Adwords campaign questions.

[cgchris99]

Sorry if this is long winded.

My online store currently shows up #1 when I type in XYZ product. And is in the top 10 for most products on my store when a user types into google "Brand Modelname".

But am I getting enough traffic? My prices are very competitive but I'm not getting a lot of sales. I want to increase the traffic in hopes of sales.

Lets use this example(I don't sell scuba gear but...)
If the user searches Scuba Equipment I would up on page 5 or 6 of a google search.

But if they search XYZ Swim Fins, I am in the Top 5.

So would an adword campaign on Scuba Equipment & Scuba Diving help me?

Comments or thoughs?

[dmorison]

If the user searches Scuba Equipment I would up on page 5 or 6 of a google search.

But if they search XYZ Swim Fins, I am in the Top 5.

So would an adword campaign on Scuba Equipment & Scuba Diving help me?

Absolutely.

The great thing about AdWords is that it is only a USD 5 outlay anyway. You'll have spent that in time thinking about it, so why not just try it!

[ianama]

Heck throw everything relevant in there that you can, and use an ROI tool to gradually eliminate that stuff that totaly doesn't work, and drop your bids for those phrases/words that, based on their conversion ration, could be profitable at a lower bid.

My suggestion is in a campaign, run a very general keyword (one that is as a whole even just a bit profitable or breaks even) along with every variation of more specific keywords, and graually increase, decrease and eliminate based on your conversion ratio, keep addiing and deleting, and at some point you'll have so many PROFITABLE specific words that the general will no longer be profitable, and you can eliminate it, and just stay with your specific words.

IAN

[cgchris99]

Can you recommend a ROI tool? I haven't seen these before.

thx

[ianama]

We built our own. Are you working in ASP?

[cgchris99]

not ASP, PHP.
I do have the ability to track sales from my adwords link though. So this info along with Excel should get me the info I need.

[ianama]

Then track it, and calculate your coversion ratio for each word/phrase. It's better than sliced bread ;)

[fenway]

quick question..I've used some sophisticated tools in the past where I submit an entirely different tracking url to determine ROI. It worked great, but I'm not really sure how it worked technically. So I was curious, if didn't want to use the tool, could I simply tack a code on the end of the url i submit to google, and that will show up in my log as the referring url? and I could track that to the conversion manually?

thanks for any help...I may not even be asking the question correctly!

[ianama]

You could do that, but that would tell you only who came to your site, and from where or what words they came.

If you wanted to get a conversion ratio on each word or affiliate ID for your orders, subscriptions or leads, you would have to pass that tracking ID in the url from page to page using say some type of session object from the time the customer enters your site all through the completion of the order/subscription process. Or, you would otherwise have to implant a cookie on the customers computer initially with that tracking code, and then check for it when the user signs up or purchases or whatever, and then you would log it as another variable as part of the order. For best results, you would ideally want to use both. But if you know the error margin, and it is small, you can use one and still have pretty good data to work with.

If you're going to build the tracking yourself, or have someone build it, you may as well have it do some simple calculations to get real time reports, instead of having to copy and paste into Excel or something.

Best of Luck,
Ian

[Shak]

some excellent and cost effective tools out there, specifically for the PPC industry.

a search on google for "roi tracking" brings up many hidden gems.

Shak