Forum Moderators: open
What I would like to see happen in this thread is brainstorming on how to handle the situation for those of us who simply cannot afford the price increase.
I, for one, expect that I will be leaving goto completely. Unforunately, I haven't had much positive experience with any other PPC programs, although I've only tried a few (FindWhat, Pageseeker, about.com)
Is there anyone out there who has had success with tens of thousands of listings at $0.01 a piece on another PPC engine??
Where to move my bids to.....
-ebess-
It's not a perfect solution, but the price of one month of GoTo would probably buy you several pages in Inks paid program. The fact they will re-spider every 48 hours will help you move your pages up fairly quickly.
Based upon the most productive conversion day/time, of a keyword, raise the bid at that time.
Fall back to the minimum bid after that.
Here's a job for a good programmer.
minnapple
minnapple --
that's beyond my abilities to automate :)
-ebess-
You wouldn't want to loose positions in other Ink sites, for the sake of GoTo. That would be somewhat of a "two steps forward, three steps back" situation.
I appreciate the advice
-ebess-
Would someone TELL or even venture a guess as to what people are selling that has such a "low profit margin" or such a "poor conversion rate" as to cause this problem in the first place.
It would be interesting to be able to look at a specific situation.
I'm not so sure that people are selling low margin items in the above scenario, but rather the market allows them to bid this low as they have done research on related words that their competition hasn't. I've seen keywords bid at over $2.00 per click, but a little bit of using Brett's goto tool and you can find a bunch of related keywords in the .01-.04 range. Granted they don't bring more than a click or two a day, but they help average down overall costs.
Nobody wants to ever pay more than is necessary. Well, Goto just told us it's necessary if we want to play in their game.
Well I can buy that. In that scenario, there seems to be enough profit margin for others to be bidding much higher. The increase to 5 cent will have an effect on the average but will not put you out of business. A little additional WORK on the site to improve the conversion rate might more than make up for the price increase.
i would venture a guess that they would include non profits who are not actually selling anything apart from maybe advertising on their site- and GoTo would be a good branding expsoure for them esp with the exp on AV etc.. but hard to justify for a big budget spend as there is no direct return.
We have used GoTo, though rarely, as non-profit sites on 1 to 4c terms.
that may be one category of people who may be affected. GoTo is not really geared to these people anyway, and it is now more obvious...
Or affiliate farms on
Affiliate farms are by their very nature a low conversion platform. By breaking them up into a series of content rich focused affiliate ranches the conversion rates may improve.
imho
Most of the penny bids people make are for more obscure terms that relate in someway to the product, but aren't nearly as targeted as their main terms. Of course, far fewer people click on these bids. But more importantly, a much smaller percentage of those who do click get converted into customers.
The whole penny bid strategy is based upon the idea that the higher visitor per dollar ratio will make up for the lower conversion rate. Howerever, alot of the time the conversion rates for these terms are so low that moving up above a penny per click will quickly erode your profit margins.
For example: bidding on "mp3", if you sell "mp3 PLAYERS" is not directly relevant, but will be allowed, and may acquire an occasional sale, but it can be assumed that the majority of people searching for MP3 are looking for free music. Conversely, those searching for "MP3 player" may be looking for a freebie, or to actually BUY something.
IMHO it is worth a good long look at your current terms, at whatever bid price, and see exactly what terms are converting. Otherwise you are flying blind. A wasted .01 bid may not kill you, but if a wasted .05 bid will, then you should be counting your pennies, no matter where you spend them. Sure, you can bid what used to be 1 cent elsewhere, (which is now a nickel at Goto) but if it didn't convert well at GoTo, why pay someone else for a non-producing term?
I realize a lot of folks have very slim margins, or non-profit sites, but doing the math really pays off. Even at a penny a click.
So far
47% oh well, we will see how it goes, . .
20% are asking me what I think we should do. . .
14% are going to let their accounts run dry
2% are saying switch to other ppc's and check on results.
The rest . . . no response either way, I will not be billing or depositing anything into their GoTo accounts without further authorization.
With advertising revenue going down I thank god I only offered it as a value added service.
I tried to be as neutral as possible when presenting to my clients.
Anyone else or do you think this is bad sharing this info?
Minnapple
The way I see it, their partners will want to make up for that lost revenue by charging GoTo more per click ... after all, GoTo should be able to pay more per click since they're going to be getting a minimum of five cents per click.
When the cycle is complete, I don't see where GoTo will be ahead of the game, and a lot of penny webmasters will have abandoned them. Their five cents minimum sure looks like a short-sighted manuever if you ask me.
Maybe it is time to consider viable alternatives. The problem with penney kw's is that most are not heavily searched or the peice would be higher. This may be a case of quality versus quantity.
I tried listing lots of penney terms in goto and they didn't result in 1% of the traffic I am getting from SEO for more heavily searched primary kw's.
I suggest you either do a lot of studying up on SEO or get a good pro to handle it for you.
It is amazing what a few good rankings for primary kw's can do. In my opinion it is much more cost effective than buying top kw's because you get listings for multiple terms without the recurring cost. One of my main kw's would cost me $2.63 on goto! $26,300 per 10,000! My rankings for prime kw'son the other SE's are actually bringing me more traffic than goto gets for the the kw.
It may come to pass that all SE's go PPC but for now I think prime keywords through SEO are much more productive and cost effective.
That may be true but we are looking for them to get more TRAFFIC. Cheap bids and limited traffic could make managing these other PPC accounts a waste of your time.
[Results may vary.]
I just fell off the turnip truck :) and I don't know what "Brett's goto tool" is. Can someone help?
