Is Adwords the Bread & Butter of your traffic?

[plin924]

This is kind of a survey. SEO is giving me results (maybe 5-10 orders a day) but it's not enough to live off of it. Is anyone using Adwords as their primary source of traffic? If so, how much do you spend on it a day/month? Any feedback is appreciated!!

 

Grace :-)

[ohdannyboy]

This is kind of a survey. SEO is giving me results (maybe 5-10 orders a day) but it's not enough to live off of it. Is anyone using Adwords as their primary source of traffic? If so, how much do you spend on it a day/month? Any feedback is appreciated!!

 

Grace :-)

 

Hi Grace,

 

I definitely am not an expert on this but here's what I'm doing. I use Google, Yahoo, MSN and others for 3 different small businesses I am involved in. All 3 of them are different products: one is a service (high ticket), one is books (avg price = $15/sale) and the other is auto parts (avg price = $200/sale). And the answer to your question is "yes" - Google Adwords is the main source of traffic.

 

I do NOT enable the content match - that can run up your costs very quickly. Also, I have enabled Adwords during business hours. I use adwords to drive people to the site and hopefully pick up the phone and call the 800 number.

 

If you are looking to slowly increase and test your PPC spending I would advise maybe starting with Yahoo first. Yahoo will generate less activity (1/10 of Google) but it seems the caliber of leads is better.

 

The number of companies doing Adwords has increased. For some keywords the prices have skyrocketed, a lot of people are bidding on them and its hard to differentiate yourself (and make money at it). I spend about $1000/week. The incremental gross income from Adwords pays for it. But its like any promotional activity - the business owner has to carefully monitor it and constantly tweak it.

 

Good luck.

 

Dan

[madcrazygirl]

Yes I use Adwords and advice is to definitely tweak your negative keywords. Object not to get as many clicks as possible but pre-qualified clicks and this is where you can improve your conversion rates.

 

My advice would also be to steer clear of the content network (there is a box to tick) as a lot of click fraud goes on here. A couple of times I set up new campaigns and forgot and within minutes my budget was eaten up. Google claim not much goes on but I know how the majority of my visitors use my site and these were not normal visitors.....

 

How much it costs depends on how competitive your product or service is. Key is to just ensure that the Adwords budget pays for itself in sales.

 

Good luck

[♥stubbsy]

Hi,

 

I use adwords to supplement my organic search engine sales. It probably accounts for 5% of my online sales and costs around 10% of the income it generates.

 

In my opinion you would certainly be better off concentrating on the SEO of your website and getting a top 5 listing in google for all your search phrases/keywords than relying on adwords to get you sales.

 

Dave

[Victor Wise]

A brief history of adwords pricing

 

In the old days, Google use to price your ads based on how much money your ads made for them. This meant that ads which were clicked on the most, were the cheapest. It was basically CTR X CPC = ad ranking (click through rate multiplied by cost per click in case you are new to ppc jargon). That’s not the exact formula; but it started off very similar to that. Then as Google evolved, the algorithm they used to determine ad rankings evolved as well.

 

But the biggest change happened a year ago, when Google introduced their landing page quality score algorithm. Google showed no mercy to websites that didn’t provide relevant landing pages to the users querry. Many people logged onto their adword accounts one morning to discover that their average CPC increased 500%. In extreme cases with sites practicing arbitrage; there were instances of the average CPC going from $0.25 to $5.44. It was a bad time for many – lots of people went out of businesses never having fully understood why.

 

This marked an important moment in the history of internet advertising. Before, the trick to increasing sales was by driving more traffic to your site. Now, internet marketers are more interested in increasing sales to their existing traffic.

 

Google is smarter than you or me First, you must understand that there is no fooling Google. You can’t fool Google with SEO like you could in the old days, it is just to smart for that.

 

No one understands the components of a profitable website like the programmers at Google. For one, they are really really smart people. But also, they cheat. They have inexhaustible data to look at from Google analytics and other programs. Marketing is science, not art. And the landing page algorithm is programmed to recognize the best marketed ‘landing pages’

 

How Google currently determines CPC (no math, just theory)

 

Google is all about the user. Therefore, if someone clicks on a PPC ad because they are interested in buying something; Google is going to damn well make sure that the website they land on sells what they want. More than that, Google wants to deliver the internet browser to the most relevant e-commerce site that has the best chance of selling you something.

