Pay-Per-Click Experiences

[wolfjay]

Hi


I've just begun a pay-per-click campaign on Google and am quite new to this. I run a website selling an ebook on soccer betting.

It all seems very interesting and quite feasible at this point and I'm thinking of expanding my marketing efforts to more pay-per-click programs. Seems like it's the fastest way to draw traffic.

I hope some of you could tell me about your experiences with such programs; perhaps success stories and the ways you got there, bad experiences and how to avoid them.

Also, which are the best programs and which to avoid? Which are the essential search engines to get on for such programs.

I'm starting on a small budget and trying to work my way up so I would appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks.

[BigDoor]

I currently use google adwords for our art publishing company. When I first started out I set a daily budget of $5.00 and more to start and see how it went, with very little return I promptly quit. A few months ago I gave it another go, I set the budget to to the smallest dollar setting and CPC...funny thing is, I now get a better click through rate and have gained more sales at the lower rate. Now this may not work for you but it was interesting to find that it worked period.

I suggest using the multiple text ad option, create different wording for each ad and see what works better. Use as many keywords as you can think of and ones you may not think to use, delete them as time passes if they don't produce or they may disable your ad. Also set you URL link to the least amount of clicks to get to the order page or people will simply leave.


Hope that helps.

Good Luck.

[lighttech]

I currently use google adwords a lot for our website www.rlights.com. Set a low pay per click. I recommend the minimum 5 cents/click. Bid on all of the terms you can think of. You are looking at $60 for 1200 clicks. Don't use overture. Everything should go fine.

[wolfjay]

Thanks guys!

I have always set my max CPC to the min of 0.05. I've read somewhere that the lower positions usually give better click- through's which are also more likely to convert. (Those who click on the lower ads are more serious about looking for what you might offer.)

Since my last post, I have had some success, increasing my CTR to about 2.5% (Is that good? Anyone knows what is the approximate CTR to shoot for?) Basically, the increase can be attributed to making my ads and keywords as relevant to my website as possible.

I would like further advice, however.

Any tips on how to target those broad-based keywords which will bring a lot of traffic and yet still click through?

Any tricks for writing ad copy for higher CTRs?

[dcomiskey]

I've set up one site for Google's PPC. I've learned a few lessons from it. One, the costs can add up quick with little results. Two, don't use lingerie as a keyword! The site I built sells women's accessories, so I naturally listed all the items' keywords. Site got hammered with clickthroughs, but no sales.
I highly recommend using Google's keyword generator (inside AdWords). It will help you come up with more phrases that will help your listing come up and hopefully generate more sales.
They way I explained it to the site's owner is, if you aren't doing ANY other marketing (which she is not), what good is getting rid of Google? People aren't going to inadvertently stumble on your site when it's not being advertised as opposed to the ones that are, IMO.

[ka0osk]

I've had pretty good results overall with Addwords. My return is about $4 per click with an average of 6.5 cents payout!!! The trick seems to be to hit the right keywords that are the best searches done by the people how would realy want your product. Popping up an add to people who could care less is a waste of time. Its best to try NOT to make it look like an add, but a sale or special thing, maybe a closeout, or even real info about the search terms. I also have my competitors names as search words (heh heh) and get about $800+ a month from those clicks alone. I sell specialty tents, but the keyword "tent" is worthless to me, with a gazillion companies using it and paying 4 times as much as I want to spend per click.... now "medieval tents" gets me on the top, and hits up the gazoo that produce. mis-spellings get me about $300 a month and it dont cost more to add some mis-spelled keywords, so I have some of them as keywords too. Nobody seems to be able to spell "Medieval" :)

John (ka0osk)
www.midwesttent.com

[natureday]

I know someone that pays almost 6 dollars a click for weight loss.
He makes really good money, but you have to really bet on the people that click on your site to buy.

[Michael Howard]

Hello, how do you determine the Max CPC for your keywords? Do anyone knows what is the optimal Max CPC? Do you specify a percantage of your products' costs?

