There was this one product I first attempted to promote several months ago. At the time I was just learning, and was being lazy about landing pages. And let me tell you, the original company was doing everything to keep the top spots. *side story, after I stopped promoting the item, I started to see the competitors ads on TV (never seen them before till now). I knew I was onto something, just to costly at the time* Well that ended up costing me more than I was willing to lose. Several months have gone by now, I've read everything I could on here and kept trying different things. I have wised up and created a few different tools, starting with a free javascript ebay affiliate thing, to a "BANS" type thing and now starting to test some landing page scripts I just finished up. What a DIFFERENCE. Compared to the $4 clicks I was paying back then, now I feel more comfortable with the average 3.8 position that's costing me .49 now. Landing pages are certainly the way to go, for me at least. I already knew the adword ad could perform, but at $4 a click, it always put me in the hole on a string of non converters. Things are starting to look up now, and I hope to be one of those guys setting the $100, $1000, $10000 per day/ month goals. First up, break even -> $100
When I first started adwords, I made the same mistake. Just throw all the keywords you can think of into the pot, send it to your homepage and wait... Until my quality score was poor and my click rates were $5-10. Then I created VERY specific landing pages and adgroups. Most of my current adgroups only have 10-12 keywords in them and my quality scores are 90% great. That's the trick in adwords. Takes more time, but it pays off in the end.
yeah, today will be a break even day at $40 pretty much. Actually, $3 profit if I dont get any more clicks. One keyword cost me $28 today, I want to pause it but it pulled in 2 sales, one of which redeemed itself (shouldnt have to rely on that). The product is a tough sell I think, 65% of the people click through my landing page. But when they see the prices of this product, I'm sure its a turnoff. Might have to try a clickbank item instead. I'll have to let this one run for the rest of the week to see how low my clicks start costing me. Ad position is certainly getting better, and now sitting at almost 8% CTR. If I pause the one ad, I could jump to 11%. Maybe tomorrow will be a bit better seeing how I'll start the day off with lower costs. Average CPC .81 now.. was .99
Lesson of the day (and I should have known better) Don't go change bids around if in the end I'm just going to set it back to the way it was. My original intention was to let the campaign run for the week, just as long as I was breaking even. At the end of the week I would go and cut out all the non performers. What I did was, I noticed one of the ads was getting most of the clicks, and didn't make enough sales to justify paying for. So I went in and cut the bid in half, but later decided to put it back to the original $1 bid. If I never had the ad running anyway, I would have saved about $30. Sure enough, ad position dropped, average cost if back up again. CTR took a slight hit, I should have just left it alone. Seeing how this morning, it ad ended up pulling in 2 more sales late at night. Over all, $10 profit for yesterday. This project is also getting me thinking about how I am busting my hump to make this company a large amount of money, yet I only see a small fraction. I'm thinking I might need to cut my loses and find a higher paying deal.
ok, so yesterday I lost 10 bucks. Back to break even. I did some light reading and found a couple mistakes I made on my landing page. At first I though I was getting a decent CT's, guess I was wrong. I read an article about call to action keyword placement, and the lack of. If there wasn't a call to action at the top of the fold, you would lose 30% of your visitors. As it turns out, I made this mistake. I was in-fact losing 35% of my visitors. My call to action was at the very bottom. So I added another one above the fold. So far CT's are better. It's been a light day, but I've only lost 1 visitor so far. Another thing I found out about, were the call to action keywords on the ad itself. There are certain keywords that should trigger a better response. So I created 2 other ad variations, the 2 newest ones do have a higher CTR. Another plus note, my ads have all gone back to being great, and the positions have gotten better. I'm not sure why the QS fluctuates, I'm averaging about 5% CTR with one day being 7%.