I even made sure to check the broad matches and negative out all the searches for names. You see, we sell a service required by law. I entered my keywords as being the name of the city in which we operate, figuring if you're moving to town, you might be looking for somebody new to handle that service for you.
But apparently our town name is a somewhat common last name for people (shouldn't be surprised - there was a baseball player whose real name involved our town's name).
Has anyone had good results with this sort of town name based searching?
So far, 194 impressions, no clicks. Kind of a drag. I hope I didn't waste $5. All the other keywords I'd want to use would cost significantly more per click.
just helping you along, as YOUR initial title would have been disabled for low CTR :)
n joy
Shak
482 impressions, still no clicks. We keep roughly standard business hours, and I can't access my work stuff from home, so should I keep it on pause for the weekend?
Then be sure to show an ad about that same specific thing.
If on the other hand, you mean that you are using keywords that include your town, such as:
rusted blue widgets denver
rusted blue widgets denver co
rusted blue widgets co
...and so forth, then you are very much on the right track.
If you are worried about running your ad over the weekend when you can't monitor it, then at least lower your Daily Budget to what you are comfortable paying as you experiment and learn.
Best of luck - I hope you have a great experience with this forum, and with AdWords as well.
It takes tweaking. Watch and tweak, pay attention to your market, stats then alter your title and ad accordingly - also keep in mind that the search terms that are repeated in your ad are bolded.
LisaB
He's right of course .. local adwords are tricky, a very fine-tune thing (I've never had to do them yet personally)
But you almost seem to have the opposite, where too many people are searching for the words in your ad without actually looking for your service, and I assume it's the locality keywords they're using, if so you need to pump up the actual product keywords and downplay the locale
just a thought (sure could be wrong) to keep you in the game, Google AdWords is the cheapest piece of market research you'll ever get to undertake, please hang with it and keep tweaking and enjoy
Didn't run the ad over the weekend, as I haven't set things up so I can work from home, so I'd rather people's emails not wait over the weekend when they respond to an inquiry.
That, and maybe people weren't looking for that service on Friday or over the weekend. The working week is starting back up, people may be more serious about things. And payday is coming for those who get paid on the 15th.
Anyway, my daily budget was only a buck a day right now anyway. I want to prove to my boss that there's a cheaper way to advertise than local media (which sucks, is very shoddy, etc.) that can also get us a better class of customer (literate, a bit well off, computer savvy, etc.).
Okay, so the punctuation on that was no good.
Okay, so today I decided to try some more expensive stuff and actually bid on the real keywords minus the geography (for the most part), but my poor clickthrough rate (1 click in 1300 impressions) on the local keyword means my big keyword ads aren't getting delivered. I paused the local ads, and I deleted the local keywords that generated all the impressions and no clicks...
blah. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
But there's no restore to click. grr.
***
Edit: Logged out, then back in - there it is. Restored. Let's see how some real keywords do?
Still no form fillout, though. :¦ Out of 60 impressions for that set of keywords, 1 click. Yay!
Now I just have to wait and see which keyword did it. I know I paid $1.66 for the click. :¦ On a product that we make about $30 on.
Did one of you figure out what to look for and click a bunch? And not fill out the form?
Grand total now, 6 clicks, no forms filled out. I guess we suck or something. Maybe people will call us tomorrow.
all deoends what ur industry conversion rate is, maybe 1 in 1000.
Shak
The product that's getting the clicks makes us about $27 per purchase at its lowest price. We then have the potential to make about $7 a year thereafter on the service being continued.
So, if we assume that I make $27 per person that buys... I just spent about $8 on clicks, and no one filled out a form indicating their interest in buying.
Yes, they could call in tomorrow morning, we could get them set up, and make that money. But the fact that none of these clicks started the process online has me nervous. One of the ideas was to get the people filling out the form online so they had the correct info up front and saved us time on the back end so we could service more customers.
While generating more phone calls is not a bad thing, it's not exactly my desired intent. Especially on a product that doesn't make us a ton of money. Granted, people who buy this product are likely to buy other more expensive services from us when they see what a good job we do at selling them a decent product inexpensively.
