It hasn't worked. I've tried a budget of $15 a day for most of the year. I'll get a stretch of a week or two where there's enough conversions that the cost of the ads is roughly equal to the profit I made from the conversions. Just breaking even. Usually, though, the cost of the ads far exceeds the profits from sales.
For the last two weeks I've run ads and had no conversions at all. I had to click on one of my own ads today and go through the checkout process just to verify that the tracking was working.
I have very slim profit margins, so there's not a lot of room for advertising expense. I've been paying $1 a click for some phrases for a particular product line, but haven't had a sale from those ads in a long time. Yet I've sold a lot of those products by word of mouth, people finding my site in the organic results, or people just visiting my site and finding those products.
If they're buying when finding me that way, why wouldn't they buy when they click on an ad for something they're actively seeking?
Having said that it simply isn't cost effective in some cases to bid on anything other then very long tail keywords and brand terms. If you are in a competative, or low conversion market you may find that adwords simply isn't the right advertising channel for you.
Have you had a look at things like changing your landing page to increase quality score, bidding only at the times of day people are most likely to buy? If you have analytics installed you could try using the conversion optimiser option, and let Google help you get conversions within your CPA target.
Additionally try the campaign optimiser tyo see if you could beniit from reducing your geographical targetting.
Finally, you may not be reaching all of the customers you could, run a campaign report and make tsure the IS (imnpression share) boxes are ticked. With $15 budget a day you may find that your budget is preventing you from getting as many impressions as you could.
I've double and tripled-checked the tracking code on my thank-you page. I did so because I was questioning whether the code was working and showing conversions. My test sale showed that it does.
Still, I wonder if Google's reporting might be off. The reason I'm questioning that is because I sell some recreational widgets on my site. Both are the same type of widget from the same manufacturer, but some widgets are made for sport A and others are made for sport B. My site's niche is for sport A.
I recently started running AdWords again for the sport B widgets, figuring they would be good holiday sellers, and I've sold a fair number of them in the last couple of weeks. I don't know how the visitors are finding the sport B widget page, because I don't rank well at all for terms associated with it.
I'm just wondering if those visitors are coming from AdWords ads. Maybe they clicked on the ad but came back after the cookie expired. Or is there something else that could affect the reporting?
Essex_boy, any notions as to why?
From November 1st to November 27th, I sold 9 of the sport B widgets. From November 28th (the day I started AdWords for that item) until today I've sold 10.
I can't tell if AdWords is working or not based on those numbers, without conversions being shown.
If your business or products is/are totally unique (or also not easily targetable), adwords will most likely not be right for you, because people will not be directly seeking you out. Instead, you will have to try to anticipate indirect keywords that they will search for, which is much less effective.
Example A: A small business owner is looking for a website. They type in "inexpensive website designers in East Cupcake," see your adword, and sign up for your service. You are targeting small business owners who are specifically looking to buy your service. You will have a high conversion rate.
Example B: You have a new, unique product or service that will benefit small business owners in a huge way. How do you target these small business owners though? It is much harder than targeting ones who are specifically looking for web design (especially in your geographic region). You can try targeting them by keywords that they might search for, like "cheap web design," but that won't be effective as your product/service doesn't relate to these keywords. This is where Adwords is highly ineffective.
However, ive had the most success when a product is in limited supply (obvious really) so Id suggest that any generic easy to enter business wouldnt be the best for adwords aka high competition.
I do know of a program that monitors adwords advertisers month to month and can confirm that many drop out and give up, so maybe adwords isnt the way forward for many.
The main problem is the cost of the clicks over sales.
As I said before, I've sold as many sport B widgets in the nine days since I started running the AdWords ads as I did in the prior twenty-seven days.
It may be that my competitors have been advertising for a long time and are getting a much lower price. Or maybe my landing pages just don't work for AdWords users, but work for people finding me through organic results. Why that would be, I don't know, but plenty of people find these products on organic results and buy.
"The main problem is the cost of the clicks over sales."
Yep. I'm working on margins of about 10%, which doesn't leave a lot of money for running ads that don't convert.
I never really noticed a big difference in conversions.
As for position, I generally bid to be on the first page, but not bid so high as to be in the top three. Someone here suggested that I adjust my bids to be in the middle of the pack, allowing customers to compare prices before they reach my pages.
The customers who find my pages through organic searches, Google Products, or word of mouth by and large say great things about my prices and service. The people who find my pages via AdWords look at one or maybe two pages and leave.
There are plenty of other advertisers running AdWords ads for the same widgets I'm selling, so I would assume that they're getting results.
Don't assume this or put yourself down. Your predicament is probably mirrored elsewhere.
I share information with several very large , if not huge well managed advertising accounts. Some of these are in the same business vertical, bidding on same phrases and the intelligence is shared between them . Some also have unique product which acts as a bit of a test on separate campaigns.
With business conditions tightening and performance poor, they are progressively more unhappy with the ROI. Do some more digging and you may find the same. There's only so much you can bid, before you pull back in a contracting consumer market.
That would tend to make me think you need to look at your keywords and your ad text; it sounds like possibly the people are interested in the ads for whatever reason, but once they get to your site, it's not what they might have thought it was.
Are you using broad match? If so, try running search query reports (or try the analytics filter I posted here [webmasterworld.com] to see what search terms your ads are *really* coming up on.
Are you running multiple ads? If not, you should be. Do your ads look like your competitors, or does something set them apart?
The most clicks were coming from the phrase "(insert the sport here) widgets." But I thought that was too broad, so I narrowed it to the manufacturer, as in "Acme widgets." I also went more specific and targeted the individual models. For example, "Acme XYZ widgets."
The ad text said "Compare our prices and service, free 2-3 day shipping."
My prices on the widgets is much less than most competitors. To try to gain customer trust I have testimonial quotes from customers on the left side, using their real names, cities and states.
I really don't know what more I can do to get the ads to convert.
