arbi and keyword selection

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mpz

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Greetings,

I've been trying my hand at arbitrage for just over a month now and not all is well. Appling knowledge gained here I was able to get few good niches and thru testing figured out what templates (heavily modified version of "arbi test" page) and ad formats tend to work. However, at this point I’m basically breaking even. My bids tend to be on a low side average being .03, yet due to my massive keyword count per campaign, they tend to drain my account and not convert well enough to generate me any profit.

I have an average of about 3500 keywords per campaign and Enhance is eating me alive and doesn't tend to convert very well (4 - 8%). Those of you that are successful/profitable, can you please share how you go about keyword selection? Do you take my quantity over quality approach where you have automated "keyword generating" tools and have thousand of keywords per campaign, or do you have only few but very well targeted keywords (where you consider relevancy of each) that yields you high ctr?

Also, what SE do you use besides 7search? I use enhance and searchfeed but none convert as well as 7search but do bring a lot (a lot) more traffic. However that traffic often seems crap.

Button line is I need to improve my ctr and I'm beginning to think less but better keywords are the answer.

Your suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 


No. Have you? Did you find it to be more profiable than adsense? Did you have to alter your site content for their ads?

Please elaborate.
 
mpz said:
No. Have you? Did you find it to be more profiable than adsense? Did you have to alter your site content for their ads?

Please elaborate.
Click to expand...

You got adwords and adsense confused. Read more before you ask questions.
 
Sorry, that came out wrong. Did you find advertising in 1st tier engines to yield better results?
 
I only use 7Search. Searchfeed sucks beyond belief, and I haven't tried Enhance but it sounds just as bad.

I have anywhere from 5 to 150 keywords per niche. I was getting almost no clicks on long-tail keywords and they were filling up my 10,000 keyword limit on 7Search really fast so I scrapped them and now only use keywords that get 100+ searches/month on the 7Search affiliate network.
 
z00pedup said:
Maybe u should run a few checks in your server logs to check for fraudulant clicks..

I had alot of visits from the same IP with 7search
Click to expand...

One thing that really makes me suspicious about Enhance is they redirect each request and encode referrer making it difficult to see if the click if real. Thanks for the tip.
 
Setec said:
I only use 7Search. Searchfeed sucks beyond belief, and I haven't tried Enhance but it sounds just as bad.

I have anywhere from 5 to 150 keywords per niche. I was getting almost no clicks on long-tail keywords and they were filling up my 10,000 keyword limit on 7Search really fast so I scrapped them and now only use keywords that get 100+ searches/month on the 7Search affiliate network.
Click to expand...

That's only a fraction of what I have, I'll test this out asap, thank you.

Edit: do you stick to the .06 rule with such small keyword quantity or do you tend to go over?
 
The $0.06 "rule" is not a rule. Spend the amount that gets you a lot of traffic while still being profitable.
 
Is your ad copy relevant to your page and the ads displayed? Maybe people click your ad thinking the site is useful, go to your page, see its shit, see the adsense on it is also irrelevant, and click the back button?
 
I have a related question to keywords for arbi sites. Do you direct all the traffic to the main page or to sub-pages? For example, say a gaming site with 30 pages or more - should I direct specific traffic to PS3 page, Wii page, Xbox page etc...?
 
technomad: I just went thru all my sites and they display proper ads, although 2 did not at first, but after i went to my other sites came back and refreshed proper ads did appear, weird. Thoughts?

Interestingly enough, if I omit "www" google defaults to some unrelated ads but i checked all my destination urls and all was well.

To the rest of readers, did you try to "disable" browser "back" button and saw a ctr increase? In my case it seems like the extra clicks I got by "forcing" visitor to click on an ad was offset by those that clicked back 2-3 times, thought WTF and closed the browser.
 
do you stick to the .06 rule with such small keyword quantity or do you tend to go over?
Click to expand...

I start out at $0.06 for most new sites, but as soon as I have some performance data I usually increase my bids. My overall average is $0.11/click, but on some niches I'm bidding up to $0.26/click.

One advantage to having so few keywords is that it's easy to micromanage your bids niche-by-niche.
 
The thing with massive keyword lists is that they could get you a lot of untargetted or irrelevant clicks. Especially if you have auto-generated list of thousands of words or copied it from some tool without looking through it.

If you have a 10000 keyword list, you're not gonna be able to look through the whole list and take out irrelevant words. And several places in there, there could be words that are totally and utterly irrelevant - but that you still pay for bids for. So the visitors going to your site based on that find, will be completely disappointed when they see your site has not even remotely what they were looking for.

Be aware of keywords that are localized - when your niche and adsense ads have no relevancy to the locale the visitor is interested in.

E.g. your niche is "nippleshaped nacho snacks". Your huge list contains tons of variations of that, but several places in there you have:
nippleshaped nacho snacks new york $0.06
long beach nippleshaped nacho snacks $0.06
south african nippleshaped nacho snacks $0.06
etc. etc. etc.

Then all those pervs looking for "long beach nippleshaped nacho snacks" (wasting you $0.06 for each click) will be let down when they see nothing but general ads about "nippleshaped nacho snacks" on your arbi site.
 
ImagesAndWords,
You are wrong. It's actually quite easy to automate profitable keyword checking. You just need to get Adsense click logger that let's you output a report where you can see keyword traffic and how many clicks you got. Then you just do a simple script that analyzes the data and see what keywords aren't producing clicks. If keyword doesn't produce clicks - it gets deleted.

Simple and easy :)
 
Thanks for your tips all, keep 'em coming.

micfire: what click logger do you use? I've been looking for something that can tell me which keywords convert. TIA

edit: anybody else for that matter, if you could share what keyword click logger you use and maybe comment on pros/cons that would be great.
 
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