My Google AdWords Failure
Posted on December 30, 2006
Filed Under Adwords
We have one page at the site with a pretty high paying (almost $80) affiliate. In the last month we’ve gotten 4 conversions on this affiliate from natural organic traffic. I figured that if I could drive some targeted or even semi-targeted traffic to the page I should be able to get dozens of conversions. And what better way to get targeted traffic than with Google Adwords ?
The first thing I realized was that all my keywords were expensive - in the neighborhood of $4-$5. The high price of these keywords did not matter to me though because I was confident that I would be getting conversions left and right. I set my daily budget at $80 (the cost of one conversion) and started my campaign.
Within about 2 hours, I had several clicks, and burned through my entire daily budget. My total number of conversions? ZERO .. After looking at my stats and keyword list it became apparent that a few of my keywords were too broad and were bringing untargeted traffic. There went $80 down the toilet.
Day two:
I narrowed my keywords and changed my ads a bit and unpaused my campaign. This time the campaign ran for several hours before burning the daily budget. Total number of conversions: ZERO. Another $80 gone
Day three and four:
This time I decided to look at my landing page. Maybe the page that did so well with organic traffic needed to be a little more spammy. I added a large banner at the very top and a few text links in the page copy. Total number of conversions: ZERO - Kiss goodbye another $160
Day five:
At this point I was a bit discouraged so I lowered my daily budget to $25. I fine-tuned my ads by adding a “call to action” as suggested at the DP Forums. For some reason on this day the cost per click was much lower at about $0.50 each - things were looking up! With this lower CPC I would be getting more hits than when my budget was at $80! Result: ZERO conversions
Conclusions:
The PPC game is harder than it looks! It was suggest in the DP Forums that losing money is a necessary part of making money with PPC. TEST TEST TEST, and TEST more until you hit on what works for you. Well guys, I just can’t afford to test that much! Last month my DP Forum buddy Tom tried using PPC to sell my eBook. To read how successful Tom was, check his bl0g at www.nextebizguy.com
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Google Adwords is much tougher to control than it used to be. For least risk try this:
Opt out of content and Google’s search partner network to avoid click and distribution fraud.
Use only phrase and exact match versions and never broad match to keep their expanded broad match function from showing your ads for unrelated searches and on keywords that are too general.
Drop by the PPC forum at http://www.searchengineforums.com to ask questions and get free assistance in making your PPC advertising work for you.