keyword that ends up at the top of the list (and uses all my click money) is just the kyword "relaxation music". (So I actually paused it). My website is in the niche of brainwave entrainment and binaural beats. So the keyword "brainwave entrainment" ,and the keyword "binaural beats" are what most people search for in that niche. And when I create a huge keyword list with brainwave entrainment keyword phrases, or binaural beats keyword phrases, sure enough the two keywords everyone (intereste din that niche) is searching for is simply "brainwave entrainment", or "binaural beats". Everything else on my list gets little to no impressions not because the amount I am paying per click is too low, but because most people on the planet are not typing those keywords in the search engine. So anyway when building a huge keyword list, at least for me, therei usually seems to be only one main keyword that the world seems to be searching in google, but all the other variations of that 1 keword seem to come up rarely. Does anyone else have this problem?
^^ Thats why its called long tail...because the chance of making a sale using those terms is a long shot One thing most marketers forget when doing PPC is - Consumer Intent - a long tail term in no way shape of form signifies any intention to make a purchase. In fact if you think about it...most of those long tail terms are probably searches done by those for whom English is not their first language