Help with poor campaigns, improve CTR and all the rest

My Adwords campaings are a disaster

[silverbytes]

Basically I don't get anything from Adwords, my conversions are almost inexistant and my campaigns have CTR of 2,7 in best case, others under 1%.

Ad positions go from 1,4 to 5,6 and in general around 4 or 5th position.

Cleaned up keywords with CTR 0% recently, tweaked my text ads, focused in relevant keywords only, but still results are really poor.

Any sugestions about how to improve?

[silverbytes]

(what a silence!)

[aruns]

I started a PPC campaign in a very competitive market, and faced very similar problems to yours. I decided to refocus by identifying long tail keywords. Created highly targeted adgroups & relaunched my campaigns, I got good CTRs, but it still took me close to a month before I saw positive ROI. My campaigns seems to be doing quite well, thought it is still early to draw strong conclusions.

The trick with CTR is having great ads, if you can understand what your customer is looking for & create a well targeted ad your CTR's will go up. In my opinion, ads matter more than positions.

4th or 5th position is not bad at all IF there are reasonable no. of searches for the keyword.

Hope this helps.

[silverbytes]

Thank you that's what I did recently. But didn't got great results either, improved just a little.

[netmeg]

How many keywords do you have, and how many to an ad group?

[arieng]

Leave your AdWords campaigns alone for a while and start playing with landing pages. Take a look at some of the other sites who are successful on these keywords. What are they doing that you aren't?

[silverbytes]

Sorry but my site is still number one in organic search so I don't think looking at worst ranked sites would help my landing pages. But my adwords campaigns are not satisfactory, that is true.

About keywords: I have 5 adgroups in campaing. Each pointing to specific niche. I receive some 500-600 impresions daily since (is a particular niche not massive).
But I have 1,6% CTR in media (some are 0,5 % others 3,3% higher ctr)

I have some 50 keywords in each adgroup, some of these are variations like "blue widgets" [blue widgets] and blue widgets.
2 or 3 keywords in each keyphrase targeted.

In this case I think the fact my site appears #1 in organic search may affect the adwords campaign, but it doesn't for certain terms so I'd like adwords campaign have a better CTR and conversions. I got 1 or 2 conversions in last 24 moths only...

[arieng]

There's nothing that says you should be sending your AdWords traffic to the same pages as your organic traffic. In fact, you should probably send your AdWords traffic to pages that are no-indexed. Your organic pages are optimized to rank. But with AdWords, the only thing you should be thinking about is conversion. Give it a try. You might find that a different approach makes a big difference.

As far as 'worst-ranked sites' are concerned, you may rank better but you surely don't know their conversion rates. They could be blowing you out of the water. However, I was referring to other AdWords advertisers. Someone is probably making money with AdWords on the same keywords you're targeting. So what are THEY doing that you aren't?

[silverbytes]

How could I know what sites are converting sales on their adwords campaigns? I simply can't...

[silverbytes]

How could I know what sites are converting sales on their adwords campaigns? I simply can't...

[bstring]

Silverbytes -

1 perform a search on your keywords

2 look for a competitor that has been around for a while in the sponsored results

3 Click that ad

You are now watching a succesful landing page.

Can you feel the need to grab your credit card? ;)

[BradleyT]

You should do lots and lots of A/B testing on your PPC landing pages!

For natural results they go to our normal website with thousands of pages. For PPC we send them to a subdomain path with a 3 page funnel and a request information sign up goal page (the 3rd page). Suprisingly it converts like crazy.

We create 2-3 paths per ad group (different graphics, different call to action, different descriptions) and the software we use automatically chooses a random path for the visitor and then eventually picks the best converting path over time and uses that path for all visitors. But you don't need software to do that you can it all manually with Google Website Optimizer.

[King_Fisher]

Not to get so elementary but there are three elements you need to check!

1. Keywords, Make sure your dialed in tight. Preferably long tailed. Run
them both exact match and broad match. Have at least 50.

2. Ads, This where most of us fall down. Ads are either skimpy, non enticing
not descriptive enough etc. If they dont like the ads your not going to
get much CTR.

3. Landing Page, Should be graphically appealing, nice colors, well laid out
Offer or the proposition should be well spelled out with a place to opt in
sign up, etc.

These are the main basics of any campaigns. Miss any of these and like a three legged stool you campaign will topple over...KF

[edited by: King_Fisher at 11:03 am (utc) on Nov. 8, 2007]

[netmeg]

When all else fails, get some professional help. (I mean for your campaigns, not personally)

Seriously though, sometimes a second or third pair of eyes can see things you can't.