Is adwords marketing worth it?

[kenpachi]

I have just finished reading through Rosalind Gardner's "Super Affiliate Handbook 2005" and some of the examples in there regarding PPC don't seem to be very feasible, considering the book was written almost 4 years ago.

One of the examples was in regards to PPC marketing and determining profitability. It went something like this.

1. Find a bunch of keyword and phrases that total at least 50,000 searches a month
2. Assume a 1.5% Click Through Rate
3. Assume a 1.5% Conversion Rate
4. Assume a 6 cent average ad cost (this does not make sense to me)

Using the above you could something like this

Searches: 50,000
Clicks: 750
Conversions: 11
Sales: $440 (Assuming $40 per sale)
Expenses: $45 (Author recommends to use 6-cent average)
Net: $395 / month

The problem I see with the above is that 6 cents a click in adwords is not realistic in my view. Now I haven't read any good books on adwords, and I will soon, but from the few campaigns I have run unsuccessfully , I don't see how 6 cents a click will get you anywhere. Personally, I think you need a minimum of 50 cents or more a click.

Searches: 50,000
Clicks: 750
Conversions: 11
Sales: $440 (Assuming $40 per sale)
Expenses: $375 (Author recommends to use 50-cent average)
Net: $65 / month

Am I missing something in my logic? I have done keyword research with the adwords tool that shows the price per click and any phrase worth going after costs a decent amount per click, even when there is little competition. In cases of low competition wouldn't it be better to try and get search engine traffic for free, instead of running an ad campaign?

Any input into this would be great, thanks!

[Linda Buquet]

Yes Adwords can be expensive and risky. Especially if you pick the wrong merchant the offer does not convert OR you pick the wrong keywords and get info seekers instead of people in the buying stage.

6 cents is really low these days. You could maybe get close to that on some really long tail terms but you'd have to have a boat load of them to make any money. Some of the super affiliate have tools that help them generate thousands of keyword combos with city, state, zip variables.

But 50 cents and up is more like it for most decent phrases.

I would DEF start off with free traffic as you learn the ropes. You can decided to do PPC after you learn enough to go there. But don't go there unless you know the merchant converts and you've done some in-depth studying about how to do PPC. We have some free guides in our PPC forum.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

[kenpachi]

Thanks Linda, I think I'm going to take that advice and test out the niche with a blog, and if successful, get some material on conducting an adwords campaign.

[Peter Bordes]

Yes it can be very effective. You def need to test test test. Take your time to optimize and focus on long-tail keywords and phrases. Depending on the category you will typically find high CPC's. A good strategy is to take the info you optimize from Adwords and then use them to buy traffic off the Google content network.

Have you tried targeting on any of the social networks?

Originally Posted by kenpachi

Thanks Linda, I think I'm going to take that advice and test out the niche with a blog, and if successful, get some material on conducting an adwords campaign.

[hamncheese]

The advice I give you is to test it. Join google adwords and try it out.

The reports will give you all the details you need as far as CTR, Converstion Rate, and avg. CPC

The CTR is depended on how good your ad is and also how much competition is on the keyword you are targeting. My suggestion is to use longer keywords and put the keyword phrase in [].

The conversion rate usually is depended on the landing page as well as how easy to use, and how trustworthy your site is.

Hope this helps!

[svtdbird]

Yes, .6 is definitely low for 2008. But, you can get there with unrelated keywords in a content campaign. There are tons of keywords that are not being used for a content campaign. They're not targeted to what you're promoting, but you can still get over 1 million impressions a day by using them. How many clicks do you think you can get with 1 million impressions.

Keywords for example - MySpace or Facebook

MySpace is averaging .15/click for me
Facebook about .30/click

These two adgroups alone give me around 1 million impressions a day. I'm sure you can think of a lot more keywords that have a lot of traffic. I currently have 34 adgoups at less than .15/click. 4 groups less than .10/click

[Linda Buquet]

svtdbird, doesn't that pull your quality score down?

Are you saying you bid on the KW Myspace but send them to your ringtones or green widgets landing page? That's unrelated so I would think it would pull your QS down, plus I would think there's a chance either/both of the companies would have a problem and stop you from using their trademark.

In fact I don't see any Adwords ads for either company so it looks like they don't allow people to bid on their trademarks anyway.

Any way you cut it, it's a brand new newbie asking the question and there are mainly newbies reading the thread, so I just want to point out this is not a strategy you should be trying.

[kenpachi]

I recently launched a new Adwords campaign for a Squidoo page I made. I had a couple of bucks left in my account and thought what the heck, lets see if this works any better.

Here are my Keyword stats that I went by:

- I am targeting 4 long-tail keyword phrases - both the phrase and exact match search types (not broad match), all my analysis is done with Google's Adword tool and search engine.

Avg Monthly Search Vol
key phrase 1: 590
key phrase 2: 590
key phrase 3: 91
key phrase 4: 320

allintitle: "[key phrase]"
key phrase 1: 16
key phrase 2: 17
key phrase 3: 4
key phrase 4: 52

KEI
key phrase 1: 36.88
key phrase 2: 34.17
key phrase 3: 22.75
key phrase 4: 6.15

CPC
key phrase 1: $0.08
key phrase 2: $0.08
key phrase 3: $0.08
key phrase 4: $0.08

- My budget is $5.00 a day
- I have $8.00 left in my account
- I am targeting Canada for some reason
- I opted out of the content network, so these will not be displayed in Adsense ads


Results:

After the first day Google wanted me to raise my bid to $0.10 on most of my keywords. I have been running this campaign for about a week and have had a total of 2 impressions.

What I don't get is why the impressions are so low. Based on my calculations of dividing the monthly search volume by 30 for each key phrase I should get about 50 impressions a day. When I typed those keywords into Google there are usually no adword ads present,so no competition. The most I have seen for one of my phrases was three ads, and when I refreshed the page it went down to one.

[bizquery]

Hi Kenpanchi,

Why don't you add in time schedule running since you just target for Canada.
Example you stop adword running at night then it will optimise on the peak hours.

Another thing, revise again your keyword and title of adword. Think something interesting where people will click once see it. Such as "Oppurtunity for every one"... just a sample.

However above just suggestion. May be other friends have lot suggestion to improve each other..

[svtdbird]

Linda,
This will pull your quality score down for that particular campaign, only. So, you have to make a separate Content Only campaign, so it won't affect any other campaigns. Your quality score is irrelevant when you're still getting clicks on your ads. That's Googles primary concern.

You can bid on the keywords, you just can't put trademarks in your ads.

The reason this works so well and for so cheap, is because it goes against what all the gurus teach in their books, since it is unrelated and will pull your quality score down, for that particular campaign. Therefore, most people are thinking like you and don't wan't to use this strategy, or perhaps haven't even thought of it.

Any way you cut it, I will be happy to continue to use this strategy. You can't even imagine the ROI with this campaign.

By the way, I'm not so sure that this strategy isn't for newbies. Having to worry about quality score actually makes things more complicated. This strategy eliminates that problem.