PPC - More keywords / how to get CPC down?

[Josh P]

Hey guys, what's up?
My campaign is 3 days old.
Ok, here's the deal, I'm using adwords to drive traffic to one of my sites. The site is basically an arbitrage site, with adsense, but I'm also pushing a CPA offer. (I'm getting about 9% clicks to the CPA offer, but due to CPAE haveing some problems with recording leads, I don't know how much of those clicks convert to leads.)
As far as adsense goes, I'm getting 57% CTR, with average click worth 12.7 cents. Now, I'm assuming I'm making money with the CPA offer included, but right now I'm spending average 19 cents per click to get the visitors there. Here are my questions:
1) how do I get the CPC I'm spending down, is there any way?
2) I have about 27 keywords I'm bidding on, with one of them being my niche. (i.e. like for the auto niche, "cars") Only 6 of these have gotten clicks, and about 10 have shown ads. I am running 2 different ad variations.

Should I get more keywords? Like, I know I easily can, I just haven't, but it does make sense bidding 5-10 cents on a a keyword, which gets me 1 click a day, and having 100 of those keywords verses bidding on that big niche keyword and getting 100 clicks at 19 cents each.

 

[aeiouy]

Are you bidding high enough to get a good position? If you don't bid high enough you will not get enough CTR to really get low payments. You are better off jacking your bid up and limiting your campaign budget initially, then having a bigger budget and a lower bid. When you get some clicks at a higher rate at a higher exposure and you out perform other ads, then your click rate will come down.

Are your ads well written and well-targeted to the keywords you are using? Are you testing multiple ads? The ad testing thing is something I still do not have a good handle on, but I do know in some cases I have written 4 or 5 ads for a campaign and one ad has outperformed the others by 3 or 4 fold. When you delete the underperforming ads things can real adjust in your favor.

If you can find other hot keywords it is always good to look for more, but you should try to work on the ones that get impressions now. On a new campaign I will closely watch those keywords that get the most impressions early on and work on making sure I can get clicks on those. Be it by raising the bid for that one keyword, creating a seperate campaign for it, or trying some variations of ads on the current campaign to help that keyword perform.

 

[Josh P]

Yes, my ads are well written (I've got some good feedback on that) and I am running multiple ads. Can you elaborate more on that whole bid higher with a lower budget thing? You saying I should but like .50 for it instead of .19? I was hoping to be able to keep the same, or more, traffic, and only bid 15.