So, simple things:
I have a low initial budget. Shoestring really
I am happy to accept low page placement and releatively few impressions
As money comes I can raise my budget
Thsi is all really basic stuff. I am small beer today. I hope to be a whole brewery tomorrow. But Adowrds looks perfect for a small advertiser and a small businessman.
Day 1: I had 350+ words, almost all of which ran well. But at midnight the site "slowed delivery". A word, actually the BEST word, was disabled. It had a 1.1% CTR.
I respeeded the site. Is that a word?
Day 2: I deleted MANY adwords that now went into on hold. I ended day 2 with 92 words left form my original list. I monitored the heck out of the list all day and deleted any that went onto undesirable states. At midnight the site "Slowed delivery". I did get cross here.
Day 3 I deleted every word that never had a click. I deleted every word, in fact, except one. Now my site is a dating site. The word I left in was "Dating". Logical or what? And at midnight it slowed delivery for the third time and I must now pay money for nothing to Google to get respeeded.
Please will someone tell me what I am doing wrong? I read and contributed to another thread about adwords, but I also note that Adwords Advisor does not post in that because it is a controversial thread, and presumably he canp't because of his jobh role get involved in Google Bashing threads. So let's please keep this thread as advice for the newbie who cannot make he goshdarned thing work.
*Play around with "phrase match" and [exact match] they are usually priced differently and you MAY find some good clicks.
*Follow the instructions given on adwords [near the bottom of every campaign screen which has 'on hold' 'intrail' or 'disabled' keywords.
*Find alterative to your keyword which may be lower priced.
*Use overture's inventory.overture.com AND the google's keyword generator to add new keywords.
*Write better COPY for your ads so that you get better click throughs. If your click through are good then your cost will be possibly lower.
*Use the conversion tracking to track which keywords are working well and spend MORE on them.
Hope this helps.
good advice man, good advice :)
I can't seem to persuade google to serve my advert at all today. The first day I got 33,000 impressions with a low low low CPC. Now it seems not to care how much I'll spend on a click, it just refuses to give me a chance to spend money with it. I say "not at all" I have 475 impressions todfay, a much higher budget and a much higher CPC
Budget is 350% CPC is 400% greater.
Starting with specific words to your site and ad copy will lead to a higher CTR not only for that keyword, but for your account as well.
Here are some links I'd suggest reading to get you started making a successful account:
These are two threads that include a lot of info. The first is detail oriented, the other is more of an account overview:
15 tips for beginners:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...] (post 6)
JumpStart Links for those new to AdWords:
[webmasterworld.com...]
AWA Info Posts:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Last 6 months of AdWords info:
[webmasterworld.com...]
WebmasterWorld AdWords Library
[webmasterworld.com...]
I am finding that things I want to use are "on hold" though. May I scream now, please?
I am working through this set. Thank you.I am finding that things I want to use are "on hold" though. May I scream now, please?
partnermine, I really agree with eWhisper on the subject of using more specific and targeted keywords. Most of the keywords you've mentioned in your posts, while certainly related to what you do, are also very general. In other words they could apply to lots of other things as well.
Using specific and targeted keywords is the best way to avoid on-hold keywords, is likely to give you much better results, and also to deliver you more targeted leads as well. I would call using targeted keywords/ads the key to AdWords success for newer advertisers.
So rather than screaming, I'd set aside a couple of hours to really think about and complile a list of keywords that describe exactly what you do and where you do it. ;)
And if you offer many things or services, then each thing would ideally be the subject of it's own Ad Group, with it's own list of very targeted keywords.
Advertising lots of things in one Ad Group, while certainly simpler to set up, is not an effective way to advertiser, at least IMO.
By the way, the AdWords keyword tool is simply a database that gives you words related to what you have entered, which you may wish to consider using. However, it knows nothing whatsoever about your busines - so don't think of it as a place to find guaranteed-to-work keywords. Think of it as a jumping off place for your own creativity, and knowledge of your business, to work from.
If you're really coming up short for targeted keywords that speak specifically to what you have to offer, I'd suggest contacting AdWords support and asking for assistance. If you give them several days lead time, they can offer you some excellent suggestions.
AWA
<edit> fixed typos </edit>
[edited by: AdWordsAdvisor at 6:10 pm (utc) on April 11, 2005]
I think I may be making prgoress. Today I have stripped out everything and:
I also received a really good reply from support (for which I thanked them) and on their advice have turned back on search and content networks despite much advice here not to do so.
