Have been using adwords for a couple of weeks now. After initial teething problems in identifying the better key words relative to our sector - with much grateful assistance from the folks at ad words - our campign is running quite happily, or so it would appear...
CTRs overall are running at between 0.9% - 1.2%. This is acceptable. However, the volume of impressions is very low.
Basically it would appear that I need more key words/phrases, but feel that I am approaching these from the wrong perspective as - at the moment I believe I've used all the key words, phrases and permutations therein that I can think of.
Initially I started with 74 words or phrases, etc (is this a high or low figure?) for a single ad, let these run for a couple of days then added a few more kw's and deleted the non-performing ones.
A few days later I could see that a certain set of kw's, etc, could be hived off under a second, more specifically tailored ad. Again, CTRs OK - just insufficient volume of impressions in the first instance, thus insufficient impact of new visitors to our site.
I guess what I'm trying to find out are any different approaches to generating key words, phrases and the like. At the moment I've probably just got tunnel vision and can't see the bigger picture.
Either way, all comments and advice is welcome.
Thanks.
Initially I started with 74 words or phrases, etc (is this a high or low figure?) for a single ad, let these run for a couple of days then added a few more kw's and deleted the non-performing ones
1. Start with a large list and make it manageable
When I started, I started with a list with 490 phrases (take a look at my related posting concerning "Strategies for a highly competitive market") [webmasterworld.com]. This helped me to find some "magic" keywords I never thought about before.
2. Don't give away good keywords with few impressions
How do you define "non-performing" keywords? If you mean a low impression rate, then don't delete them. Don't overlook them! Of course it's a question of expenditure and revenue, so not everybody might agree with me.
But in my case many of the keywords with low impressions are a) not competitive (cheap & good position) and b) highly targeted (high CTR and conversion rate). This must not be true for your market.
100 keywords with 1 impression/day = 1 keyword with 100 impressions/day. Why not get this traffic?
So what to do? Group this keywords into smaller groups and place each group into their own ad group. Write compelling ads that match the keywords.
3. It doesn't come for free
When I started with Google AdWords I completely underestimated the time needed to do the homework. But it didn't take long to find out that it pays out.
I needed about three days to find my keywords. The more I worked on it the more I learned.
After I had my keywords and created the first ads (with moderate impressions, but ok) I found my CTR to be too low. I constantly worked on my ads, tried various modifications and found my CTR continuously raising. Now, a CTR of 0,9% - 1,2% wouldn't be acceptable for me. The CTR for my running ads is higher than 2% and I managed to climb above the 5% mark for some of the ads (with one glitch where the competition found me).
4. Always keep your ROI in mind
To get a high CTR is not a problem. The problem is to get targeted traffic that turns visitors into buyers. Always keep in mind, what you spend on Google AdWords must come in somewhere.
Always think about this when you create your ads.
Maybe your market is too specific and too small for an Internet business. In this case better spend your money on traditional marketing, than loosing it on Google.
But first, try to get out as much as you can, be patient and learn. This forum is a great place to study anything about Google AdWords, but always keep in mind every market and every business is differnt. You must find your own way, your own keywords and the ads that works best for you and your site.
Here's a quick rundown of how to ID keywords for your industry:
1. Wordtracker. Understand how the system works, and identify your markets and numbers.
2. Google Sandbox. Run your phrases through it, check out the suggestions and broadmatches and see if they need to utilized.
3. Overture (if you have an OV account) suggestion tool.
4. Referrer logs - see what KWs people are searching for to find your site.
5. Stop and think about the searcher and your product. There are often many phrases that aren't about the product directly, but might be how to fix something or other info indirectly related to your product. These are often the phrases that you can buy for cheap because people haven't gone the extra step to identify search patterns.
6. Once you do all this work, recheck these services later on to see if new keywords or patterns have come into play or old ones have fallen from favour, keyword searches are dynamic based on the current lexicon and are constantly shifting.
