IMP: 12,971
But only 9 Click-throughs!
My site is a uk dating one.
Given such a low CTR rate, do you think it is honestly worthwhile continuing with my Adwords campaign?
There are all sorts of variables/conditions to look at, far more than the data you've supplied so far.
Given such a low CTR rate, do you think it is honestly worthwhile continuing with my Adwords campaign?
During almost five years with AdWords, I've worked with many thousands of advertisers in one may or another. In that time, I've seen lots of advertisers succeed - and, yes, I have seen others fail.
If I had to characterize those who succeed it would be to say that they did not expect near-instant or miraculous results. Instead, they committed to the (sometimes hard work) of understanding their market, their competition, online advertising in general, and the AdWords program in particular.
I can assure you that most any type of business can use AdWords to profitably drive traffic to their site. But it won't always happen overnight. It can take real work - and I'd say that for many brand new advertisers it's not unreasonable to expect that you could even spend more than you make, at first, while you're coming up to speed on the factors mentioned above, among others.
All that said, I hope you'll stick with it - and I wish you every success. ;)
AWA
Also, UK market is a bit of an odd creature ...hard to explain but thankfully you are not dealing with North America where the traffic in this niche is probably more competitive and of course at a higher cost.
I would encourage you to really take a look at your competition and perhaps find a 'crack' and build from there.
Given such a low CTR rate, do you think it is honestly worthwhile continuing with my Adwords campaign?
Sure. You're paying for clicks, not impressions, right?
If anything, your question should be whether you want to continue with the website or not. If you are getting traffic and / or doing ok otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much.
Here are my depressing and demoralising stats from my Google Adwords account so far:
IMP: 12,971But only 9 Click-throughs!
Have you tried to learn anything with those 12,971 impressions? Yes, the CTR might be one of the most horrible things I've heard of, but 12,971 impressions should give you a lot of data.
Are you using multiple ads to track different CTRs and the metrics that you care about? (Sign ups, purchases, etc)
Are you trying different ads with different keywords and testing the same things?
With that volume of impressions, you should be learning some things, or at least making a good effort to learn some things.
From AWA:
I can assure you that most any type of business can use AdWords to profitably drive traffic to their site.
I'll say that statement is true because of the "most" qualifier. In mature markets with a lot of competition, you will often run into what is called the "winner's curse." Pretty much, it's an economics term saying that the person who most over estimates the value of an unknown item will win that item in an auction, and wind up paying too much for the item.
I know that the value of a click on any given term will be different to different sites. When you have a competitive market where there are many entering and leaving, you'll find that there are many people paying too much because they lack ways of knowing what clicks are worth to them.
I also know that the quality score matters, and a lot of people say it works to their advantage. Well, it might for some people. However, it also adds more unknowns into the mix. A quality score might work in favor of a certain number of click buyers, but it really creates to google's bottom line because it adds more uncertainty into the mix. Someone at Google would agree.
Add an unknown quantity of fraud clicks into the mix, and there's even more uncertainty that could bite you later. There's a reason that Yahoo followed a similar model, and it's not about quality. It's about the bottom line. "Improve your quality score or increase your bid." If the overriding concern was quality, it would just be "Increase your quality score or go away."
The good thing is that you haven't said you are paying too much for clicks. With your ad still running at 12,971 and 9 clicks, Google is truely giving you a great gift of data, and a nice testing ground for all sorts of different things.
As mentioned before - use the statistics you have, analyse them - look at what keywords are getting impressions but no clicks. Write a new adgroup for the popular keywords - refine them, make them more targetted. Run about three adverts per adgroup. What are you offering different to all the other dating sites? Bring this to the reader attention in your advert.
There is reams of stuff in here if you search on how to optimise you adwords campaigns. You just need to plough through it all. Good Luck.
1) Yes
2) 88
Truegho,
find a niche in there and I think you'll do better, a certain type of people with a certain interest. Then try some a site targeted campaign after searching for sites that appeal to those kind of people (assuming the site has Adsense).
Perhaps it's difficult for gay people who own ferrets to meet like minded people (no joke intended, but perhaps a little too limited, OTOH).
Then find a few more 'niche' groups, mountain climbers, shakesphere enthusiasts (keep in mind, they don't have to be gay).
Then look for some more 'niche' groups, etc.
For a site targeted campaign, sometimes it helps to find sites first. Sites no one has thought of yet.
My opinion is 'general dating' is overdone, filled with married guys looking to cheat. Wont date on weekends and holidays, wont let you meet their parents, etc.
Israel
Thanks everybody for the advice on my dating site. All points were taken on board.
One thing I am currently contemplating is scrapping the dating site - after all, I am only building up my FREE memberships first anyway, so no ROI yet (only has 700 members so far!) - and resetting my Google Adwords campaign to my true ghost stories website, which is No. 1 on Google for a key term. As this site is already generating me money with Google Adsense ads, I was wondering if I built my campaign around this, would I get even more visitors than the average 900-1000 new ones I am currently getting. What do you all think?
At least I would get SOME ROI on the ghost site, rather than the nowt I am getting on the free uk dating one!
[edited by: skibum at 2:35 pm (utc) on April 9, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specific keywords [/edit]
