
Ask YC: your google adwords experience? - zeka
I have started to advertise my site on adwords and so far the experience has been quite frustrating. The ads are not showing, after 4 days I still see zero impressions for all imaginable key words and their diagnostic tool does not really help, just says: "This keyword does not trigger any of your ads".<p>I have increased my budget to ridiculous $5CPC and gigantic monthly budget but nothing seem to work. At this point I am getting paranoid of things suddenly starting to work and getting a huge bill from google.<p>I searched for help here and there, but mostly found the same suggestions over and over, that do not work for me: "increase your budget!", "pick better keywords!" and "wait 3 hours for servers to pick up your campaign". <p>Anybody had similar and frustrating experience? Is it even possible to spend, let's say, less than $2K a month advertising on google ?

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axod
Definitely. There are a few things to bear in mind...

1\. Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords. If it is not,
Google will give it a bad score, and your minimum bid will be raised, and
you'll get less traffic. So make sure keywords appear on the landing page as
you would for SEO.

2\. Make sure your ad-copy is good. You can create loads of differently worded
adverts, and Google will work out which one gets the best CTR, and show that
one the most. So spend a long time experimenting with different wording. It's
sometimes surprising what changing a single word can sometimes make. (If your
CTR is too low google will also reduce your quality score, and so increase
your minimum bids).

If you pick popular keywords you can have traffic coming within about 30
minutes I've found. Spend a while using the keyword tool, and adding your own
variations - as many as you can think of.

When you start getting traffic on some keywords, expand that avenue - use the
keyword tool to find other similar keywords.

How many keywords do you have and what sort of sector are we talking here? $5
is quite a lot unless you're doing finance/law etc

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rwebb
google has jacked minimum bids through the roof over the last 6 - 12 months.
i'm guessing all of your ads are actually inactive right now because your
minimum bid is too low and you have a bad "quality score". Their UI is sort of
a pain.

login -> click into your campaign -> click into your ad group -> on the set of
tabs to the right, click "keywords". here i'm guessing you'll see that your
campaigns are inactive and you have to bid between $5 and $10 per
click...which I'm guessing will be prohibitive. 9 months ago you just had to
bid the minimum and you would end up paying <$1 per click, but now you will
actually pay $5 - $10 per click.

the crazy thing is that there is zero transparency into this market. funds try
to bet every quarter on google's earnings based on comscore, etc. but they
have no idea what the average CPC is doing. it's like betting on Exxon based
on car usage w/o knowing the price per gallon.

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nextmoveone
I would drill all the way down to the Ad Group level, in the keywords tab and
click the customize columns link under the date range and to the right. I'd
show the quality score as a column; check all the quality scores and minimum
bids.

Then I'd check all the status starting from the keyword level up to the
campaign.

Lastly if nothing showed up there I'd go back to the keywords and put my mouse
over each and every keyword magnifying glass to find out if ads are being
served.

Then if it didnt work I'd call google and ask them for help.

Hope this helps!

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gscott
On Google I narrowed down to 4 keywords that work best where I get a good
conversion rate and I spend no more then .35c per click.

Turn off Google's "Advertising Network" and only advertise on Google search
results. I found there "network" just drums up a lot of hits but few
conversions.

Use www.adbrite.com. I get better results on AdBrite then I do on Google and I
spend less money for more hits and the hits are good quality, it did take more
time to narrow down the right sites to advertise on.

Google organic hits are important don't forget SEO.

Try www.reviewme.com to get a blog writer to write about you (don't spend more
then $100).

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alfredtoh
We just launched PayScroll ( <http://www.payscroll.com> ) and I've been trying
out various ads system. Adword, Yahoo Search Marketing, Text-Link-Ads and
almost PPP (payperpost). Here's what I have been seeing so far. And bare in
mind, this is with a $200 budget.

Adword - Expensive. we are bidding around $0.15 - $0.25 CPC. Clicks comes from
search and sites. And also you got charge for impressions. We had to pay $$
for impression from a campaign that brought in zero clicks. Remember, Google
is stock is at $600 for a reason. If you have a huge budget and can place high
bids, it might work for you.

Yahoo Search Marketing - Slightly less expensive and lower CPC with more click
through. We signed up through Yahoo SB account and you get $50 sign up
promotional credit but the catch is you have to deposit min $30 so you get $80
to burn. So a plus if you have a small budget. No cost per impression just
pure CPC.

Text-link-ads - So far not a whole lot of clicks with $125 worth of links.
Total links we bought - 5. Main purpose is increasing your pagerank (wishful
thinking?). Promotional $100 so overall we paid $25 out of pocket.

PayPerPost - Pay per post sounds interesting at first. And we submited an
opportunity through PPP direct. Basically PPP direct is you make an offer to
the blog owner and the blog owner will decide to accept your offer to review
your site, etc. We did not go through because the offer was pending for days
for some reason. So no deal there.

