New account, much less roi. Adwords no longer viable

[chucky]

I used to use Google adwords and was receiving aprox 13 orders a day for my £20 / day budget.

I was carefull to make sure that my ads went directly to the relevant page and that they were relevant.

For one reason and another I stopped using adwords and have now had to set up a new account.

I set things up in pretty much the same way (if anything I probably did it better this time) but am finding that I only get one or two orders a day for the same investment.

I left it a month to see if things improved but I cannot afford to keep throwing money away like this.

Anyone have any ideas. They are all highly relevant. I don't understand how my conversion rate should reduce or why people are suddenly prepared to spend so much more money per click.

Unfortunately I don't remember all the stats for the old account so don't know the click through rates or conversion rates etc.

Any help on how I could rescue things would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

[venrooy]

I don't know if this will help, but I also started a 2nd account a few days ago. When I put my adwords in I put in a starting bid of like .10 or .15 - And google came back and said I had to bid $1 per word to get it started. I decided to erase all of the keywords, and put them all in seperate campaigns - and I bid only .01 to see what would happen. Then google only raised the price to .05 to .10 instead of $1.

Also - have you checked out your competition for these words? Are there any new sites bidding on your words?

[wrgvt]

You don't say how long ago you ran those ads or if you're targeting the same product or products. Most products have a bell-shaped curve for conversions and sales near the product delivery date. Let's say a product is released in June and you might get a 10% conversion rate for your ad. By January, that conversion rate might drop to 2% and if the product turned out to be popular, a lot more people are selling it and running AdWords to generate traffic for it.

[Israel]

I decided to erase all of the keywords, and put them all in seperate campaigns

Very interesting, Venrooy.

Do you care to share whether you put each keyword in a seperate campaign or adgroup or did you just create a new campaign for the bunch?

Also - have you checked out your competition for these words? Are there any new sites bidding on your words?

Quite often there aren't. Great keywords are showing no ads because every advertiser appears to require an unprofitable bid for certain groups of keywords.

The huge bids seem not to be taking your page quality into effect. I'll use a completely non-existent site as my destination and Google still wants the same $10.00 for the keywords as if I had used my real page!

Also, everyone watch your campaigns for keywords that do not show as 'Inactive', but don't show when searched. When tested in the Ads Diagnostic Tool, it reports that Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid is lower than the minimum CPC bid recommended by the system for your keyword. (among other nutty reports lately).

My question is: How are you to know this if it's not marked inactive? It doesn't make any difference whether the keyword has had no impressions or a long term 5%+ CTR either. Something has gone whack at Google or this was simply a way to double bid prices that's designed to also utterly confound the user.

In any case, Venrooy, like your creative solution there. Just make sure they're showing your words now with the lower bids! Be interested in your clarifying to what extent you broke the keywords up if you're willing to divulge.

Israel

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As an aside, has anyone found any use in the "new" tool under Tools¦Keyword Tools¦Site-Related Keywords?

It seems to just pick a few nouns off your page, suggest keywords that mostly have nothing to do with your site and then reports bids that resemble those asked in the "old days" (pre December 8th).

[chucky]

Thanks for the replies guys.

All campaigns are active and none require a higher bid amount.

I have a large range of products which are popular year around with new items coming and going regularly so the effect should equal itself out with regard to new products.

Due to new years resolutions my products should be more popular now than in May when I pulled the campaign.

I don’t think there are any more competitors but having looked at their campaigns I feel that they have got better at using adwords as their links now take you to the relevant page rather than their home page. Previously I was the only one doing this so feel that customers may have just hit the back button until they got to my site where they didn’t have to browse to find the product.

If they have got better at Adwords in this respect I think they probably improved their campaigns in other areas.

Any help would be appreciated.

[crak_bot]

For me at least, I'm starting to notice that I "burn through" my google users in about a month, maybe less, then conversions tank even though clicks are the same.

At that point I switch to overture/yahoo and my conversions come up again. Then I go back to Google.

I know they say there are millions of people searching and I guess there is, but from experience they seem to shop and search in blocks and once you exhaust all of them in one area, it seems to die. At least for my market, I'm sure for others there is a constant flow of new customers.

Hope this made sense since it's just a theory with no proof to back it up. (other than my conversions)