Is anyone else fed up with not being able to make sense of the stats? I have NEVER been able to get my site log stats to match Google's click counts (often out by a factor of 3 - in G's favour). We've kept our campaigns pretty focused (no Content Match/Adsense, restrictive keywords). I've always given G the benefit of the doubt and assumed that all those clicks were a) real and b) worth it.
As we take a lot of sales phone calls (that may have been leads generated by Adwords) we ascribed a higher conversion rate than just the online conversions (where we made an online sale).
We also subscribed to the "Golden Triangle" theory (heat map)and aimed for top 1-3 placement in Adwords and (obviously SERPs) but the truth, at least in our case, is different.
We are a travel business selling pretty expensive non-commoditized products (i.e. accommodation) and it is pretty clear that our customers are willing to research their expenditures - and the serious buyers use the SERPs to research options. The vast majority of referrals from PPCs do not convert to sales - and they consume a lot of our sales team's time in addition to the big expense of getting the potential clients to our site.
The only campaigns that I am going to keep running are ones that reinforce our brand - all the keyword campaigns are toast for now. That'll free up about 5% of our total REVENUE to put into brand-building and offline advertising.
Anyone else experiencing the same in their niches...? I feel a bit like I'm swimming against the flow of conventional wisdom by saying Adwords is not worth the expenditure.
Have you tried turning your bids down for a while instead of turning them off completely?
Yes, over the past year we've tried (in 2 week periods):
1) reducing bids to averaging positions 3-5
2) reducing bids to averaging positions 6-8
3) reducing bids to averaging positions 8+
The results appear the same in all events: Adwords gives us low conversions compared to SERPs (if you believe the Adwords click numbers).
Most of the bids we place are in fairly competitive categories but they are also very specific: i.e. "rental villa marbella" - so theoretically the clicker is fairly well pre-qualified. Our average PPC is $0.75 on converted sale value of $1800.
Be aware that Content and Search will behave very differently for different sectors and different volumes and at different times. Some of my campaigns do much better (in terms of cost per conversion) on one than the other, and some are level-pegging for both.
(I think that on very high volumes you start to complete with all other available bidders every time and the performance differential will tend to increase.)
Eg, I am running what for me is a VERY large campaign to promote awareness in this "back to work" period for many Europeans, and I've had to selectively pull some ads from Search and some from Content after collecting a day's worth of data.
Having done that, my current conversion cost is only slightly higher than for my normal "trickle" campaigns, but my volume is maybe 100x usual.
Go with the stats, Luke.
Rgds
Damon
[edited by: DamonHD at 2:28 pm (utc) on Aug. 31, 2006]
Anyway, this wasn't really a call for help (I'm pretty solid on my conclusions and the methodology) but am interested whether anyone else has come to same/similar conclusions for their niche/industry.
Right now, I'm thinking I'm pretty smart for cutting adwords out - my competitors are still spending and on the bid-increase treadmill for fairly useless clicks.
If a competitor is able to pay a higher price - perhaps, they're losing money or are running with almost no profit margins, or perhaps they have tricks up their sleeves...
If it's a small handful, it might be the former. If it's more, it's likely the latter.
