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e.g.
1.) I have one experimental ad. it gets about 1%CTR and has resulted in about 10 enquiries in the last couple of months (not as good as I had hoped, but its not for a popular market).
2.) I think I am ready to start offering Google PPC to my clients to promote their sites. Is anyone else doing this? How do you charge?
They just sent us an Email offering $100 worth of free AdWords Select ads.
Net Result: Disappointment.
Ads are ads.
Search results are something else.
If Overture used the same sort of display ads as Google instead of the search result format as they and their partners do, I would expect their results to be disappointing as well.
Looking at two KWP that I track the wheels have come off.
-----------------KW1----KW2
All of March-----3.1%---7.1%
1-3 Apr----------1.2%---1.6%
Our problems were.
1. First we used fairly broad terms for our services. We got lots of views around 50 to 80 a day but very fwe click thoughs. Google suspended the account as we were not receiving the min .5% click throughs.
2.We then started refining, and tried again. The cost per click went up to way above what we pay at Overture after this refinement. - sometimes 80c for what costs us around 20% to 80% less on Overture. We still didnt receive the requisite click through. Suspended again
3. Now we have all our terms in brackets (Exact terms and order) and we have a long lists of them! The click through charge stayed the same (high). And now we are getting around 5 to 6 "views" a day. So far no click throughs but will take a while before it can be assessed at this rate!
Our Ad wording has been tested elsewhere and was approved by our copywriters as being good copy to attract a click.
Again, I think diff products and services perform better in some PPC's than others. No criticism of Google apart from our point of view, Overture's method of reviewing relevancy by hand seems better than Googles methods of just using an algo (click through rate). Overture does not seem to have as big a problem with low click throughs than Google, so it looks like Overture works better for us with our services at this time.
That's my experience. I still feel for the money you're getting a lot of exposure. Considering you would've had to pay more money with Adwords than you would've with Adwords select to get some results.
I really wouldn't recommend this service if you're an seo, bacause the competition is fierce. I can't say everyone is going to click on your links, but the ones that do seem to check your site out a little better than other PPC's.
1) Which results seem to be the best to use?
Broad matches. If your ads are broad matched, your keyword(s) will match all searches that include that keyword. Your keywords will be broad-matched by default, unless you select a different matching option using the special characters noted below. For example, tennis clothing will match tennis clothing sales, clothing for tennis tournaments, etc.
Phrase matches. If your keywords are phrase-matched, your ad won't show if the user's search words are not in the same order as the order that your ordered keywords specify. Just surround the keywords that you would like to phrase match with double quotes (" "). For example, "tennis clothing" will exclude your ad from showing for searches for clothing for tennis tournaments but not red tennis clothing.
Negative matches. If your keywords are negative-matched, your ad won't show if the user's search includes that word. Just add the negative character (-) in front of the keyword you would like to negative match. For example, -elbow will exclude your ad from showing for searches for tennis elbow.
Exact matches. If your keywords are exact-matched, your ad won't show if the user's search includes any words besides the exact keyword or phrase that you've specified. Just surround the keywords that you would like to exact match with square brackets ([ ]). For example, [tennis clothing] will exclude your ad from showing for searches for tennis clothing sales.
2) I know they will drop the listing if there are not enough clickthroughs but is that per word, or per url? If you have an url on
clothing stores and get a few clicks for words like "maternity clothing", "men's clothing" etc etc are they all added together or is it PER phrase?
3) Finally, how does it work with misspellings. Do they accept them ? And do they have anything like match driver on overture that will redirect it?
Thanks.
Okay, one more thing:
Did google ad words select replace the original ad words program? Or do they co-exist for same phrases?
Still, I've seen decent results. With the same family of keywords as on Overture, I've see 6% CTRs for some ad groups and 4% overall. Google produced about 1/3 the sales as Overture at a reasonable CPC.
Alex
My conversion rate is 17% +, but to get that you need to be specific.
