I've been running several ads for a week now and only got 20 clicks in total. My daily budget is around $30 since I'm still testing, and i get around 600 impressions per day. The keywords that I'm getting impressions on have my ads in ~4th or so position.
I'm desperate to get more traffic to my site and am wondering whether unchecking "automatically optimize ad serving for my ads" will solve the problem. As far as I understand, what this feature does is limit the number of times your ad is shown per day. Unchecking it would show my ad all day, right?
Thank you
As far as I understand, what this feature does is limit the number of times your ad is shown per day
No, that's not what it does at all.
This setting only has an effect when you have more than one ad in an adgroup. With the box checked, it will favor ads that have a higher CTR. With the check box off, it will serve all ads equally.
Note that there are situations where you have the box unchecked, and it will NOT serve all ads equally. This occurs when you create a new ad, and you have selected Search Network and/or Content Network. Until ads are manually "reviewed" (unfortunately, no way to tell when this occurs) they will run only on Google Search. Thus, an older ad that has been reviewed will get more play than a newer ad that has not yet been reviewed.
If you're not getting clicks, it is because users are not compelled to click.
Make sure your ad includes a "call to action". What do you want them to do? (Go check out your site, buy something, etc.) Tell them to do that!
Make sure that your keywords are a good match. Use negative keywords to filter-out irrelevant traffic. Make sure your keywords are specific. Put yourself in the mind of the searcher, and consider whether they are, in fact, looking for a site like yours when they do the search. If they aren't, then you ad is just a distraction.
And one more question. How would you increase the # of impressions you get? Should I increase my daily budget (even though $30 is recommended) or are there other techniques for that.
Thanks
Would you consider 600 impressions per day good though?
No idea. Depends on what you are advertising and what your needs and expectations are.
It's certainly enough to be statistically-significant, though, which at this point should be your goal. I think that early on in a campaign, your goal should be to do market research, not actually make sales or bring visitors to your site. So, 600 is plenty.
So, you've had 600 impressions, 20 clicks, and it's not working. Better that than to get 100,000 impressions, 1000 clicks and it's not working. :)
How would you increase the # of impressions you get?
Better ads. Higher bids. More keywords.
Should I increase my daily budget (even though $30 is recommended) or are there other techniques for that.
Increasing your daily budget won't help. Don't worry about daily budget unless you actually hit it. Otherwise, it has no effect. The daily budget is only a limit. They DO limit ads served during the day based on daily budget - so, if at noon you've used half your daily budget or more, you might want to increase it, because you aren't going to get all the exposures you might otherwise get.
The best way to view daily budget is as a fail-safe mechanism. It has no meaning other than for that purpose.
From the 20 clicks I got this week, one got something off my site. So overall I spent ~$2 CAN and got ~$17 American. This is pretty good. I'm hoping that it wasn't just luck though. Also my server estimates that 8/20 visitors added my site to favorites, which is also pretty good. (I don't really understand how this estimate works though)
So now that I know that this affiliate stuff can actually work, I need to increase the # of visitors to my site. I've tried all the possible keyword combinations, but none give me the traffic I want. (for all keywords I tried to bid the lowest amount - ~13 CAN cents).
I'm kind of keeping away from using the more popular keywords that cost more, or the ones that have a high activation fee. However I'm starting to think that bidding on those is the only way to go. The thing is, I don't have enough statistical data to be sure that my site can actually make profit, so bidding on those expensive keywords would be a huge risk.
So now I'm stuck here either waiting for a few month getting this low traffic, or trying to bid on the more popular keywords.
Oh and one more thing. Do you guys think that using Overture is better as a beginner. I'm starting to find that this activation fee and quality score stuff is really hard on beginners.
Also if any of you know, does it make a difference which currency I use for Adwords. I am using Canadian atm, but I'm not sure what conversion rate adwords is using. Would it make more sence to use American currency. I mean I paid $10 as an activation fee using Canadian currency whereas I could have paid only $5 using American. Is adwords also using this 200% conversion with keyword costs? If so would it be possible to switch to American currency even if I live in Canada.
Thanks for your help.
