When I discovered that my CTR was absolutely terrible I could not help but wonder why, I did a little thinking and came up with the only possible (in my mind)explanation which is that I am in Thailand.
I went to anonymizer (thinking that if anonymizer hides my IP google should think I am in the states by default) and chose google, and typed in the search term X X.
Wow I have never seen so many ads! I was on the third page of adwords!
I changed my ad by increasing the max CPC to US$ 8 and am now around 2 or 3 the CTR has increased.
So my question is how many of you do the exact same campaign for different countries rather than just one campaign for many different countries?
Reason I ask is when I first upped the CPC all was fine and my average CPC was around 0.8 or so, but today I just noted it has gone up to US$ 1.40 which is too much. So I am now wonderingf whether it would be better to do just one campaign for the US and one for the UK and one for X etc. That way a more expensive market such as the US is not increasing the average CPC for a less ex****ve market.
One way I have tested this is to run the same ad using pure Danish keywords (we have a few letters nobody outside Denmark have on their keywords, so it is quite accurate) first for some time with no tageting and then using language and/or IP targeting. I allways end up with much less impressions and clicks using the targeting.
One of the explanaitions could be that the ISP's used by small regions are sometimes "mapped" together with larger ISP's in other regions sharing IP pools for dial ups.
I usually just use targeting by ad copy making sure to use destinct Danish words in both title and description lines to filter out non-Danish users.
Google is a MAXIMUM price per click. You will not be charged any more by putting your bids up, unless this pushes you further up the order which it obviously has.
eg)
1 $8
2 $3
3 $2
4 $1.50
5 $1.10
6 $0.80
Googles minimum is $1 for this search term. This means that people actually pay:
1 $1.14
2 $1.13
3 $1.12
4 $1.11
5 $1.10
6 No displays
If you were on the third page, this means that there are at least 17 advertisers and if the one at the bottom is bidding high, everyone gets shuffled up also.
- GSX I do not want to pay US$ 1.40 per click but have put my max bid up to US$ 8 so I am always in the top 3 for my selected keywords.
I also have a maximum of US$ 10 / day so I could in theory only get one click a day! Any more than US$ 10 a day (which is THB 450) and I have to really think about as that amount would get me one more administrative staff or a server upgrade etc etc.
When I select the countries in the adwords campaign for example I have just selected X does this mean my ad appears on searches only on goolge.X or on google.com with an ip from X or both?
Important thing is to know your customer. Who would be most interested in your service/product? IId guess for example in this specific case that best targets for Thailand, going by the Tourism Authority of Thailand's stats from memory are Germany, Scandanavian countries, and East Asia, possibly Australia/NZ. Us arrivals have dropped considerably.
But i still see the careful development of correct keywords, negative and brackets appostrophies are best. There is a big difference between say ¦ Thailand travel temple ¦ and ¦ Thailand travel ¦ seeing all words must be present for your adwords to show. I find using more keywords on each line, and more lines, and good neg keywords eg ¦ backpacker cheap hostels ¦ are the best way to go to both improve CTR and reduce the min click-through cost.
We have worked very hard on honing our campaigns and is it starting to pay off in referrals and also ROI. Our first campaigns were very bad ROI, but after a lot of thinking, research and honing, we think are campagins are bordering on works of art! Also trial a few ad wordings, and then chgoose the ones with the best performance.
As others have sugegsted run some controlled experiments, changing only one aspect at a time, as different campaigns. For ex, pne which has the exact same keywrods, and negs, and ad copy but only for UK, and one for only US and one only for East Asian countries. After a few weeks you will know who is most interested, and have some handy market intelligence as well!
So yes geotargeting is powerful, especially for some services or products where there are real differences between countries and languages. The US market is huge, and those running campaigns for just the US and Canada say, must be quite numerous. Many would just not need to target surfers from say Thailand, Eastern Europe or Latin America.
But other means of targeting that google provides are just as powerful. The more you can niche your prospect group, the more work, but the better the ROI. Geotargeting is one of them.
What I would like to see is who else is advertising for the keywords.
I have now changed the ad to target our target market and cut out the US, UK and most European markets, our adword impressions have shrunk incredibly! (makes me wonder which engines the Asian markets use!)
My question now is does anyone know how I can see who is advertising for ie. Singapore or Malaysia without actually using a Singapore or Malaysian IP?
I am in Thailand so I can see peoples ads targetting Thailand and if I use anonymizer I can see the US ads, but because google delivers its ads by IP how could I see those in other countries I target?
I don't see the point in setting up separate country-specific ad campaigns. ok, maybe some nationalities won't be interested in my ad - but then they won't cost me anything!
Even various spellings - color/colour, etc - what's the point? Doing the "colour" adword campaign and targeting the US too is going to cost me anything or hurt my ROI, seems to me!
And setting up and managing dozens of country-specific campaigns is going to cost me lots of time!
What am I missing here?
Therefore I started wondering if I break it down, I can still get the cheaper Singapore, Thai, Malay etc hits on one campaign and target the US and UK on their own campaigns. Plus if I am targetting Asian countries such as above I can save myself a keyword as they may just type in X X rather than X X X if they were in America.
There are some countries I do not want to target as it decreases my average CTR.
There is also the additional benfit of seeing how certain countries search etc. which I find useful.
The reason Louponne I started asking about this is as I mention in my first post, I was concerned that my CPC was being increased because of the heavy price tag the US targetted keywords carry.I don't understand your reasoning there. If you set a certain limit on your "worldwide" bid, you'll appear in the countries where, based on your competitors in those countries, your bid places you high enough - I don't see why splitting your campaigns up helps here. And I assume that you pay depending on what your competitors pay, depending on the country. That's how I understand it anyway - you pay, up to the max you bid, or up to the max needed so that your ad appears. um, right?
There is also the additional benfit of seeing how certain countries search etc. which I find useful.Good point there! :-)
in certain niche areas such as visitthailand's and mine it is difficult to maintain the min .05 click through rate which means Google will pause your campaigns. Any way to target better therefore reduces the likelihood of this.
If you are getting high click rates (say with a product that sells to all countries and to a board market target) then agreed its not a problem.
Plus the keywords I was targetting to get me to the top ( I see very little point in being below position 2) in the US required a max bid of US$ 9.
This meant that my average CPC had increased and was increasing more, to above what I wanted to pay.
If I paused that campaign I stopped everything.
Now I can still continue with the countries I want and if I want to start the more expensive US or UK campaigns can do so with a separate campaign.
What I have done in these situations is find someone on ICQ or another IM (or here) in that region and politely ask them to click a link (my predefined search) and send me the screen dump. Most people are nice and do it for you
How ingenious Mikkel, my learning something new every day lesson.