'green widgets with bobbles' as a select criteria with copy of 'buy extra special green widgets with bobbles here'.
Of course, once you have them on your site.........
Am I missing something here?
It takes a lot of time to get it right.
If its any consolation, most of my previous attempts were below 0.5% for the same site.
for example, if the keyword GENEALOGY was in my list, and someone searched google for "THOMAS FAMILY GENEALOGY" the title of my ad when it popped up would be THOMAS FAMILY GENEALOGY.
Maybe it's possible to do this already, but I havnen't seen it. I would absolutely love to have this option.
Does that make sense?
Alex
for example, if the keyword GENEALOGY was in my list, and someone searched google for "THOMAS FAMILY GENEALOGY" the title of my ad when it popped up would be THOMAS FAMILY GENEALOGY.Maybe it's possible to do this already, but I havnen't seen it. I would absolutely love to have this option.
Does that make sense?
It makes sense, but the eventual result of making it that easy would probably be that every advertiser would have the title "THOMAS FAMILY GENEALOGY" for that search. In that case, it might be better to have a different title. ;)
If you are offering a B2B solution then pause your ad over the weekend, most businesses are not there and all you get are curious tyre kickers.
Run several ads with different headlines and the same title and then same headline different title, will tell you what words work best for your campaign. In doing this I've managed to get CTR on most campaigns up to between 2 & 4% with a reasonably good conversion rate.
If you offer a regional solution always go for exact match and include at trial at county/state level first then expand from there. Never go outside your country and always select to have local traffic, so if you are UK based ask for UK traffic. Personally I also find the syndicated traffic to be poor, so say you don't want anything but Google searchers.
It can and does work, but there's lots of tweaking to be done, but I love it!
I'm selecting a price to put me at the top, but this facility seems flakey too. Sometimes a lower maximum CPC will rank me higher.
Then I had a thought. (oh no...)
I wondered - when I select UK only, Google displays my ads only to customers using google.co.uk.
I'm guessing most people will go to google.com, not google.co.uk.
This would explain the very low numbers I'm seeing.
So I tried selecting ALL COUNTRIES instead. The estimate jumped from 1 to 9. Still way too low.
I've asked Google, but experience suggests I'll get an automated and irrelevant response in a day or so.
So three questions:
1. Does selecting UK only - limit exposure to those searching via google.co.uk?
2. Anyone explain why the predicted clicks per day are so low?
3. Anyone else seen the flakey behaviour when predicting ranking based on keywords and max CPC?
Any thoughts, guys?
Cheers,
Chris
Your answers are
a) yes if you select UK only you will only have your ad displayed to those using google.co.uk
b) The clicks relate to the number of times your impression will be acted upon. You will find there are several hundred searches but if you get 9 clicks out of 200 impressions that's a healthy CTR of 4.5%
c) Google's Adwords select is based on both the cost of the click and also the current esteem with which they hold your site/page. The behaviour isn't flakey, it's probably that your site does better PR wise for certain things and hence you may have to pay less for your traffic. I guess it's working on the basis that you would capture a certain amount of it by normal unpaid methods, it's only fair they charge you less if you want to buy.
I don't think that you've got this Google.com / Google.co.uk thing quite right. Google determines your country of origin (by IP address ??) and then serves the ads according to that. In other words if I'm in the UK, using google.com I will see all ads that are flagged for UK users (or all users).
Regards
Ross
That's the way I hoped it worked.
Anyone got the definitive answer?
I'm seeing better results by going to google.co.uk and looking for my ads, but I still don't see MOST of them at all. On google.com, I see NONE of them.
And, now I think about it a bit more, even allowing for the fact that estimated clicks will be a factor of perhaps 100 less than estimated impressions, (allowing for CTRs in the low percentages) the numbers are still too low to be plausible.
Anyway, it's all learning, I spose.
Cheers,
Chris