 

People click on PPC ads because they are interested in making a purchase ( I’m keeping this discussion to products for simplicity sake). So the most relevant matches, the ones Google strives to deliver first to browsers, are the websites that are marketed the best and generally have the highest conversion rates.

 

How does Google make sure that the best marketed, highest conversion rate, websites always appear first? They give them a crazy discount! This is capitalism at its finest folks. The wealthiest internet companies pay the lowest price for ppc ads (lowest CPC) and the poorest internet companies pay the most for advertising (highest CPC).

 

You either make no money or become rich with adwords

 

If you don’t know how to sell your products well, if you suck at online marketing: Google will squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste and brush its teeth with your love. You will be paying 10 times more for an advertisement that works a tenth as well as your competitor. You are exponentially screwed! Your return on investment will 1/100 as sharp as the industry leader.

 

What does that mean for the industry leader? If you make $100 a month net from adwords – the industry leader is making over $10,000 a month. Sorry man.

 

Can you get cheap PPC ads anymore? Certainly. The internet is a backwards place; and most online niches really don’t have an ‘industry leader’. Just get a high quality score :-"

 

The sad truth about osCommerce

 

To date, I have yet to see a single osCommerce site participating in adwords with a respectable adwords strategy. Getting a good quality score with osCommerce is really really hard. This was bought to my attention this week actually as Chooch made me aware of all the roadblocks in the stock osCommerce code that makes accommodating Google adwords quality score guidelines difficult to do.

[plin924]

thanks for the replies everyone.

 

my website URL is www.accessorybug.com. it's got a landing page of a small blog that i have. the main store's url is

 

www.accessorybug.com/catalog

 

i think some if not most of my keywords are listed on first 10-15 listings of yahoo/msn. (i think). no where near the same amount of success for google. i'm totally confused.

 

i'm desperate and thinking about throwing money at various celeb gossip magazines to get things going. thoughts? anyone?

 

Grace

 

p.s. i think my techinique is white hat seo. if there's anything i'm missing please let me know.

[♥FWR Media]

Without going any further into SEO you have a basic HTML/META problem

 

Put your URL in http://validator.w3.org/

 

There's not even a doctype!!

 

You have <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Accessory Bug Catalog RSS English" href="rss.php?language=en" /> above the doctype.

 

Before you start thinking of SEO whether white hat or not you need to sort your code.

 

re: http://accessorybug.com/catalog/belts-c-60.html

 

<META name="verify-v1" content="dIz8o/Q1wUfmEtMiJENBuiFJ0GoiyyQjNu/gnlc0kqU=" />

 

The search engines want clarity and that is garbage (md5 content?).

[hubcat]

thanks for the replies everyone.

 

my website URL is www.accessorybug.com. it's got a landing page of a small blog that i have. the main store's url is

 

www.accessorybug.com/catalog

 

i think some if not most of my keywords are listed on first 10-15 listings of yahoo/msn. (i think). no where near the same amount of success for google. i'm totally confused.

 

i'm desperate and thinking about throwing money at various celeb gossip magazines to get things going. thoughts? anyone?

 

Grace

 

p.s. i think my techinique is white hat seo. if there's anything i'm missing please let me know.

 

Personally, I have a niche market, and had horrible results with Adwords last year. Although I'm considering giving it another go now that the business is a bit more mature. However, I had much better results with paid banner ads on websites that I thought my target market would be visiting. Make sure they are reasonably priced - banner ad pricing is all over the place.

 

Good luck,

Adrienne

[♥FWR Media]

Personally, I have a niche market, and had horrible results with Adwords last year. Although I'm considering giving it another go now that the business is a bit more mature. However, I had much better results with paid banner ads on websites that I thought my target market would be visiting. Make sure they are reasonably priced - banner ad pricing is all over the place.

 

Good luck,

Adrienne

 

 

With niche markets particularly Adrienne you need to get a firm handle on "negative keywords" it's so easy to spend a fortune on adwords with little result if you don't eradicate the "unwanted" searches surrounding your keyword.

[Victor Wise]

Personally, I have a niche market, and had horrible results with Adwords last year. Although I'm considering giving it another go now that the business is a bit more mature. However, I had much better results with paid banner ads on websites that I thought my target market would be visiting.

 

 

Adrienne,

 

Can you give me an example of a keyword you bid on (or are going to bid on), and then the page that the adwords ad links too? Perhaps I can illustrate, using your web page as an example, why adwords was so expensive for you and performed so miserably. I would use my own website right now; but its not live yet and I'm not yet comfortable disclosing its details yet.