IOW, each click could become profitable for a long time going forward. But I like to worry! :)
That and the 4 suspicious clicks. I halved my CPC again for while I sleep. Impressions seem to be slow (probably nobody searching right now either), and co extra clicks. Gotta rmeember to re-up the CPC when I go in to work tomorrow.
Part of the problem is having a 60 year old boss to convince. :)
THen there's the whole problem with my webhost - they don't seem to be logging search strings in Webalizer. And of course, Google won't tell me what people searched for. Sheesh!
The only problem? The guy's on the other side of the state.
*sigh* Perhaps we are not ready to be doing this yet.
I've seen people have some success making longer forms a process of more than one step, so that the first screen they get to is a little blurb that says something like, "We are your local provider of widgets for MyCity, Mystate. For information about widget, fill out this simple 3-step form and we'll get you the information you need!" Blah blah, something something.
Then on step one, have it only have a few fields. Have step two finish it off, or go to a step three.
Works for some, not for others. Really depends on what you're selling, I guess. :-)
My non-expert, somewhat-newbie-myself 2 cents.
JK
*sigh* Perhaps we are not ready to be doing this yet.
No, you just need to lower your expectations of timescale to a succesful AdWords campaign, and you need to raise your budget expectations.
Just reading through this thread shows that you're not really doing this anything other than half-heartedly and you're expecting instant results. It doesn't work like that and as a result you're really being far too hard on yourself.
If your 60 year old boss doesn't "get" that, then drop AdWords like a hot brick.
TJ
He's just very skeptical. I can understand that if we're going to grow the business, you have to spend money to make money. So some advertising has to be done, and you don't always see results right away. Maybe I've hyped myself up too much.
As for where the link goes, it goes straight to the form. The navigation of the site is also rather easy to handle, but we point em right where they need to go off the bat.
I dunno that it's half heartedly on my part, I've done a fair bit of reading before hand, you just don't know what will actually work until you try it.
It was enough to convince the boss to get a website done. Then it was this, then it was that. It's an uphill battle, but it's one that must be fought in order for us to grow and progress. He's 60 and he's not going to continue doing this forever, and I'll be picking up the torch and running with it from there.
The one kvetch I will offer up is that we need to promote the website internally - we've got to use up our existing business cards and get them redone, and we need to change the phone message. I've just hanging back on that a few more days because the boss will moan and gripe. He does about everything that costs money or involves technology.
:)
He does about everything that costs money or involves technology.
That's pretty much what I meant about not "getting" it - in financial terms and timescale. It will take a bit of both to get it right.
I wasn't meaning to be unkind in using the expression "half-heartedly". What I meant by that was the impression I'm getting is that you're dipping your toe in the water and you're not really going for it expecting to get frost bite the first couple of times.
You're going to have to get your boss to understand that it will take both time and money to get right, or to know that it's just not going to work.
TJ
How do you know when your ad is reactivated? They seemed to not love my text for my one ad that's getting clicks.
I've had 3 form fillouts now. One on the other side of the state, another on the other side of the state, and one in another state entirely.
The indicates where we are both in terms of what state and where in the state. The form fillout page has a disclaimer that says "If you are not nearby, you may wish to consider that."
Heck, I put the disclaimer at the top and highlighted that line in red.
*sigh*
Think I'm gonna have to advertise in the local media, however unappealing and difficult to quantify that may be.
So, for example, if you are a telephone installer in San Jose California, don't use keywords like these:
phone
telephone
installation
phone installation
install phone
Instead use keywords like:
phone installation san jose ca
phone installation sj ca
install phone san jose california
install phone san jose ca
install phone sj ca
...and so on. Then by definition, only a person who is actively looking for exactly what you have will see your ad.
When this person clicks on your ad, they are already a pre-qualified customer - and there is a good chance they are both ready and able to do business with you.
Next up, ad on the local newspaper website. They say they average 1.2% clickthrough, and I know they'll be able to come in, even if they may not want to.
