Adwords Advice

[PSA]

Hi, I've recently tried Adwords and had very little success with it. I wondered what experienced users thought about it and any good advice?

Thanks for any input

PSA

[viradian]

Professional adwords coaches will tell you to test two ads at the same time in adwords. Adwords allows you to run two different ads at the same time for the same campaign. After a few days, see which ad gets the most response. Delete the poor performing ad and create a new ad to try to beat your better performing ad. Its called A/B split testing, where you always try to beat your better performing ad.

[viradian]

But Be careful...Adwords costs can rack up quickly. If you don't pay attention to it, you can see a huge bill on your credit card. I like to set daily budget limits so I can keep the costs under my control.

I've actually had better response from Yahoo Sponsored ads. More clicks and more conversions.

[PSA]

Thanks for that and I'll have a look at Yahoo.

Not sure about the A/B as even with with putting my business name as keywords, which includes the city name, I find doing test searches on each word rarely brings a response even when there's only a few ads and which are less relevant ads.

Eg; I search for Peterborough Serviced Apartments which is my business name and I expected to be on there more so than someone who's keyword is apartment - and even more frustrating when it's a UK search and the links are to American sites.

I'd hoped that anyone who searched for anything in Peterborough would have a good chance of seeing my ad but again it shows other ads that don't even have Peterborough in.

But maybe its me!

Cheers

[viradian]

Have you used the Overture keyword selector tool? Type in your top keywords and it will give you related variations and tell you how many searches were placed in a month. It helps you target more desireable search terms for your ads.

[TexSurance.US]

One thing I'd like to add. I have tried both Google and Yahoo Sponsored ads.

Not to say I wouldn't do it again with what I have learned,
but generally I was not impressed.

==================================

One hang-up was with the customer support at Yahoo and their program in general - I think it's designed to take advantage of nieve users.

- they say to start an account with 5.00
- but when you get to page 5 of 6 in the sign-up process,
- they want 30.00
- and I never got the 25.00 promo credit offer.

* It's the principle of it, not the money. I can't false advertise,
- so yahoo shouldn't be allowed to either.

==================================

Now I'll step off my soap box and make my real point.

Any time I am looking for something, be it information, meta tags, whatever, I always look at my competitions sites.

And where do I ( and everyone else ) look, why the google Sponsored links of course. Yahoo too if you like to Yahooooooooooo !

And some of those loosers pay over 6.00 per click and all I'm doing is research. So like some one already stated, be careful.

Ask yourself, are you after traffic or building your label,

if your after Traffic bid High, and pay high when butt holes like me or your actual competition are doing nothing but research.

Bid low ( .10 ) per click if your only trying to get on many sites.
- which in it's own little way for little money can boost your presence
and possibly result in better indexing and relevance in normal searches.

And use the tools others have recommended for selecting the right search terms that you want your campaign to be based on.


Good luck my friend.



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[richb]

But even better click and conversion, did you able to convert it to sales? Sometime it get people to click and your bill increase, but it really hard to convert it to sales!!

[viradian]

I agree that Pay Per Click really stinks...don't do it unless you have to. I do it on a limited basis and only for keywords that I don't have a presence for. When I signed up for Yahoo PPC, I got $75 of free clicks for signing up...I limit my ads to $5 per day, and I don't run the ads everyday.

But, if you can optimize your site to get naturally listed, you are much better off and conversion should be better too.

[viradian]

One big difference between Google and Yahoo PPCs is Google bills your card every so often, so its hard to keep track of how much you've spent for traffic. I had a $70 bill from google one week and I didn't get any sales from it...Waste!

Yahoo on the other hand keeps an account for you...It charges your card for an amount you specify. Say 30 bucks. Then it takes money out of that account every time someone clicks on your ad. You can see the amount left in your account at any time. When your account gets low, it will charge your card again, but you can always see where you're at.

[tomfallenstein]

I found my campains successful.

I have done much research and tried many different ads. I have very specific websites and you want to make sure the keywords you are going after are indead the type of people that will purchase a costume.

For instance I sell star wars costumes, I do pay for the term "star wars costumes" but also look at paying for more specific terms since those are usually the people that end up purchasing more often. In my case an example might be "adult darth vader costumes".

I found that when I paid to be #1 my conversion rate was around 5%. When I paid to be #4-8 my conversion rate was more 10%.

I would just recommend playing the numbers game and test it out for yourself. On my #1 ranking my conversions cost around $10. and for my #4-8 rankings my conversion cost is around $2.50. So keep that in mind.

[abraxas]

Hi,

I want to ask, do you have any idea how could one track Adsense earnings separately form each website if more than one? I mean how many clicks from each site? Also is this available for Adwords - I don't have adwords account yet and couldn't find such stats for Adsense.
In addition, do you know if I can somehow bound/limit my Adwords budget to my earnings from Adsense..if possible - i just want to turn these earnings, but not exceeding them into adverts and visits, instead of cashing out?!
Thanks for help!

[viradian]

I think if you set up different campaigns for each site, you can keep track of each campaigns earnings separately for each site.

As far as adsense money going directly to adwords ads, I think those are separate accounts, so I don't think you can convert the money from adsense to adwords.

[abraxas]

Thank you very much viradian!