I'm trying to place an ad for a cheap low profit product in a highly competitive market (office supplies). Right now I'm in doubt Google AdWords will work for this.
Taking the average profit on the products and the expected conversion rate into consideration I cannot spend more than $0,3 per click and still make some profit.
Probably you can already guess what my problem is: unable to spend more I will never get into a good position! My position after two days is 33, I've got 10 impressions and 0 clicks!
However, before giving up I'm asking myself what are the competitors doing? I think they will not be able to spend much more on the long run.
So what to do? Pay more for the keywords and focus on those specific products that sell well or make more profit? Pay more for a while to get into a top position and achieve a better ranking for more click-thrus? Make changes to the web site to increase the performance (conversion rate)?
The company has some advantages over the competition:
- US manufacturer of the product (there are only a few)
- Overnight shipping in the US
- Products on stock others not always have
- Lowest price on products manufactured in the US
- Best support (others claim to have as well, but don't have)
- Free shipping on orders starting at $30 (others $50)
- 2 years warranty on all products
But there are some disadvantages as well:
- Fewer products than others
- Lesser discount on large quantities
- More expensive than non US products
Doing some research for all my relevant keywords using Overtures Search term suggestion tool and Google searches I got the following results:
Single keyword (broad): < 25,000 Overture searches, 1,500,000 - 1,800,000 sites listed on Google
2 keywords (best terms): < 40,000 Overture searches, 400,000 - 830,000 sites listed on Google
2 keywords (other terms): < 8,000 Overture searches, 250,000 - 300,000 sites listed on Google
3 keywords (best terms): < 5,000 Overture searches, 50,000 - 80,000 sites listed on Google
3 keywords (other terms): < 1,000 Overture searches, 10,000 - 15,000 sites listed on Google
4 keywords (other terms): < 1,000 Overture searches, 5,000 - 15,000 sites listed on Google
2-4 product specific keywords: < 100 Overture searches, 5,000 - 15,000 sites listed on Google
Here are some examples to explain my keyword terminology. Since I don't want to expose my details I'm using a fictive example for a company selling tires:
Single keyword (broad): car, cars, tire, tires
2 keywords (best terms): car tires
2 keywords (other terms): car wheels
3 keywords (best terms): car winter tires
3 keywords (other terms): car winter pneus
4 keywords (other terms): used car winter tires
2-4 product specific keywords: pirelli 190 snowsport tires
Any ideas/suggestions are welcome.
Peter
tires
wheels
radials
(If it were really tires.) Take some of the less-often searched things and use exact matches. For example:
[cheap firestone tires]
[tires firestone cheap]
[tires cheap firestone]
[steel-belted radials]
[steel belted radial tires]
A lot of times the exact matches will be cheaper than the broad matches, plus, you can sometimes find searches farther down on the list that no one might be bidding on.
I've had some luck in competetive arenas doing something similar. It's quite a job finding good keywords, though. For things that get a lot of searches, I'm often satisfied to bid high enough to get in the top 8 - 10.
I just started working with Adwords, though, so maybe some of the gurus here can be of more help. :-)
Good luck!
JK
-Pete
[buy firestone tires]
[find firestone tires]
[get firestone tires]
[purchase firestone tires]
and so on - and then the singulars too, most likely
[buy firestone tire]
[find firestone tire]
[get firestone tire]
[purchase firestone tire]
No hard-and-fast rules here, but perhaps worth a try.
One thing you need to do is put as many keywords in the title of your ad as possible without making the ad too vague. there was another thread on this forum (I'm not sure where it is) that talked about how people using an internet search rarely actually read the results, but instead scan the page for the terms that they are looking for. The more your title looks like their search, the easier it is for them to recognise it and they will click on your ad.
Also, try to spread your ads to as many search results as possible by finding groups of searches that may not get as much traffic, but are cheaper to buy. (This worked wonders for me on Overture)
You may want to compete on the BIG searches, but it's much easier and cheaper to spread out your advertising $ on the thinner terms. Many times your bigger competators will have a company that handles their PPC campaign so they will not take the time to cover smaller searches.
You can also price your ads (on Overture at least) just pennies below some of these competators because they will rarely check to see what they are actually paying. If you do this you need to be careful that you don't start a bidding war with those competators that actually do their own PPC.
Now I don't know if this is true, but I have been told that the more clicks you get on your ad using adwords, the higher it will display, even if you are paying less than someone else. If you think about it this would be a good idea for Google. A ten cent ad getting 100 clicks would pay better than a fifty cent ad getting 5 hits.
I hope this helps you, it's really a trial and error type of thing. As long as you don't out spend your budget you should find the techniques that work for you.
Last night was a long night for me. I spent another couple of hours in doing some keyword research. Once more I went through the entire website, exctracted any possible keywords and phrases, entered them into an Excel sheet and tested them with Googles keyword suggestion tool and added additional relevant terms to my list as well. I think it was worth spending the time and I will tell you know what happened.
I ended up in a list of 490 [keywords] and [keyword phrases]. I added the entire list to a new campaign. For this campaign I entered a high CPC and temporarily raised my daily budget.
Next I clicked the "estimate traffic" button in the edit keyword area and removed any keywords still not getting into position 4.
The new list provided an idea about how much it costs to stay in top positions (how can people survive paying that much?) and how much traffic can be expected. It also showed me which relevant keywords are expensive and those that are cheap.
But the best thing was to see there was just one keyword phrase I never thought of so far with a moderate estimated price, a CTR 10 times higher than any others and a position of 1,0. Since the product that keyword reflects brings higher orders than average I will be able to spend a little bit more for my ads and bid for the currently estimated price.
I changed my add and included this keyword phrase (hoping people will click on it when it contains what they are searching for).
Next I've set my budget back to make sure I don't loose much money if my ad fails. Then I lowered the CPC and tested again. I did this until I lost the estimated position and CTR.
From the final list I removed any remaining keywords not exactly fitting to the content of the site or having an estimated position higher than 4.
The result is a list of only 6 matching keyword phrases with an estimated position of 1,0 - 3,8 (avg.1,3) at a reasonable price. Doing my homework that way I improved the performance of my ad by 100% overnight without having to pay much more.
Even my motivation is back again, I'm sure this was just the beginning. It's all about ROI so I guess the real work starts now. I will have to improve the ad to get most out of it. But with the small keyword list I have now I think I have a really good starting point to control my keywords and ads performance and ROI.
Peter
Thanks,
Btw, nice summary on how you found teh keywords.
