PPC keywords?

02 Jul 06 1:36 am

Hi Clifford,

You should try to get an idea of how much the top bid is for the keyword you're targeting. Arbitrarily setting your CPC to $1.00 and seeing what happens is a recipe for burning through cash.

You can either use the Overture (YSM) bid tool to get an idea for the top bid or use the Adwords keyword tool to get cost and position estimates. The Adwords API now provides cost, which I think is a fairly new feature.

I recall that Mark's advice from one of the videos is to start out with a CPC of between $.12 - $.16 and try to get your CTR up. If it's a competitive KW then your ad is going to show deeper in the SERPs.

PPC advertising is both an art and a science. The science is in KW list building, ad group and bid management. The art is in writing your ads, otherwise known as "Adwords Haikus".

The neat part with Adwords is that Google will reward you with a lower CPC if you have a high CTR.

Rich

02 Jul 06 2:28 pm

Hi Clifford,

In general, I add phrase match and exact match for all of my KWs. Then selectively add broad match if it makes sense to do so. Broad match may cause your ads to show for untargeted KWs thus causing your CTR to suffer.

The next thing I would do is group my KWs into more focused adgroups.

For example say I'm doing a campaign for dog training:

Adgroups:

dog potty training
dog agression
dog barking
dog biting

Then I would group my KWs into the adgroups above. That way your KWs are more easy to manage. You can also set you landing page to be more targeted. SitStayFetch provides a targeted sales page for each of the KWs above.

The idea is to get targeted traffic from targeted KWs to a targeted landing page for a targeted product. In essence, laser-guide the visitor the whole way along to a sale.

Rich

03 Jul 06 1:48 am

Here's an example of where a broad match may not be what you want:

KW: learn bass

So say someone types in: "learn to bass fish"

Then your add will show for the broad match on learn bass since the words 'bass' and 'fish' are both in the search phrase. It doesn't matter in what order and the other words around them or even what the word 'bass' is actually intended to mean.

Does this make sense?

Rich

04 Jul 06 12:20 am

Hi Clifford,

KW research does take a bit of time. That's why the gurus outsource this tedious task to lower paid free lancers. The rest of us, just have to grunt through it. I guess it's just paying our dues :lol:

WordTracker is a great resource and the paid version is a lot more powerful than the free trial. A single day runs about $8.00 and I've found that it runs over by a day or two. Dr. Andy Williams at ezSEO.com has a WordTracker tutorial if you sign up for his newsletter. It's really worth reading for how to get the most out of your WT account.

The real power of WT is the KEI for how much competition there is for a KW. This is really powerful for SEO when determing which KWs to target - the less competition, the better the chance of getting a higher ranking, especially in Google.

Lately, I've just been using the Adwords keyword research tool. It's recently been expanded and if used properly can generate quite a few relevant keywords. It can also give you cost and position estimates along with popularity. It's useful for getting a general idea for the top bid amounts for a KW.

Rich

04 Jul 06 3:55 pm

Hi to everyone!

I Started an adwords campaign 3 days ago. I wanted to promote "Rocket Spanish" and a web site called "diabetesbegone.com". They offer an excellent e-book on Diabetes. (I am a diabetic and have found myself to be a little knowledgeble on the subject).

I am on a really tight budget so I started my daily spend at $20.00.

I had bid $.05 per bid on the e-book site and .90 on the Spanish site.
I had about 66impressions and 0 clicks on the e-book site and 1573 impressions with 47 clicks on the Spanish site. (3days) I am using 4 keywords on the e-book site and had 10 on the Spanish site.

I left the e-book site alone but a few minutes ago I was studying the impressions and CTR of the Spanish site. I saw I had only 4 keywords that were working. I used the key word editor and deleted the Keywords that were not working. I then got a message at the top of the page stating I would have to increase the bid amount of the keywords left in order to activate the ad again. The minium bid was 5.00 per click. I can't afford that so I deleted the add.

Why was the add working for the .90 bid and then go up that high after editing my keywords?

04 Jul 06 5:38 pm

One other thing I forgot to mention in my last post is that Adsense clicks on a content site could be tasty since "diabetes" related KWs are pricey.

Rich

05 Jul 06 4:46 am

Hi to all members of the Forum,

I'm new to Affilorama ( just purchased today ) I've been reading some of the post's in the forum and I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned an alternative to Google Adwords.

I've tried a few different PPC sites including Google which I admit has a steep learning curve that can soon prove expensive for beginners.

For anybody on a tight budget may I suggest trying Miva as an alternative.
You will find that some of the high priced keywords at Google can be got for a lot less at Miva which in turn means you can do more Add testing on a smaller budget. IMHO

Look forward to learning more about Affiliate marketing here in Affilorama and maybe making some new friends along the way.

Regards to all,

Steve.

06 Jul 06 3:08 am

You maybe right sean06. I've registered with Findology and took me 10 mins to setup a simple campaign, that was more than a week ago.

My keywords were on pending status for a 7-8days before it was approved. I've made numerous enquiry about my keyword status and no one got back to me. However as soon as I made the attempt for a refund, my keywords became active.

After 3 hours that the keywords became active, I had 139 clicks and was overjoyed to know that I only paid $0.03 for each of those high price keywords.

I thought at least I should be making some adsense money but I was wrong. The adsense impressions shot up by 100, but no one clicks. When I check my website statistics, there were only 25 visits. So, I'm now awaiting for the support to see if that might be click fraud..

rgds,
Clifford