I do understand that Google wants to make money, and, if your advert does not click it will stop serving the advert, even if you bid £1,000 per click, coz no clicks is no clicks.
I have one confusion at present. OK I have lots, but this is getitng to me.
I am getting impressions. Not a huge number, and nowhere near as many as the estimator led me to believe might happen. But the management centre says "On Hold". No I know they are being served because I have (very sparingly) checked that. But why do they say "On Hold"? It is not good for my psychology.
On the main topic of "am I starting to understand this?" I would appreciate input about my being on the right lines, or not. Adwords is, to me, when i can work it, more business friendly than Overture, and, to me, Google is the SE of choice, so I want to work with it.
AWA, as feedback to Google I want to say "Please make the grownups who design these things aware that my stress levels are still high over this. And let them know that high stress levels do not make for happy customers". I mean really high
using more specific and targeted keywords
AWA I agree, that this is the best way to make money with AdWords, but unfortunatelly this is not the way how to get rid of On Hold status.
I have just posted message #72 here [webmasterworld.com...] , you can read there this:
I am open to any advice how to improve the quality of phrases like [blue wood flying widget] or [small iron round widget] to get rid of On Hold status.
These phrases (and unfortunatelly I have many others) demostrates that the advice "use more specific and targeted keywords" just does not work in this case.
So rather than screaming, I'd set aside a couple of hours to really think about and complile a list of keywords that describe exactly what you do and where you do it. ;)
Sorry to be sarcastic and "unconstructive", but if I as QGAP cannot run the campaign then the only think the boy can do, is to scream with me.
I know this situation is not your fault and I am REALLY grateful for all your involment here, but it makes me crazy to read "improve the quality" "improve the quality" again and again and then I have 70% of my higly targeted (so highly that it generates almost no clicks) phrases ON HOLD!
Words that are common in your industry might have different meanings in different contexts that can dilute the focus of your targeting. Spend some time with your favourite keyword suggestion tools looking for words to block as well as to bid on. It all helps.
A small example: if your site is about "dating", block the word "carbon" so your ad won't appear in searches about "carbon dating", which is something quite different.
I agree that the "on hold" feature is stupid, when brand new terms in a brand new campaign go on hold with zero impressions.
Interesting my words have also popped back into "Normal" while I was making this post. The telepathy interface must be working.
On checking my adwords again with Google they still rank me roughly where I "ought to be" business-wise inthe list, but they aren't getting clicked. So I am editing the advert (there are sufficient clicks to say "no, this is not not quite right")
BTW how DO you guys quote previous posts? What button am I missing? That square quote box is cute. Or is it just for real men? ;-)
"Negative keywords" can help.
Yes, absolutelly. But surelly not for [blue wood flying widget] that received 4 impressions (!) in last weeks and is On Hold now.
BTW how DO you guys quote previous posts? What button am I missing?
I can really help with this one :-)
use [ quote ] (without airspaces)
I know this situation is not your fault and I am REALLY grateful for all your involment here, but it makes me crazy to read "improve the quality" "improve the quality" again and again and then I have 70% of my higly targeted (so highly that it generates almost no clicks) phrases ON HOLD!
Dave741, I'm very much aware of your high level of frustration, and have passed your feedback along often. I'm curious, though: have you contacted AdWords support and asked for specific advice and assistance? If not, I can only recommend this as being well worth your time. If you do contact them, please be sure to point them to the account(s), campaigns, and Ad Groups in question.
I truly hope that support can assist in getting things to run more smoothly for you.
More on your other questions in a bit, partnermine.
AWA
have you contacted AdWords support and asked for specific advice and assistance? ... If you do contact them, please be sure to point them to the account(s), campaigns, and Ad Groups in question.
Yes, several hours ago. So I expect the answer in next days.
But as you can see - my stress levels are very high (partnermine thanks for this wonderful term :-).
I usually wait half a day or so to get an idea of how things are progressing if I make large changes or new entries.
Well I made the initial changes at 9:30 BST. I have had higher impressions, but the only person to click through all day was me, spending my own money. The advert is "as good" (and frankly as bad) as my big gun big budget competition (though their business model and mine have to conicide in terms of cost of acquisition of members who will eventually pay for the service).
There's not a lot you can do in 25/35/35 characters.
Ah wait. That was a haiku, not an advert.