[natureday]

It doesn't matter so much, as long as you set it for 30 cents.
You don;t have to pay that much:)

[aethernet]

I think it depends heavily on the industry. In my industry repeat business is a huge part of sales so I can afford to spend more on ppc but I don't think this would apply to your industry. In any event you have to have a few hundred dollars to find out what works.

I sell technology related products and have found that Google is ok and yahoo is a waste of time. This seems to make sense, what geek uses yahoo or msn?? Theres a few other ppc's that I'm testing but its too early to tell any results.

The Adwords Learning Center is a GREAT resource:

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

[IndieRetailer]

We actually use Google Adwords and Overture's (Yahoo!) for combined efforts. I would say that the best return for our money has come from Overture.

We also found a couple really fantastic tools relating to selecting appropriate and related keywords and web site traffic analysis.

The first one we just found a couple nights ago, but apparently is quite popular and is spoken about almost as a standard tool that every webmaster should have. It's called WordTracker. Click on the link to check it out. http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/a/15460

The other tool is simply incredible! Visitor Ville is a web site traffic analysis tool that turns your traffic analysis into a 3Dimensional city. Each building, or house, represents a page on your site. People and cars (visitors) move around this virtual city as they navigate your site. The best description I've heard is web site traffic analysis that DNA spliced with the SIMS. Click here to check out Visitor Ville http://www.visitorville.com/?id=514

[MerchantAdv]

Everything I have read here seems pretty on point.

The two main things I would emphasize is:

1. Test Market: Don't throw everything out at once. Pick one strategy at a time and spend preferably a few weeks going through different scenarios. It will take some trial and error finding what works best for your product but remember to be patient and set up a schedule.

2. Be Creative: Pick as many related words as you can think of, or that are recommended by a good keyword generation program. Usually the most effective campaigns are the campaigns containing only a few high cost generic keywords. Try to find the keywords that will still pull in traffic but are not as popular as the mainstream ones. It is usually better to have 10 creative $.05 keywords than one $.50 keyword that is too generic to pull in the traffic you are looking for and will result in a sale.

Good luck!

[john238]

I think Overture and Adwords are the main two ppc programs. There is also goclick and searchfeed, which are not quite as good, but are cheaper to advertise in.

I would not bother advertising in 3rd tier ppc programs as you will just get lots and lots of clicks but no sales. This is because alot of people are paying people to just click on the listings so that they can earn money.

It is fraud in a big way in the 3rd tier ppc search engines.

[sean]

Hello, how do you determine the Max CPC for your keywords? Do anyone knows what is the optimal Max CPC? Do you specify a percantage of your products' costs?
It all depends on how much profit you are making on each product. Say you get a profit of 5 dollars on each product purchased by your customer and assuming that one of ten clicks convert in to purchase, then make your total cost for adwords to approximately 3 doll...means 30cents as maxCPC on your major keywords. you can spend more to get your ad placed in the front page at the expense of profits. hope It helps.

[thedude]

We have been using many PPC networks in our marketing efforts, but the best that worked for us was Google Adwords. Overture was good but not that efficient.
Stay away from Clicksor, Looksmart, Adbrite , they are filled with bots and it seems that the only way they get money from is click fraud.
Regards

[biggybank]

I have had a bad experience with google adwords recently.

We chose keywords that were demanding the lowest possible price per click and started our campaign. A few days ago, when I logged in to see my reports, most of the words were showing up as inactive for search and demanded higher payment from me to activate them. I wanted my ads to keep running, so I set them up at higher prices, but the next day they were all inactive again, demanding even more money! My campaign is now inactive, and I have no idea why the sudden change. When I do a search in google for the words I chose, there are no other sponsored links showing up, so why is google demanding more money from me?

[the_host]

Try http://www.click-share.com

I am working with them from 6 mounts and have very good results with very high CPC.

They also provide text and products ads.

How do they compare to adsense and YPN?
Im always wary of the smaller services.

