So what would you do in my place? Any thoughts?
Otnot, pardon me for being the first to reply - probably not that appropriate, considering that I work at AdWords.
But I'm just about out-the-door, and wanted to say this before I go - and not just because of where I work, either:
If you are making money from your ads, I think it might be wise to keep them running.
;) AWA
10% of your total sales (PPC and Organic), or 10% of the profit from the sales generated via PPC.
The real question is, do you want to give a competitor your sales that were formerly generated via PPC?
I have a serp where my adwords is in the "north" position *and* I am in the #1 slot - I continue to pay for it because I don't want to give those searches to my competitors - and its about 7% CTR so its not a few.
After Florida last year I found myself having to advertise very heavily for my kw's.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
With Christmas just around the corner and the price per click going up everyday until it will reach $5/click.
That is the really nasty thing about PPC. The inventory is limited. If you're in a competitive area, you'll have to cede most of your profits to the advertising media. They are, however, a parasite that has a vested interest in their host prospering.
Can I cut back on my ad's and still get good sales?
You have to analyze your own data to answer this. You also have to answer for yourself what is "good."
I'm only getting 350-400 clicks per day now and I'm recieving 1400 unique's per day. So a thousand uniques for free vs. $150 per day.
I would suggest to you that this is not relevant for answering your question. What is relevant is the business you're generating from that $150/day spend.
I know that 80% of the people prefer natural over paid.
Again, I would suggest to you that this is not relevant.
So what would you do in my place? Any thoughts?
If you were profitable running just PPC with no natural listings boosting your traffic, then PPC was profitable for you. Given that you seem a bit PPC averse, I'd suggest to you that you've probably missed opportunities to expand your business by expanding your PPC programs.
Otnot, I don't think it is quite as simply as analysing your current profitiability from the adwords listing.
What you also need to consider is whether or not any of that paid traffic would go to your site anyway in the natural serp listings. If your display url is well know to searchers, probably a decent percentage of those adword customers would click on your natural serp listing instead of a competitors adword ad. A day or two of dropping you adword bid so that the ad appears lower or pausing it altogether should help you understand how well things are working. on the other hand it appears you are making $1500 a day so you are smarter than me anyway and will probably figure things out. Best of luck.
Regards,
Don't you have tracking information in place which tells you where your buyers come from? That's the only way to know what's the best source for *your* site and *your* customers.
But, there is nothing that says you have to do it using google's tools. Just run some stuff on your server.
You can't manage what you can't measure.
With a good tracking tool you will be able to see things such as which terms people are finding you under (both in PPC and organic results) and then relate those searches to favourable actions on your site (newsletter signups, sales, etc). That way you will be able to find out what your main money terms are.
You might find most of your customers are coming through your PPC bids on the term 'purple widgets' but none of those people are converting. In that situation you are getting no return on your investment and it will alert you to the fact that either your creative needs work to better address the stage of the sales process your search customer is at or simply alert you to the fact that the term, while relevant, is not the kind of thing that paying customers search for.
Without tracking you could still be spending a significant proportion on your online budget on a system that may not be driving sales at all. Traffic is just the beginning of the 'making money on the web' world, if that traffic isn't doing anything then it is nothing more than a cost to you.
