Has anyone else had this experience? Is a competitor screwing me?
My google ad is costing me more than my rent.
K
Google has been quite deligent in arresting fraud clicks so it may be something else?
You should always set a daily budget (based on what you are willing to spend on a monthly basis) and monitor your clicks everyday or every week at the very least.
I recently got $17 worth of fraud clicks credited back to my account so they are quite serious about fraud.
(Alan Parsons Project?)
What tipped you off?
Thanks.
A question, have you a way of tracking adwords incoming page views on your site either from a custom url or custom landing page?
If you have not then it may be hard to determine what is happing with adwords claimed clicks compared to normal visitors.
Oh and I certainly agree that a daily budget is very important, without that you are almost writing google an open cheque.
My google adwords bill has gone from $90/month to $300-$400/month but I'm not selling jack.
Skateboard, most often, when you are getting lots of AdWords traffic to your site, but no one is doing business with you, it is time to look carefully at the offer you are making in your ad, as compared to what they see on your site in general, and in particular on the page you take the user to.
Really, when one is getting lots of traffic, but no customers - it is most ofen something about the site that is behind the problem.
Off the top of my head, here are some of the more common reasons for 'lots of traffic but no sales' that I've encountered, talking with hundreds of advertisers over the past few years:
* Landing page is not highly related to what the ad itself is about.
* Landing page does not make it clear where user goes next to find what they have already searched for.
* Landing page is an endless animated intro, with no way to get around it.
* Landing page requires personal info before user can enter the heart of the site.
* Landing page and site do not give user a 'warm fuzzy' feeling, that they can trust the business with their personal information and/or credit card.
* Site is difficult to navigate.
* Site is poorly written, has grammar and/or spelling mistakes, etc.
* Site has an 'amateur' appearance.
* User can't find the product or service they were looking for.
* User doesn't like the prices.
* User can not find, or does not, like the shipping rates.
* User can't find prices and/or shipping rates without going through purchase process.
I often suggest to advertiser that they forget everything they know about their business, and put on their 'customer' hat instead. Then, working as your own customer, search on your keywords, click on your ad, and go to your site. Can you find what you were searching for? And would you be comfortable doing business with you? Would you give you your home address and credit card number?
My google ad is costing me more than my rent.
As mentioned by others, be sure to control your costs with the tools available to you within your account: daily budget, maximum CPC, size of keyword list, keyword targeting options, negative keywords, and so on.
AWA
As for Google's fraud protection. It is non-existent in my opinion. Atleast when I have logs with proof, Overture refunds me. You just never hear from Google again as they laugh to the bank.
Google will allow adsense on blogs that have been up for 3 hours. That should tell you how much they care about the integrity of their ads.
You MUST monitor your PPC campaigns carefully or you will be burnt.
(Alan Parsons Project?)
.... you got it!
What tipped you off?
... huge jump (2000%) in click thrus on a particularly sleepy keyword.
* Absolutely do not use as many keywords as possible. Instead create a list of keywords based on quality, not quantity. IMO, ideal keywords should be very specific and particular to your actual product or service. 10 great keywords are more valuable than 10,000 poor keywords.
FINALLY the truth comes out about the issue of how many keywords to put in. I've written about that in the recent past - without any reaction, really - to share my suspicions that putting "oodles of keywords" was really a waste of time...despite the emphatic advice by the "experts" to the contrary - So from my own experience I totally agree with AWA about quality over quantity! Newbies need to be made aware of that fact!
On the issue of things that work and don't, I would like to raise the problem of the type of business suited to adwords - specifically in terms of the "profit per conversion". If you sell a Rolex, car, expensive trip, or HI-FI system, you can afford to pay 1 $/euro/pound per click for a conversion rate of 1%. You've paid 100 to make several hundreds or thousands, so it makes sense. My problem is that I sell gift baskets where I make a net profit (before paying adwords) of about 10$ / conversion. So the math is real simple: at 1$/ click, say, I need a conversion rate of 10% (which I think would be very high) just to pay for the ad. So does adword make any sense when your profit is 10/conversion? I'd really like to get reactions to this simple question - I haven't found anything about that in Perry Marshall's book, or anywhere else; perhaps there is a reason, like: "a dirty little secret of adwords is that it's not profitable with a 10$ profit per conversion" - But I could be wrong!
