Testing the Waters in Competitive Areas

what am I doing wrong

[graywolf]

I am trying to test out going into a moderately competitive area.

I have 15 2-3 word keyphrases

When I estimate traffic at $0.50 a click it estimates my average position to be between 4 and 6

After 2 days the average positions winds up between 11 to 26

I have a daily budget of $40 set so I am not getting full delivery

Needless to say I keep getting disabled. I've tried upping the bids as high as $1.00 but have only been able to move as high as position 9. Any general tips would be appreciated.

[cline]

$1 is not a particularly high bid, on average. The question is, is it worth $1 per click to you? Looks like you're going to have to bid far higher than $1 to get good placement.

Suggestion: If you're testing gingerly, always use exact match.

[graywolf]

The question is, is it worth $1 per click to you?

I am #1 and #2 in the organic searches on Yahoo and MSN for the term. And it takes anywhere from 250 - 300 visitors to convert. So at that rate I'll be loosing money.

[vibgyor79]

It probably doesn't make sense to pay $2.00 per click when your conversion rate is lower than 0.5% (assuming you don't sell the product for $1,000).

However, if you can absorb some losses, you might want to set the bid price that will take you to page 1 of search results (preferably position 5.0 or 6.0 for the testing period). Let the ad stay at this position for atleast a week (assuming you have that kind of cash to burn). During this time, your ad copy will be syndicated to search network thereby increasing the volume of clicks.

Also, your ad copy will start receiving a large number of impressions and Google's system will collect the CTR data. If your ad copy has better CTR than the others, you will either see your avg CPC go down or you will see your ad position increase (which will again result in higher click volumes). After one week, based on the conversion numbers, you can reduce the bid prices and still get more clicks than when you first started.

You can cut your losses during the trial period by setting a low daily budget.

Another idea would be to tap into the content network. I would recommend that you create a new identical campaign for the content network with a lower max CPC. You might want to set a lower daily budget so that there is no deluge of clicks.

If you are already tapping into the content network with little luck, then you can increase your exposure by adding more "specific keywords". That is, if you have a 2-word keyword, input the keyword into the Google keyword suggestion tool (select all languages/countries option), collect all the 'specific keywords' and dump them into the AdGroup.

This will help increase both search and content network clicks.

But if you are in a really competitive arena, there is no other good alternative to adding more keywords. And that includes adding relevant keywords, related keywords, slightly relevant keywords, competitor names (assuming you don't have any scruples doing that), combining two words (if you have "home loan" as a keyword, add "homeloan" to the list) and so on.