Adwords WAY Overpriced

[bostonseo]

Google Adwords is so overpriced compared to Overture. What's running up the prices is Mom and Pop shops coming in and spending $1,000 and leaving and next week it's more of the same. The quality of clicks seem to be serious declining as well. Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

I'm boycotting Google Adwords; who is joining me?

[skibum]

It takes a lot of work to manage 25M a year on AdWords. Maybe it just takes more work. That's certainly enough cash to do plenty of testing. If that is 25M on broad match, opted into content, with generic ads and dynamic titles, that could be why.

Clients always seem to come up with tens of thousands of dollars to spend on PPC but can't spend one or two months worth of ad dollars to fix the site and get the conversion up.

[blaze]

I can appreciate this, though. Screw up on the website, and lose everything. Screw up on the PPC, and your ROI just goes down.

[MovingOnUp]

You may pay $5 per click, but if I can generate twice the CTR, I only have to pay $2.50 per click to get the same placement.

I'm bidding on literally thousands of decent keywords with $0.05 bids in my industry. The main general keyword in my industry is almost $3. I average $0.14 CPC, the 4th position, and hundreds in profits every day. Perhaps you need to focus on more detailed keywords rather than general ones. As others said, you don't need to be number one.

The concept of a "marketing budget" with AdWords is flawed. Don't limit yourself that way. Consider AdWords and other traffic sources to be your "cost of goods sold" instead. If you can double your money with AdWords, wouldn't it make sense to use it as much as possible? Why only spend $1,000 to make $2,000 wen you can spend $10,000 to make $20,000? As long as you have positive ROI with AdWords, max it out.

[johnnydequino]

<<Ogletree said: I think the biggest problem with G is that broad match will beat exact match. It allows people to bid $5 on all terms instead of $5 on the big one and $0.50 on the little one. We do great on OV because the four word terms are affordable.>>

Dead right. Hopefully with the latest changes on how they rank broadmatch will help. I just hate irrelvent searchers, and over the longterm so will searchers. But hey, google has an IPO coming so let them make as much money as they can.

P.S - Longhorn is coming which will reshape the entire PPC industry. For good or for bad.

[digitalv]

digitalv so how many industries do you manage clients' in?

One - network hardware. Which is what I said earlier about how more people in my Industry are searching Google to find what they need. If it's a fluke then it's a fluke but you're still arguing the wrong point :)

My point was that even though I get more bang for the buck with AdWords, I wouldn't consider dropping Overture. It might cost me more per acquisition but it's still worth it.

[whoisgregg]

It's the same number of competitors on both Overture and Google but because of the lack of control per placement on Google prices are dramatically higher

Not in my industry, Overture bidding on my most competitive keywords top out at almost double what Google bidding appears to be. Of course, my experience is only representative of my experience. :)

<added>
I'm still profitable in both, so I use both.
</added>

[ogletree]

MovingOnUp you can not do that on AW. If there are 10 people bidding real high for the broad match then the bulk of your kw's can't be more specific. You can in Y but not G. I can bid an exact match on a 5 word phrase and still have to pay a ton for it because it contains the general term. That is wrong.