Again this is what we are at with $200 and might not hold true if you have a
huge budget of 4 digits to burn.

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SwellJoe
We're doing Adwords, plus a couple of other pay-per-click services. We spend
about $500/month with Adwords, and haven't had trouble finding keywords to sit
on for about $2-$3 (we avoid competing with our customers for keyword
placement, which rules out a large pile of really expensive hosting-related
terms)...keywords are expensive and getting moreso from adwords, so I'm
putting most new spending on other options.

AdBrite is pretty good. You can buy full-time placement on quite a few sites,
which is probably better for long-term effectiveness and brand awareness than
per-click...I'm experimenting with that now. Sometimes it turns out really
expensive though--I picked a few design-related sites, thinking web designers
are also often webmasters, but so far, I've paid like $23 per click from one
of them (from about 100k impressions)...I still have some time left on the ad,
so it could drop a bit more as the ad has time to work, but I'm thinking I'll
pick the best performers from the CPC ad list to buy full-time placement on in
the future, rather than guessing about what fits.

TextLinkAds are too expensive and are kind of iffy on the "don't irritate your
potential customers" scale, so I've signed up, but haven't bought any links
yet.

Our best marketing tools are our various informational websites--we get 50% of
our clicks from our Open Source project website, and another 10% from our
documentation wiki (which contains our two published books on the topic of our
Open Source project and gets quite a lot of traffic).

One interesting thing to note: Adwords clicks are stickier than any of the
other types. Folks stick around for nearly 5 pages after finding us through
Google Adwords, while Adbrite clicks stay an average of 2 pages (though some
are better--very closely related pages tend to produce much better
stickiness), and the other sources are somewhere in between. So, I suspect
Adwords clicks are better qualified than those from the other sources, and
thus worth more.

Of course, if you can't find keywords that you can competitively spend on,
then you can't really make good use of Adwords. But, I'm surprised. I've used
Adwords in two fields that were pretty competitive (in my previous business I
was butting heads on one side with CDNs, and on the other with various types
of server appliance vendors and proxy software vendors...while my current
business sits along-side the highly competitive hosting industry, which has
some of the highest per-click rates that I'm aware of), and never had trouble
finding some less trodden territory to live in. Are you sure you're not going
overly broad or trying to buy ads that would better serve your business
partners or your customers? You obviously want to sit on the same spots as
your competitors, if you can afford it, plus if you can come up with some
alternatives (like for people who don't know what your product is normally
called but know what they want to accomplish) that's a good way to capture
customers that no one else has first access to.

So, it really depends on your industry, how wide a range of keywords would be
useful to you, and whether you've got to fight with a dozen other companies or
just one or two.

And, of course, Adwords is not the only kind of marketing that exists. It's
just the easiest. You can advertise in all sorts of strange places--just
figure out where your customers go, what they read, etc. and get your ads into
those places via whatever means necessary.

BTW-Google's syndication network is a huge ripoff, in general. Do not let them
run your ads on the whole network (it's enabled by default). It was eating our
budget in a few hours each day for worthless clicks, and leaving no money for
far higher quality clicks from the search engine results.

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nickb
Order this today (it's a damn bargain!) and thank me later:
<http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321496590/>

PS: I do not know the author and I do not own Amazon stock.

~~~
falsestprophet
Do you own Amazon call options or debt?

~~~
nickb
LOL... no, no derivatives of any kind. :)

Just a fan of the book. It's excellent!

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jamiequint
Yeah, the interface really really sucks. We actually thought of making an
adwords campaign manager for our YC idea (making buying adwords mindless and
simple) but if you drill down into the TOS for all the major networks they are
anti-competitive to the level of being ridiculous. It took me a few hours to
actually figure out the adwords interface and I still don't fully understand
it.

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mynameishere
_the interface really really sucks_

I've found the interface very good. I think it took about 15 minutes to go
from zero to a worldwide ad campaign. Let's keep perspective.

.......................

I pay about 6 to 10 cents per click. I get about 1000 impressions a day with a
very small monthly budget. Adsense, by contrast, is completely
worthless...maybe one click every couple months. Make sure you aren't
corrupting your view of adwords by accidentally targeting adsense (which
google encourages).

~~~
axod
Completely depends on the sector though. Some things _fly_ on the content
network (adsense), some things die.

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LostInTheWoods
In the past I've run campaigns with budgets as small as $60 per month. $2 a
day is perfectly reasonable if you just want to get some test users to your
site. Of course, I had to pick the right keywords to make this work.

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prakash
Try Pubmatic. They look at more than one ad-network to increase your revenue.

<http://www.pubmatic.com/>

