I have two campaigns, one has a 1% conversion rate and the other campaign has a 3% conversion rate. I've messed around with raising bids, but it doesn't seem to help, the traffic increases but no sales. My goal is to get 1 sale a day, I'm getting a sale every fews days at this time. My daily budget is $10, this could be a problem. Although, I'm willing to make an investment if I can get my campaign tweaked and sure I'll get sales from increasing my budget instead of wasting it on bad clicks.
This is what I'm thinking:
My CTR is low it's about 1% or less, should I find the keywords that are bringing most traffic and create a seperate ad group with a relavent adgroup just for those keywords? I read that having a low CTR means your ads are going to get displayed less? Is this correct? How can you make your keywords relevant to your ad if you have many keywords that are targeted 3-4 words?
Exact and Phrase matches - how do I create these? is it keyword+keyword, or is it [keyword keyword] or "keyword keyword"?
Should I create these matches for all my keywords?
One of these campaigns has a landing page, should I create a new landing page that looks different and start a PPC campaign and have 2 of them running?
Any other advise would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Look, I am only replying because I am bored, and you have no answers but don't take me as an authority at this. This is what I do myself and I could live on it alone so it can't be that bad.
Ok, let's dissect things. Take one campaign.
One thing is your CTR, another thing is your conversion.
1) Work on the CTR. What I do is look at the competition for my keywords. I type my keywords on yahoo, Google, Msn etc etc. I copy everything that's at the top of the results, anything that looks catchy, be it paid ads or not. From all these ads I mix and match what I think are the best words to produce about three ads, one different from the other but all as catchy as i can make them. Top line is what it is you have or what the user's problem might be, perhaps with a ? next line is what you/your product is gonna do to fix the problem/your answer to the problem above, third line is telling them to ACT on it and do it now and that it'll be FAST and quick to do. If you have your keyword on your LINK then when they look for it and it shows it shows in BOLD.
2) Get the three ads to run. Tick the option to show best performing ad more often. While you are testing this your CTR is shit as it's the sum of the three ads so you are paying top dollar to be up there but you do need clicks or your QS will suffer.
Let them run enough for them to be shown a few times, 100?, 500? Up to you but you should keep an eye for the best ad, then kill the other two and have a new ad, just like your best ad but with a different word. ONE word.
If it beats the top ad, you hit on a good word! Run one ad againt the other for a while, here it is up to you how long you keep on testing ads but while you are testing your CTR is the overall sum, which wont be as good as if you just ran the one best CTR on its own. But so long as you don't change wordings too drastically then the CTR shouldn't drop by that much.
3) You have now the best ad with the highest CTR your efforts could produce. Stop testing, have just the one ad. To raise your CTR further so you get a better QS you now need more clicks, to achieve this I try to bid as high as it takes to be within position 2 and 5 but so long as I am on the first page I am happy. Here I just muscle it with the others, by bidding high enough to be up there, where the clicks are.
At this point my budget is still fairly low but in my opinion it should be at least $30, better if $50.
4) Your clicks are now coming, your QS is getting better the minimun price is going down and you can now lower your bids, because more often than not they'll keep on charging you as much as they can per click, however as I halve my bids I will double my daily budget.
My budget has been set to be used up throughout the day since the beginning of the campaign.
If at this point you are making any money or going even then you could up the daily budget to $250 and see the QS beome real good, so you can lower your bid a bit more, if you can afford it, keep them one or two cents above minimun, also this is up to you because regardless of minimun required bid if you drop too low in the page your QS suffers and your minimuns will go up again so your TRUE price is the one that keeps you in position 2 or 3 or even 4 or 5, it depends how much profit you are making.
Now if everything is working ok and you trust it that adwords won't fuck you up in two week by upping all your keywords to a minimun of $10 per click you can put more work into this by testing individual keywords and killing the ones that do not produce, you can also start testing different landing pages to help with your conversions.
I won't comment on how to test keywords using what's available from adwords as there are many ways of tracking keywords performance using tracking programs outside adwords and I am quite useless at most of them so I'll end the rant here.
One word of advice would be not to go too wild spending $250 a day on adwords, even if they are bringing $500 back, it will take a while to actually get the $500 in and sometimes you might even never see it at all so don't go out trusting that you'll get paid.
No doubt people will find holes everywere, that's cool, let me know where you think they are so I can do better.
