11 Jun 12 1:01 am
Basically, Google AdWords optimal use is very complex - a book-length subject for sure. It's quite difficult to keep Google from vacuuming up all your profits. After all, It's designed as a tool to make Google money and the engineers at Google are very good at what they do.
In my experience it requires at least $20 to $30 a day for a decent campaign. And even a well managed campaign is likely to lose money for many days while you fine tune it. Popular keywords often cost OVER $1.00 PER CLICK! If your max daily budget is set for $20 a day, that's not a lot of visitors. One of my recent campaigns had a keyword costing $48 per click - I didn't use that keyword.
A few of my personal tips:Don't work at getting max CTR (Click Through Rate - the most clicks on your Google ads) - like Google stresses. That only makes money for Google, since you pay for every single click on your ads - whether they result in a sale or not. You want to do all you can to get only people clicking on your Google ads who will actually buy - max SCR (Sales Conversion Rate). That is, max profits for you, minimum profits for Google. So, your ads absolutely must be highly targeted and hopefully will actually filter out people who won't buy. And your landing page simply must convert well.
This is one of the reasons keywords indicating a crisis, immediate need, or other sales indicating keywords are so important.
What this all means is that "max traffic" is the wrong goal. Your real goal is "max profits".
Use lots of "negative keywords" to prevent your ads from showing (and getting clicked on) for the wrong searches. For example, the keyword "conversions" will get many visitors trying to convert metric measurements to US units, etc. or trying to understand cooking measurement units and such - rather than those seeking higher sales conversion rates. Certainly use "free" as a negative keyword if your product is not free and you don't have a "free trial" or such.
The above shows how you have to carefully monitor you PPC campaigns, for example to see what search terms brought your PPC visitors (and more). You can't just let your campaigns run themselves, if you don't want them to run you into the ground financially.
Feel free to pause your ad groups or campaigns, while you improve them, or when you're distracted by other tasks - to prevent a money losing campaign from running up big Google bills because you're not paying attention to it.
Don't expect to set up an AdWords campaign and then just walk away from it, if you want it to make you money, instead of costing you. At first you'll have to spend on the order of 1 hour every day fine tuning your bids, A/B split testing your ads, trying out new keywords and many other things. Of course this depends on how many keywords and ad groups you are managing.Only after a campaign is thoroughly optimized can you spend more than a day or two away from it.
Be sure you understand the use of Ad Groups and key word matching options and the Google warnings prompting you to spend more on bids.
I wouldn't advise anyone to launch a Google AdWords PPC campaign before digesting one or more good books on the subject.
Hope this helps...
_jim coe
Last edited by jimcoe on 11 Jun 12 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