 

I do believe I owe an explanation why I criticized osCommerce above. Also, considering that I have no knoweldge of coding (only marketing); I may very well just misunderstand that a few esoteric contributions can bypass any situation.

 

Best regards,

 

Victor

[Victor Wise]

Grace,

 

What is the landing page you mentioned and which keywords is it intended for?

[plin924]

hi victor,

 

landing page is www.accessorybug.com

 

keywords: inspired handbags, celebrity handbags, inspired spy bags

 

well there's more, but these are the general ones...

[hubcat]

Adrienne,

 

Can you give me an example of a keyword you bid on (or are going to bid on), and then the page that the adwords ad links too? Perhaps I can illustrate, using your web page as an example, why adwords was so expensive for you and performed so miserably. I would use my own website right now; but its not live yet and I'm not yet comfortable disclosing its details yet.

 

I do believe I owe an explanation why I criticized osCommerce above. Also, considering that I have no knoweldge of coding (only marketing); I may very well just misunderstand that a few esoteric contributions can bypass any situation.

 

Best regards,

 

Victor

 

Well for example, I bid on "organic dresses" and "earth-friendly dresses" - I had loads of negative keywords so there shouldn't have been too many wrong searches (i.e. negatives for men, kids, children, babies, girls, etc., etc. about 40 total).

 

Landing page would have been the product category in that case, which is:

http://www.faeriesdance.com/gala-gaia-dresses-c-25_32.html

 

Also tried some options with specific products as landing pages and the home page as a landing page. One thing I know, it's difficult to split-test landing pages with the OSCommerce set up.

 

Anyway, hope that helps.

Adrienne

[Guest]

Well for example, I bid on "organic dresses" and "earth-friendly dresses" - I had loads of negative keywords so there shouldn't have been too many wrong searches (i.e. negatives for men, kids, children, babies, girls, etc., etc. about 40 total).

 

Landing page would have been the product category in that case, which is:

http://www.faeriesdance.com/gala-gaia-dresses-c-25_32.html

Hi Adrienne,

 

The first thing that struck me when loocking at your landing page is that it makes

no mention of organic dresses, and the only mention of "earth-friendly" is in your

header. There's no copy on the page at all. That leaves a couple of problems...

 

1. The keywords you're driving traffic with don't appear on the landing page, giving

the page a low quality score. This results in Google jacking up your click price.

Victor's got a good post discussing this.

 

2. For visitors, there's no reinforcement on the page that they've found what they're

looking for (no keywords). Also, it seems that only 3 out of the 8 products listed

mention "organic" in the product description. As a visitor, I can imagine that your

landing page would result in a quick click on the "Back" button... =)

 

I'd recommend some good salescopy reinforcing that your visitor has found what

they're looking for and extoll the benefits of organic cotton.

 

Also tried some options with specific products as landing pages and the home page as a landing page. One thing I know, it's difficult to split-test landing pages with the OSCommerce set up.

Home page as landing page = not good =)

 

As far as split testing landing pages goes, you could set up 2 identical ads in your

ad group, with 2 landing pages, and measure performance... Google has also

introduced their Website Optimizer for split testing, but I've yet to use it...

 

Cheers,

John

[hubcat]

Wow John! Thanks for the detailed explaination of keywords optimization. I've been meaning to go back to Google at some point and try another campaign.

 

The thing is if the keywords are very specific, my site usually shows up on the first page anyway. I'm up to page rank 5 and getting pretty good organic traffic from Google. I'd like to capture more generic searches like "organic clothing" or "organic women's clothing", but then I get into greater levels of competition and harder matches to good landing pages.

 

Also, so far I'm finding that my banner ads on targeted sites (like theRainForestSite.com or PristinePlanet.com as examples) get both better CTR and better conversion rates for similar or cheaper CPC than google. So my motivation to go back to work really hard to make google like my ads is not very high.

 

Anyway, thank again - I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind when I finally get some time to reopen the campaign. I'm even going to relook at my banner ad landing pages and see if your suggests might help there as well.

 

Cheers,

Adrienne

 

PS - Sorry for the long wait for a reply, I took a small vacation. :-)

[mpiscopo]

Without going any further into SEO you have a basic HTML/META problem

 

Put your URL in http://validator.w3.org/

 

There's not even a doctype!!

 

You have <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Accessory Bug Catalog RSS English" href="rss.php?language=en" /> above the doctype.

