Cost of Adwords

[Crazy_Fool]

I'm finding that everything I do with Adwords costs about 10 times what Overture costs for the same search terms. Adwords prices are way too high for most of my clients. Has anyone worked out how to reduce Adwords costs to something sensible? (I've been using adwords Select since it began)

[Mike_Mackin]

The short answer is no.

We have covered this issue before.
It seems to a be industry and/or product specific problem.

I have examples where adwords is one tenth the cost of Overture. One the other hand 13 of the 18 adwords campaigns we have are currently paused because the price is out of line with the market.

[Tropical Island]

We are currently running campaigns at very reasonable prices, 5¢, with CTR's in the 3 - 4% and excellent ROI. One of our main regional keywords though has a 43¢ minimum to cover the USA (5¢ for the rest of the world) which leaves it to the 2 biggies (obvious who they are) in airline reservations and bookings. That leaves our small B&B completely out of the market (which is our biggest source of guests). For that term we use Over and FindWhat. We tried the 43¢ for 4 weeks hoping a high CTR would bring down the price but every click was 43¢.

[Crazy_Fool]

i wish i could find a few of those 5c terms ..... well, i did find some a few months ago, but google cancelled the ads because they don't allow that product to be listed.

still, it's more money to spend elsewhere .....

[ikbenhet1]

if you are looking for cheap adwords say .05 a peace, you could try to put target adwords in less comepting countries in your industy. (some keywords in their native country)

Me for example my maximum is .06 a click, i get about 200 visitors a day for the only campaign. i have compettitive keywords.

So i/you could make 5 or 6 campaigns, and get about 1000- depending on the number of campaings you have visitors for max 0.06 cents a click.

[chiyo]

Just to summarise quickly what ive said before a fair while ago.

Our company is located in small developing countries which nonetheless have much interest from Western foriegn investment and many Western companies use our services. So limiting by country to reduce rates is not an option.

Let's say we are an advertising agency, (related to our *real* business). Once we use the term "advertising agency" (either in quotes or not) the min bid is something like 40c.

When we add to it like say ""advertising agency" AND "brunei"", (I dont remember the exact momenclature for phrase matching etc but the logic is the same), the price does not come down as expected but actually sometimes goes up! That is despite that clients who use our services, even though most come from Europe and North America, expect to pay local very cheap rates rather than international rates, which is understandable. However our advertising costs if we used Adwords are even MORE than an advertising agency in the States!

Needless to say we get very few exposures, let alone clicks so these are hardly competitive terms.

On OV for comparison we are getting more exposures, the same Click through rate, and paying 5c to 8c per term.

It seems that "qualifiying" or "niching" a keyword phrase, in our cases at least" does not reduce the cost, but actually increases the already high costs.

Needless to say, Adwords at present, does not have appeal, especially compared to competitors for these sorts of campaigns. On the positive side, it is not hard to get high on the google main database, as they are highly niched, so its not a big problem. Just pointing out what we see as a weakness in Adwords in a certain area from the standpoint of potential advertisers like us.

Thankfully there is a good alternative. At the moment Adword does not provide us good ROI for our industry in our location.

Ive also noticed that whu I would expect Adwords, with Googles brand on being good for niche searches, to be more relevant to the query, in many searches, the adwords dispalyed seem very braod and less related than what you would find with OV at present.

[profitpuppy]

I have to say that I've had totally the opposite experience. The products that I am trying to promote cost between 50 cents and several dollars on overture, but I never pay more than about 20 cents on Google, but this is by finding some smaller combination keywords.

[SlyOldDog]

It seems to me Adwords prices are driven not by real demand, but by a computer algorithm.

Case in point: "location widgets" $0.90 per click. Ok fair enough. Overture is $2 and there is a lot of competition. But hang on now..."location widgets" en Espagnol. Same price, but no-one else advertising on the page. Eh? It seems that Google has a few linguists (or language software) projecting what bids should be in one country, based on what they see in another.

This is where Adwords becomes a bad bet. It still might be worth paying though, especially if there's no competition :)