I am selling a software program that should help beginning
algebra students do their homework. My initial set of
keywords (things that you would expect - "algebra homework
help", "algebra tutor" etc). All of these yielded very low
expected clicks per day (3-10) and pretty high suggested
bids ($1.00 or so, min on some was set to $0.5).
I know what the pitfall of a generic keyword such as "algebra" is -potentially lots of clicks and no sales.
However, to me it is still appealing because:
1. The min rate is 0.05
2. Expected # of clicks around 100
The way I want to deal with "misdirected" traffic would be
the following:
1. I use a ton of negative keywords (such as -linear, -abstract, -matrix --- things that don't apply to basic
algebra)
2. My ad says very specifically "basic algebra", so I
am hoping that people interested in other areas of
algebra are not going to click
Is this a viable approach?
Thanks,
Neven
The advantage of Adwords and other PPC engines is that it's a great testing tool. Why not give it a try for a week to determine the viability of this approach?
I had a campaign where I had to do this because of the same reasons, and the results were positive.
So I suggest you give it a shot and then stop the campaign after a week to determine how effective it was, and then determine a future strategy based on this data.
Good luck!
The suggested bid means nothing. I have yet to figure out how they come to the conclusion and I believe (at least from other threads I have seen on here) no one else has either.
Their expected clicks can be way off too. Either too high or too low, but most of the time it can give you a general idea of what to expect.
You may want to use wordtracker to find exact phrases that people are looking for about algebra in combination with using the negative keywords.
If this is you, I think you flip-flopped the URL fields. Click on your ad and check it out.
Thanks for your suggestions.
As far as the long url goes, I was just following somebody's
advice from this forum (use the max 35 caps url to make your
ad bigger). At the time I didn't realize that because of
the formating the competitor's ads were also going to get
bigger. Another change I did was including some common
mispelling words for algebra. This seems to have improved
my click-through rate by 20% (5% mispelled kwds + 15%, I
assume because of the larger looking ad, although I am not sure
that 6000 impressions (1 day) makes it statistically significant).
By the way, my click through rate is not that high (1.2%,
80 clicks on 6000 impressions), but it seems like well spent
$5.00. I am still waiting for orders though ....
Neven