 

Before you start thinking of SEO whether white hat or not you need to sort your code.

 

re: http://accessorybug.com/catalog/belts-c-60.html

 

<META name="verify-v1" content="dIz8o/Q1wUfmEtMiJENBuiFJ0GoiyyQjNu/gnlc0kqU=" />

 

The search engines want clarity and that is garbage (md5 content?).

 

Try checking Amazon.com in the validator, or any other reputable website. Seems like the validator should be used as a guide to clean some code, but not much more than that.

[♥FWR Media]

Try checking Amazon.com in the validator, or any other reputable website. Seems like the validator should be used as a guide to clean some code, but not much more than that.

 

The fact that some reputable websites do not validate is an indicator of absolutely nothing.

 

If you choose to believe that validation should just be used to clean up code, then of course, that is your choice.

[nursallie]

Hi all!

This thread is great. I've learned so much. Now you've got me thinking about my landing page.

My website is smellstickers.com

I am using Google Adwords and Yahoo too. I have about 40 keywords. The thing is that the landing page only has one sentence on it. Does this mean I am scoring lower on quality with Adwords because I do not have more keywords actually on the landing page?

One other thing, in your opinion do you think I should have that landing page with the "enter" button, or just have the next page be my landing page? I mean as far as which would be more likely to reduce the bounce rate and also which would be more likely to increase my quality score and seo rankings?

 

THANKS

[pure11]

what i have learned in the years i have spend running a website, is that google and search engines love content. the more content you have, the better ranking you will get.

 

i advise anyone who only has an online store to think about maybe creating a forum site or any kind of site and making sure you have allot of content (thats why i said forum site) because forum sites are easy to set up and well generic yet you can do allot with it, if you can get your community to strive that is, members comming back , and in order to do this you must have some kind of special content on your site that would interest your specific targets in a way that would make them come back.

 

then when you have a good community site, create XML files of all the directorys of your site and upload them to google and yahoo. I have about 5 different directories and so 5 different XML files with about 500 links on each XML file each. that is 2500 links entered into google and yahoo alone by simply submitting this XML file with all the links of my site pages

 

this alone will increase your traffic

 

there is a site that generates XML files for free: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

 

the max is 500, so you see why i only have 500 lol if anyone knows of another site that generates unlimited xml urls?

 

even if you only have a store, i recomment creating this XML file of your store

 

you can submit the XML file to google and yahoo by creating and account with them and then in webmaster tools you can submit the XML files

 

 

i currently get 1st page rankings on over 10 keywords and 2nd page rankings on other keywords, also 3rd , 4th, 5th etc...

 

so basically i get 20k traffic per month from google traffic alone without paying a cent

 

 

i hope this helps someone, love to see members help each other and a site like oscommerce with a friendly sharing community is essential

[Brucie]

Just want to contribute and say that this thread has really helped optimize my campaign and get rid of some poor performing keywords. 98% now have "Great" quality scores and we have a PR of 4.

 

Many Thanks!

[NewBudda]

Without going any further into SEO you have a basic HTML/META problem

 

Put your URL in http://validator.w3.org/

 

While reading this article (which is really helpful btw, thank you) I checked my site (i.e. catalog/) in the validator and was shocked to receive 50! errors. My shop is only slighlty changed from the stock (contribs: center, header tags, seo urls and newsletter) and it is still very much a work in progress, but 50???

I realise that not all errors are critical but some seemed quiete unnerving like "This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional!"

Most errors seemed connected to "osCsid" and "NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES." both of which I am not sure what they mean.

How concerned should I be in terms of adherence to Googles guidelines?

[zhexiang]

I still don't really understand...

 

What's Quality Score? How do you add content to your oscommerce to improve quality score?

 

I'm still blur... :huh: ???

[NewBudda]

Quality Score is a numerical value that tries to reflect the appropriateness of your site compare to the link that links to it. In other words: If you click on a link "shoes" and you land on a site about shoes the Quality Score of that site should be higher than if you click on "shoes" and land on a site about the problems high heels cause your posture.

 

What ZeroHC is saying is: You want to be found using certain keywords, so in order to make your site more relevant to these keyword add more text that mentions these keywords in a RELEVANT manner. Just repeating keywords without sensible context is not helpful and might actually get you in trouble with Google. A good example of relevant content would be a lively (and real!) forum about the products that you sell...

 

Alternatively and if you want more control over the content, write some good articles or Testreviews about your articles.