Hi everyone, I've been dabbling in Adwords for a few months now - have a had a few successes here and there but mostly flops - still learning but not yet convinced that using adwords is a viable option. However I have observed the following and I'd love to have your thoughts on this. Ive been marketing an adsense ebook and realized tha most of my conversions where coming from the content network as opposed to search and I had bid a lower amount on the content ZAR 1.50 (South African Currency). Everything going cool for a day and conversions good. Then all of a sudden from day 2 onwards, without any changes whatsover, I see a huge influx of clicks on content that messes up ROI and puts me in loss mode. Doing the logical thing (or so I think), I begin reducing the content bid in 25 cent increments over a few days. But content clicks still increase and losses continue. On Google, I found the following info and I quote: "Because contextually targeted ads on our content network sometimes return lower conversion numbers than ads on Google.com search results pages, clicks from the content network use "smart pricing" adjustments. Google's smart pricing technology automatically lowers the cost of content clicks based on the referring site, to maximize the return on investment for advertisers. If our data shows that clicks from a particular content page are less likely to return results, our system automatically reduces the price the advertiser pays for those clicks." What they don't say is that while they reduce the cost per click, the no of clicks rise to such an extent that the net result becomes more expensive. They know which sites convert so that if your bid is good enough, you get to be on good sites and if your bid is lower, you get to be on lousy sites and I think they are more lousy sites than good sites. What I think happened to me is that at day 1, my ZAR 1.50 was high enough to be placed on good sites. Then other higher bids came from elsewhere and I was relegated to poor sites. From day 2 as I began reducing my bids, I was relegated to poorer and poorer sites. Since there are more poorer sites in the network, the clicks got higher and conversions tumbled. Or alternatively, since my daily budget was high, the system pushes my ad onto non-related or loosely related sites in an attempt to draw my complete budget. ?? This is what I think. Anybody has any similar experience or thoughts to share? Regards Anwaraa
smart price acts individually per adsense sites, not per AdWords account. Also you need to get a wide period of time ( 1 or 2 weeks) to have a statistical period of time that you can measure your ROI - if you get just 1 day it will not work.
Having the price paid-per-click change does not increase the total number of clicks made. Visitors to content network sites are the same. They don't multiply if the bid price drops. The content network is tricky, as it is a lot less stable and you can have different sites coming in and out of your campaign causing extremely large fluctuations in clicks.