I edited the advert about 2 hours ago and the site logs (ignoring AdStats) show zilch in terms of clickthrough. So I have moved from one professionally created poor advert to another poor one. But it is genuinley "as appealing" as other people. And no-one knows I am a new site until they get there.
And when they arrive I have a 90% arrival to join rate, so I must be "ok" at what I do (or people are so desperate for love that any goshdarned site will do the job)
Now in my day job I work with a copywriter who has written a load of successful stuff. A guru, type guy. And this guru wrote with me my advert. And he uses adwords successfully for the office site. Low budget, low impressions high CTR.
Do the rules let me post the ad anbd the adwords here, for example, to see what I'm doing wrong? Coz my imprerssions are creeping up (yup, I did say "creeping" and CTR is zero) I do realise that I leave the URL off if I am allowed to post it.
My problem is the other end of the spectrum form the blue fying wooden widget. My needs are to stand out in the generalists.
A thought on the 'bfww', though. Won't a well spidered web site handle specialist niches better than adwords?
OK, we got past (I so hope we got past) the midnight hurdle wihtout being slowed.
Ok, that was special. I logged in this morning to see what was what. One word is sadly underperforming. I was just about to delete it when "ping" my email sent me a notification triggered by my login to tel me that "Your account has been slowed".
Well, I can see why that word woudld have been causing grief, but dammit it had only had 643 impressions. Not enormous, really. And slowing the account before the customer (hmm, note that word?) has had a chance to handle it himself is a bit much.
So, guys, help me here, please.
The word that performed very badly is 'friendship'.
A google search on friendship comes up with two things. One is an unhelpfully large number of potential matches. The other is a huge list of dating sites. I was about 6th in this list once. Even with a slowed account I am there this morning about 15th. (Ok, no-one would bother with number 15, I'm not fooling myself). But, if my advert and word choice is poor, why are other sites not being slowed also? Big ones, I mean? (I suspect I know the answer here. I suspect Google lets big spenders get away with a lot if the overall account perfromance is good)
But look at this one, for a result on friendship:
<ad removed>
That seems unlikely to me. 10th on the list. Now people do not tend to buy friendship, do they? So why isn't this irrelevant site slowed? (Ok I know it's one of those sites that advertises with its adword and gets revenue from other adword peole by just displaying paid ads, but why does it appear in the list at all?)
[edited by: eWhisper at 11:29 am (utc) on April 12, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't copy ads [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
But look at this one, for a result on "the keyword":"snip ad for generic shopping search site"
That seems unlikely to me. 10th on the list. Now people do not tend to buy friendship, do they? So why isn't this irrelevant site slowed? (Ok I know it's one of those sites that advertises with its adword and gets revenue from other adword peole by just displaying paid ads, but why does it appear in the list at all?)
Well the cynic in me would say that it depends on what kind of friendship you are talking about but....
The bigger cynic says that it is because those supposed price compare shopping sites give Google tens of thousands of dollars a day. Google knows better than to make them mad by disaproving a few ads for things keywords that have nothing to do with them. I have to deal with this all the time. On one term four of the right hand ads are for these sites. Each one returns no items found, but displays a list of ads pulled from either Google or Overture it looks like as possible places to look. Only one of these ads is even relevant though. At least I am alternating with another relevant site for 1 and 2 in the premium position, but this is repeated in most of my terms because they are specialized types of high value widgets.
OK, we got past (I so hope we got past) the midnight hurdle wihtout being slowed.
Please know that the slowing of accounts is not something that happens on a schedule - so there is really no such thing as a 'midnight hurdle'. Instead, accounts are slowed when they fail to reach a performance standard, regardless of the time.
The word that performed very badly is 'friendship'.
While this keyword certainly pertains to what you have to offer, it is also extremely general, and is almost guaranteed to be disabled in short order.
I just did a quick search on my favorite search engine, and the word friendship returned over 16 million results. This tells you the word is used in many contexts. Just looking at the first ten of those 16,400,000 results showed me three uses of the work that are not related to what you have to offer:
* (friendship) poems
* (friendship) greeting cards
* (friendship) rings
If you were to look at the first 200 results, I'll bet you'd find dozens of similar cases. So the only way to make a very general keyword like 'friendship' survive would be to use a really substantial list (probably numbering in the many hundreds) of negative keywords, such as :
-poem
-poems
-greeting card
-greeting cards
-ring
-rings
-pact
-pacts
-garden
-gardens
-building
-camp
-camps
-festival
-festivals
-diary
-diaries
-bracelet
-bracelets
-doll
-dolls
- and on and on and on...