[rajat]

Hi,

I think google Adword is tolerably good. But I had very bad experience regarding Yahoo overture. I doubt they encourage fraud clicks. The quality traffic coming from overture is very poor. Do not invest much money on PPC campaigns of search engines. I think the best practice is to go for quality backlinks from websites which have good page rank in google.

Focus your SEM efforts towards quality back links. You will definitely get quality visitors without spending an extra penny.

Rajat
http://www.xponsetech.com/seo.html

[rajat]

Most people face bitter experience with google adwords. The problem that you have cited is quite common among those who go for PPC campaigns. You send me your website address or URL, then I will be able to offer more specific suggestions on how to tackle the problem.

http://www.xponsetech.com/seo.html

[merchantmase]

i have found it's difficult to manage my adwords and yahoo campaigns separately. i saw a few tools that allow you to manage your google and yahoo campaigns at once. keyword max, atlas one point, inceptor. the one that seems most cost effective is adconsole. anyone use any of these? i'm thinking of trying one of them out.

[savicevici]

agree with rajat...quality backlinks from websites with a good pr its the best way to get many visitors from your website.


http://www.*********.com

[barefootmentor]

I used be BIG into PPC I had ad's running on 7 PPC sites. Yes I had a good ROI but I did lots of testing too. Now I have very limites campaigns running since I have figured our SEO that is much more cost effective.

I still have new people start out with PPC though it's the quickest way to drive targeted visitors to your site.

[Christine8]

PPC works for short time goals but in the long run you should get a good SEO firm. In my experience the conversion rate from organic results are up to ten times better than PPC conversions.

[krunk]

I guess I need to be educated a little bit more on how to effectively use pay per click because I've never really had any success using it at all. Is there a good inexpensive course out there I could buy?

[barefootmentor]

Krunk- Yes there are probably lots of courses you can purchase, but I've got something better. I did a training on PPC a few months back and I have posted it on a neat little desktop tool I'm using to train the people I work with.

Feel free to download a copy so you can have access to this one of a kind training. Go to: http://qview.barefootsuccess.net and just save it to your desktop. Once you open the program click on the "featured" tab then the training is under the "presentation" tab.

To your success on the net,

Cindy McAsey

[diggin4it]

I think adwords has it's place, but the problem is with lack of visibility of the bids no one has a clue why their ads become inactive.

One thing that amuses me (ever so slightly) is the website below. It was set up to combat the increase in non geographic numbers being used by companies to bump up their profits. As a non profit making organisation it added adsense to pay for the server hosting etc. The thing is adsense sees the talk about telephone numbers and automatically adds advertisements for revenue sharing schemes for the very numbers the website was set up to wipe out.

http://www.saynoto0870.com/

[krunk]

Thanksk for the useful information Barefoot Mentor!

[barefootmentor]

Your Welcome Krunk,

I truly believe if everyone would just "pay it forward" the world would be a better place to live ... even though my business name is "Barefoot in the Garden"

Cindy

[thestuffinder]

Ask.com was a nightmare for me. I was used to Google's easy interface and theirs was just confusing. With one campaign on google I would average 1-3 sales for every 100 clicks at a low cost and for the same campaign It cost me over $30 for 150 or so clicks and Not A single sale. Plus they want money up front. Google doesn't. (which could be bad or good)

[JPnyc]

I should inform you that your link is dead. That domain is censored on all our forums for having spammed them.

[jacab9901]

Please participate in the "pre-launch" site www.megastake.com and help us. It has got a very good review from ‘Press Release Newswire’ PRWeb a leading online business magazine.
Thanks in advance.

[FileHawk]

A lot of good points here. Has anybody ever used other keyword generator programs besides Googles Adwords? I feel that there's a lack of information provided, those little data bars are not that helpful...

[HawaiiSurfer]

I think that the bottom line is that everyone finds different things that work with adwords. The key is the keywords and that testing different ones will bring different results.

The problem is that people go to adwords, try it for a few days and when there are no results, they think that it doesn't work. It's like any business advertising - some things work and some do not. Sometimes changing one word, quotation, or bracket can make a world of a difference.