Many thanks in advance for enlightened thoughts on this very simple economic question.
Marc
So no one would be selling such items via adwords.
Things that could not be equal may include:
1. The adwords bid levels your competitors are using they may have found lower priced words / adverts.
2. The conversion ratio of your adverts compared to theirs / they may have found higher converting ad copy.
3. Your competitors prices and or cost base and therefore profit per item.
4. The conversion rate of your specific products or website compared to your competitors?
Any of these 4 may make it more or less viable for you and or your competition.
AWA did a great job of enumerating possible issues with your site, but what I hear you saying is that Adwords was working before, and with an increase in traffic you expect a similar increase in sales. If it were truly a site/landing page problem, then we would not expect to have had conversions in the past from Adwords. THerefore, if you have not changed your site, then it seems more like a traffic quality problem.
You need to know this: the Adwords algorithm has CHANGED in the past month. So it is entirely possible that the keyword emphasis has CHANGED as well. Look at your past sales and determine what keywords were working for you. NOw look at your Adwords account and see what keywords they are sending traffic on. Compare. Also, do the same for Content vs. Search traffic as mentioned in an earlier post.
Many advertisers profit on conversions well below $10 a piece. No dirty little secret. You have started your analysis, so continue with it to determine what you should really bid. Why did you come up with $1?
I have some profitable programs that run at 5 cents. If you have a $10 margin, you could afford a conversion rate of 0.05/10.00 = 1/2 percent, given a minimum bid. If your ads get shut down or not shown, then look into second and third level keywords together with appropriate negatives.
Also, consider the value of cross selling. Maybe some of your competitors offer baskets as a loss leader and sell visitors on a higher margin related item.
Finally, there are plenty of advertisers "testing" their programs. This is often done at overbid prices.
The main point you make is that a margin of 10$ / conversion is not incompatible with the adword concept. That's reassuring - The problem being what combination of CPC and conversion rate should I aim for. I mention 1$ / click just to make calculations simple – In fact I've paid 30 cents per click for about 1500 clicks ($450) and only one conversion that was "tracked" by google (3 or 4 other sales may have resulted from an initial google click and a later order that was not recorded as a conversion if the site had been bookmarked). In other words a conversion rate of basically 0%.
Fclark mentions his programs running at 5 cents, which is unrealistically low for gift baskets, a very competitive business particularly as Christmas approaches - So 30 cents is probably not unreasonable, but I can always try to lower that with well-targeted keywords. By the way I have what I think are excellent CTR, hovering around 3-6% for the French and German campaigns (we're in the south of France; shipping within Europe only). The CTR is inexplicably lower with the campaign in English (well-targeted geographically) – but still adequate. Fclark says in msg 13 that the algorithm has changed – I've also sensed a recent change – with lower numbers of impressions – It would be nice to know what these changes are and mean.
So even if I can bring my CPC to 20 cents, I have to convert 1 in 50 clicks (conversion rate of 2%) to break even with my $10 margin – That's going to be the hard part, given that I'm starting from a conversion rate of 0%! Obviously I'm doing something wrong, and will try to analyze what. As you say I can try to bid lower – but that won't affect the conversion rate – I could raise prices to compensate for expensive clicks, but that again wouldn't make any difference when the conversion rate is exactly 0% (would it become negative!? :) ).
So this all brings me to the last and rather obvious possible explanation, namely that there is a problem with the site or the products. (But it's not one of the obvious technical things that AWA mentions above, like "site not related to ad", etc – I've done all the right things like ads linked directly to very specific pages of the site, etc, etc ).
Anyway, many thanks again – I am reassured that in theory the thing could work – I'll hustle to try to bring down the CPC and up the appeal of the site/products!
Cheers
Marc
