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The Google content network has finally come of age. At this point I have a lot of clients that get 20% of less of their clicks on Google, and 80% from the content network. BUT, the conversion is still highly variable, and very bad in a lot of industries. So, the traditional advice still holds true for me.
Start at Google.com only, or add the search network if you know what you are doing, and then once you have your CTR up, the account stable and a baseline for conversions you can live with, add the content network in at that point, and see what you get.
If you are a B to B business that isn't in the mortgage or financial industry that doesn't have super expensive clicks, and your product or service is high priced, most of the time you'll do just fine.
Most of the fraudulent activity on the content network is aimed at the super expensive clicks, especially mortgage and medical type terms. I am sure the same is true for the adult and gambling industries but I don't touch those. Life is too short.
Also being able to separate the bids is a must, and remember to line out sites that don't convert. As always, your mileage may vary. I am having some great luck with some of my clients at the moment.
Submitted by steveblom on Thu, 2006-02-02 20:36.
adwords account management | adwords bid managers | adwords bidding strategies | adwords services
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After you get to a certain point in Adwords, you start to get a LOT of keywords, campaigns, websites, and ad groups, and you start wondering what you are actually doing with your life. I mean, hey, I want to just advertise, and make some money, not spend hours pouring over the Google interface, managing campaigns!
Google makes advertisers work extra hard. Is it worth it? Well yes, for people that go the extra mile and outsmart their competition. Our company does this for a lot of corporate clients. There comes a time though when you have so many tens of thousands of keywords going that it is time to look at leveraging some technology to try to improve efficiency and lower the workload...
To manually review the bids and adjust them for 10,000 keywords takes a while even when using the Google interface to its utmost power. When you have been doing this for a while, you come up with your own ninja adwords techniques that you end up repeating quite a bit, which succeed in many different industries. Well why not turn this over to some intelligent software? Sure, why not?
I went on an all out search to see what could do this to help me and my company and this is what I learned:
1) Most of the big SEM companies that service the fortune 500 companies have their own proprietary systems
2) They are so expensive that they don't even list any prices on their websites.
3) Of the real bid managers out there that have decent reviews and capabilities, there are three that stand out, which include bidrank, atlas one point (formerly Go Toast), and Make me Top.
With bidrank and make me top, you can do a decent amount for about 200 bucks a month, but still I fell far short in being able to do a real good job with the 10,000 keywords I wanted to test. Atlas one point is so expensive to actually USE, that 150 keywords maxed out my little 90 dollar account within the first few days. How much would it cost to manage tens of thousands of keywords, just in adwords? I estimate at least 1600 bucks a month for 10,000 keywords, and it could easily be more.
I did find one other bid nanager from england, but I lost the link, so if someone knows of some good bid managers please comment and I'll include it below this post for everyone else to take advantage of.
My conclusion- I have to hire some programming teams to program my own industrial strength bid manager, capable of handling at least yahoo and google worldwide, with unlimited bid adjustments according to my exact ninja rules and the ability to create new ones, plus an integration with a webstats module so that you can do stuff like keep your cost per sale or cost per lead at a certain range and make your bidding adjustments based on your actual results.
Which language? Come on, stay away from Bill Gates baby. Php/mysql all the way. I have my own list of features in my head, but I am opening up a survey to find out what individual users and SEM companies are really looking for in a bid manager, so I can build a really good piece of ppc bid management software.
In the comments below, tell me about your ideal adwords bid management software and what it should do.
Comments, Comments, anyone?
Submitted by Adwords Guru in Training on Mon, 2005-07-25 17:44.
adwords bidding strategies | adwords services
When Spending is a Good Thing
Paid search engine novices sometimes bring us their accounts on Overture or Google when they feel as though they are spending too much money to obtain customers. Usually, the customer is correct. Many people are overspending by as much as 75% for the same amount of traffic that we produce after two weeks of testing.
In one client’s case, we determined that he wasn’t spending enough!
This particular client sold their product for $30.00 and was lucky enough to be in an industry where the cost per click was around $0.50. The client typically converted one out of every ten people that visited his website, so his total cost to obtain a client was right around $5.00 leaving him a $25.00 profit after each sale. With Adwords, you can set your daily spending limit. Many people figure their daily limit by dividing their monthly advertising allotment by 30, and then never give it another thought.
When our client originally setup the account, the daily spending limit was set to $15.00 (or $450.00 per month.) This meant that Google would optimizing their advertisements for around 30 clicks a day. After that, the advertising stops altogether! This lack of spending caused the client to lose business to his competitors by not having his advertisement shown as much as possible.
Once we saw that this business was profiting well, we increased the daily spending limit to $10,000 per day. Keep in mind, our client never accrued enough clicks to come close to that limit, but it meant that his advertisement would show every time one of their keyword’s were searched. Instead of receiving 30 clicks a day, our client now receives around 125 clicks per day. This increase in traffic has increased his sales by nearly four times!
For more information on competition monitoring and DRCI's complete line of search engine advertising services, contact 1-877-343-8911.
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