The key to avoiding account slowing, if I may be rather direct, is to use really targeted keywords, and avoid very general ones. Ad eWhisper pointed out earlier, you may be able to add general keywords in an account after it has an established positive history, earned through the use of very targeted keywords.
And if you see that someone has an ad running on a keyword as general as 'friendship', it probably means one of two things:
* The keyword has not been disabled yet - and they are running in exactly the same way that your ad ran for a time, before being disabled.
* They have worked really hard to make the general keyword succeed, by protecting it with a huge list of negative words, similar to the list above multipled by 50 or so. ;)
I hope this'll give you some insight, as to how things work, and how to move towards success.
AWA
I know this situation is not your fault and I am REALLY grateful for all your involment here, but it makes me crazy to read "improve the quality" "improve the quality" again and again and then I have 70% of my higly targeted (so highly that it generates almost no clicks) phrases ON HOLD!
Dave741, I'm very much aware of your high level of frustration, and have passed your feedback along often. I'm curious, though: have you contacted AdWords support and asked for specific advice and assistance? If not, I can only recommend this as being well worth your time. If you do contact them, please be sure to point them to the account(s), campaigns, and Ad Groups in question.
I truly hope that support can assist in getting things to run more smoothly for you.
So the answer from the support is here. Do you know what is the recommended solution? Do you know what they recommend for my [small blue flying widget] phrase?
Use multiword, specific keywords in place of singular and/or general keywords
I think that the boy who answerd my mail even did not read it. He just ansvered "On Hold question".
F... f...
AWA it is no wonder, that we are loosing our nerves...
usually i send 2-3 emails before i get what im looking for as a response :-/
usually i send 2-3 emails before i get what im looking for as a response :-/
An old question comes to mind for the crew at Google:
"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"
Please know that the slowing of accounts is not something that happens on a schedule - so there is really no such thing as a 'midnight hurdle'. Instead, accounts are slowed when they fail to reach a performance standard, regardless of the time.
It's odd, actually. It appears to be linked toi my "doing something" on the account. But I accept yourt point that it happens when it happens
The word that performed very badly is 'friendship'.While this keyword certainly pertains to what you have to offer, it is also extremely general, and is almost guaranteed to be disabled in short order.
OK, I am taking this very much to heart. Please be direct. I'm a big boy and I can take it. I'm tryng hard to become more direct. Advice is a thing I am short of.
A dating site really does not do much other than let you find a new partner for 'stuff'.
Advice is a thing I am short of.
partnermine, I see that you have joined this Forum quite recently, and unless you've been reading for a while before joining, you may not have seen anyone mention the AdWords Learning Center. This is a pretty good free resource, as you come up to speed with what brings you good results with AdWords.
So you might want to take a look:
AdWords Learning Center
[google.com...]
BTW, don't let the first sentence which mentions "the Google Advertising Professional Exam" throw you off (!), as the learning center may be used by anyone.
Here is some other stuff worth looking at, from the AdWords FAQ:
A whole bunch of keyword related help topics:
[adwords.google.com...]
Optimization Tips:
[adwords.google.com...]
Demos and Guides:
[adwords.google.com...]
Searchable Help Center:
[adwords.google.com...]
I hope this info proves to be useful. ;)
AWA
I am now targeting more precisely. But when I try to narrow the targeting I find the words I choose are "on Hold" already. For example '"new friendship"' is on hold, gets of the order of 75k search hits, has now a small but growing set of neg words with it, and is predicted to have few clicks.
A dating site really does not do much other than let you find a new partner for 'stuff'.
Just saw your most recent post after submitting mine, and here are some more thoughts:
So rather than use keywords like "new friendship" try things which are much more descriptive of the service you offer (and perhaps where you offer it) such as examples below.
So, OK, maybe these are not exactly brilliant, but they'll serve to illustrate the principle:
find new friendship
find new friendship nyc
find new friendships
find new friendships nyc
find new friends
find new friends nyc
Meet new friends
meet new friends nyc
dating service
dating service nyc
dating services
dating services nyc
Find a mate
Find a mate nyc
All of these are much more specific to your actual service, than is the more general keyword 'new friendship'.
Hope that makes sense.
AWA
A comment though, for feedback. "This seems very hard"
