Hi guys, firstly what a great site. Spent a couple of hours reading threads and was really impressed with all the helpful comments. Basically, I have clothing store and have decided to launch a website (www.projectsclothing.co.uk). We've been up for a few months a made a few sales, but traffic in my opinion os terrible. I have about 10-20 hits per day. I want to attempt to increase that with a ppc campaign. I have some really basic questions, which are embarresing but I'll ask them anyway. 1) Firtly, I'm aware the cost of adwords is based on (loosely) your CTR, qulaity score such as text relevance and landing pg quality. However, if I don't have any CTR history how is this determined? Is it based on my first 1000 impression?? 2) The cost of words on PPC – don’t really understand it which considering the literature available is shameful. I want to use “designer t shirts†as a broad match on adwords. When I use google’s traffic est it tells me the price for the word is between £0.41-0.58 and I will get 12-15hits per day and be in the top 1-3 positions. The average CPC is 0.52 with a maximum of £1.15. If I have my bid a 0.52p I get the results above. If I increase it to say £2 the number of hits increase by a couple more to 13-17hits. My question is what will the difference be between bidding a) £0.10 b) £0.50 c) £2.00 Does it simply mean that when that word is searched I will appear higher in the list if I use a higher price then if I use a lower one? But if I only have a budget of say £10-£15day then isn’t better to reduce my bids to a very low number as I am still likely to get the required hits as my budget is likely to run out very quickly? How do you determine th eoptimum number (or is this a how long is a piece of string question) Also is it best to pick lots of niche keywords with low volume usage or go main keywords (as above) and pay more more per click, if I use th elatter wouldn'y my CPC be poor. Tough to know where to start as I'm so new to the whole PPC game Also, do you think it’s is best to try and learn this stuff or would I be best to pay for someone to manage my campaign? Any PPC advice for a newbie as I can see how easy it would be to pour money into PPC campaigns just learning it. Your thoughts please
Knowing how to create simple Web sites is needed if you want to succeed online. But not only creating a Web site will guarantee your success, you have to optimize your Web site to sell, and to sell well. How to make it to effectively sell what you have to offer. With AdWords you are going to bring targeted traffic to your landing page, but you have to convert those visitors into buyers. The first thing to keep always in mind is the word: relevancy. So your landing page must be relevant (targeted) to your AdWords ads and your keywords. By the way, know how to create a high converting landing (or squeeze) page, is time to drive low cost adwords and targeted traffic to it.
In answer to 1. QS and min CPC is first determined on landing page quality, from there as of impression #1 CTR and history take over. 2. The higher you bid the higher your ad will be displayed. If you want to beat your competitors search results and capture more traffic you need to outbid them. the diff between .10, .50 and 2 is the competitors in between. Finding an optimum position is what campaign management is all about. It can turn out to be a full time job, especially if your trying to learn in the process. If you have a limited budget, then the goal is to try and get as many clicks as possible for the budget that you have. Setting a bid at the very minimum is also not the best practice, as you will still get too little traffic. You basically need to learn how to bid to get in position 4 - 8 or which ever position seems to produce the most 3. It is best to use a good combination of short tail and long tail keywords. If a keyword is competitive, it is because the keyword produces results. Some will say to build a massive portfolio of long tail keywords to cut costs and get a high ROI, but the issue is volume... 80% of traffic is gained by common terms, and you can get about 20% traffic from niche long tails. So if you only go the 20% route you could be missing a lot of sales, that will only cost you slightly higher in cost per acquisition or CPA. Again, finding a balance between general and niche terms is best for an optimal campaign... Lastly, you want to know if its best to learn adwords or just sub out the work. This really depends on your free time to marketing and how aggressive and successful you want to be. I have been doing adwords for over 7 years, and I still learn new things every day... It will take the average newbie about 6 months - 1 year of hands on experience, with a mentor, to really learn how to use adwords by themselves. (This is based on average training in corporate environments). Most big businesses outsource the work to either individuals or large marketing firms depending on how much you can afford to spend on management. A business owner has more things to worry about then his marketing 24/7. So it really depends on your needs and free time...
I totally agree with that. Website that sell always make your profit. So it is important for someone to have website that really sell before they go and do their marketing. If not, their marketing will just be wasting money.