Over the past three years, I have created a successful site and product line which has actually managed to make me a living off the web. I have no advertisements on my site and have never bought a piece of advertising. Until tonight.
Just started two campaigns a half hour ago, and I have to admit to being really scared. Afraid that goofballs will just click click click and not buy buy buy. I know that with the built-in safeguards, it is impossible to bankrupt me by dawn, but still, the knees are shakin' just a bit. I am such a wuss, buying adwords in August is like betting on the Favorite to Show!
Heh! My wife's betting style. ....though she does come away with a total win of $2.60 and I end up losing $50.
You'll be OK, pshea.
I already owe G 13 dollars and no results, that's ok. Turning on and off on advertising like a light switch . . . . blackouts notwithstanding, it's an amazing world.
Also, don't feel as though you have to spend the max amount per click! I have several fairly successful campaigns where Google suggests you spend like 1.62 per click but I'm spending 0.05 and still getting a decent click-thru ratio.
This is anecdotal evidence only, of course, but in my experience, as long as you're somewhere on the first page, and your ad is targeted enough, you'll get decent qualified clicks. My conversion rate seems to be about 2% -- not huge, but I'm happy with it as I'm selling high-ticket items.
Putting the price in the ad tends to lower my click-thru-ratio, but improve my conversion to actual paying customers.
Over the past three years, I have created a successful site and product line which has actually managed to make me a living off the web. I have no advertisements on my site and have never bought a piece of advertising. Until tonight.
Pshea, first congratulations on jumping in!
If you've built a successful business, I suspect that coming up to speed on AdWords will be pretty quick - especially with this excellent forum in your corner.
Here is a radical concept: it might even be really fun to learn the ropes, and see your efforts result in additional success.
The idea, expressed by others above, of limiting your risk through your daily budget is key. Don't put your budget any higher than you are comfortable with, as you experiment. In his excellent earlier post [webmasterworld.com...] , vibgyor79 said:
GROW your AdWords campaign slowly.
This is great advice. Take it slow, seek to be targeted rather than general, experiment, monitor, change and improve stuff, and have some fun!
Always great advice.
I have had fun today, checking in with Adwords Admin all day and watching. I don't use a log analysis that tracks the visitor path (I guess that's next on the shopping list now), so I'll have to bleary-eye my way through the logs for now to see if this experiment turned up any sales.
I had the least number of visitors last year in August and that looks like it will be the same this year. And today, is the least-visited day of the month so far.
I'm certainly going to take the advice to lower the price I pay for ads, already did that once today, and I think that I can try even lower.
Someone at PubCon was telling me that even if I achieved top 5 spots in the unpaid search results, I should still purchase words and I could not get my head into that. It bugged me because he was so certain of his position. He said the trend was that people clicked on ads/sponsored results. I have nailed pretty well every organic keyword combo (is that what we are calling it now?) I could possibly want and surfers are ignoring that and clicking on ads? It bugged me. Then I got bored yesterday and thought I'd give it a try while things around here are a bit quiet.
The encouragement is great as is the advice, as always. I gotta go lower them prices now . . .
Someone at PubCon was telling me that even if I achieved top 5 spots in the unpaid search results, I should still purchase words and I could not get my head into that. It bugged me because he was so certain of his position. He said the trend was that people clicked on ads/sponsored results. I have nailed pretty well every organic keyword combo (is that what we are calling it now?) I could possibly want and surfers are ignoring that and clicking on ads? It bugged me. Then I got bored yesterday and thought I'd give it a try while things around here are a bit quiet.
TOO right... :)
Shak
