I have used them all. You can get big lists off wordtracker or keyword discovery very easily. They all do the same thing.
Yep direct to merchant.
Hey can't please everyone, troll on brother, troll on!
:error:
Anywho, here's the latest update:
Well things are moving along ok so far. Most keywords are getting some clicks now and it's time to add a phase to the project. I'm now a couple days in and can begin to edit or delete or pause or adjust keywords as they convert/don't convert/cost me too much money. This is the stage where most go wrong because they don't know what criteria to use to edit things OR they just don't edit anything at all. My criteria is easy. I want a minimum of 100% return on my investment. In my case there's curve ball in the calculation because I've got 3 different payouts to deal with. So, the way I handle this is to take an average of the 3 payouts and use that average as my payout for all calculations. In this case I have one that pays $150, $60 and $40 so the average is $83.33. So I can spend $83 to get a lead. That's my starting point. Now I know whenever a keyword hits the $83 mark and is not profitable, I have to either delete/pause or adjust the bid downward.
If the keyword has converted, I will know the conversion rate, so I can apply the following formula to figure out the new bid:
New Bid = Target Max Cost x Conversion Rate
So let's say I have found a keyword that has converted but has cost me $112 for one conversion, so I know it's above my target max cost. This means I have to do something and that is lower the bid to a point where it will be profitable if I get a conversion. Let's assume it converted at 1.33% for an example. My calculation is as follows:
New Bid = $83 x 0.0133
New Bid = $1.11
So I go into whichever engine I'm working on and adjust the bid for that converter down to $1.11. NOW if that keyword converts at that conversion rate, (it may or may not, but let's assume it does), I know I'll be making at least 100% ROI and that's exactly what I want. But what about keywords that have not converted but have gone over the $83 mark? The answer is easy delete or pause that keyword. It hasn't worked yet and yes you may hit a miracle click, but why waste money on it. Just delete or pause it and move along, there are literally millions of other keywords out there.
Another thing I like to do on overture is move those converting keywords to their own category. This way I can see at a glance which are my converters and which are my test keywords and which ones are offline. It's just for organization purposes. I like to test smaller batches at a time on overture to allow my daily budget to be focussed on a select group instead of spread amongst thousands and thousands of different keywords.
Here's the numbers:
One thing I found interesting so far is I haven't got a single lead from adwords yet. I've got a small trickle of clicks and I think my account may be under review. This happens sometimes and I have no problem with it, but once I get adwords rolling, I feel my profits will pick up nicely.
So I'm almost a week in. I'm not hitting my target ROI yet. What should I do? The answer is test more keywords, test new ads, test new ad copy, test new landing pages. It's simple really, if you're not getting what you want, test things until you find something that does get you what you want. Do not make huge changes all at once. Make small changes, document them and then give them a couple days to run. I haven't changed any text yet, I've only played with bids so far. You'll find sometimes that you have keywords that are costing you a lot of your budget and just not converting. Get rid of them. Be ruthless in throwing out the garbage. Do not think, "well I put $xxx into that keyword so I could get a lead on the next click, I better not touch it." Get rid of it before it drains more of your budget.
Now I'm off to add more keywords to adwords, overture and msn...