First Sale with AdWords
July 24, 2006 – 9:07 am
On Saturday I wrote about the free AdWords Voucher which I had. Saturday night I'd set up 3 campaigns for advertising Click Bank products. Sunday morning on waking up I discovered it had already eaten up over £10 and by lunchtime it was up to £23! Of course I don't want to be spending my own money on this scheme so I'm watching it constantly to ensure it doesn't go over the £45 mark. I've got just £12 left as I write this, so just 36 hours has eaten £32. How much am I paying per click? about 6-7p on average.
However I was quite disheartened when I saw no sales had been made in my CB account yesterday, and wondered if I'd chosen the right products at all. Two of the products I'd chosen (one's now a paused campaign to save on money) were both sign up for 7 day type offers, then people presumably can pay at the end, so perhaps it's just a delay and I may see more earnings next weekend. However this morning I logged in to find a sale of $15 from yesterday which is okay.
I seem to have chosen an exceptionally popular subject, which I already knew was popular but not with 10,000+ searches in 36 hours! Still it gives me priceless info on what phrases people are searching on that's for sure. Dave has a voucher too so once I get the basket set up on the Tattoo site we may use that to push some visitors from the USA through to that - why the USA? Well the UK don't seem to be interested in buying digital products and plus the bulk of our visits are the UK so if we just target the US and perhaps Australians with AdWords then we may get some more sales that way.
So advertising with AdWords isn't for me at present. I think it's too much of a risky business to be in, especially when you target a niche subject that will probably receive more clicks when you're asleep. Yes you can pause your ads overnight but then you're losing possibly the best custom of the USA.
On a positive note however, our new RSSGM site was indexed within a week of it going live and the past weeks stats are averaging over 50 visitors a day which is pretty good for a brand new site I think (virtually all visitors from Google). I can assume it will start to settle down in a week or two, but if MSN and Yahoo start sending through visitors too then that figure may even go up.
2 Responses to “First Sale with AdWords”
This is VERY interesting info you're posting. I run a web-design business and have been trying to get customers from adwords campeigns… so far without much success. I wonder — what types of keywords seemed to work for you and what sorts of ads did you post up.
By Walt Schlender on Aug 6, 2006
Hey Walt,
I set up campaigns on two topics at first. The topic that ran the course had very low bid prices and you could still get reasonably placed. CTR was around 3%, so not exceptional, but considering the amount of impressions, the clicks were enough to use the money up within a matter of days.
When I've run a campaign then I tend to take the average CTR and then look at all keyphrases that are actually below the average. If the phrases could possibly work better with a different advert then I create another ad group within the campaign for these phrases. I did this for a couple of clients and doubled their CTR.
Also what's your average advert position according to AdWords? If this is very low and onto the second page then you'll have a lot less chance of being seen. Try to aim for between position 4-6 at a minimum (or should that be max?!) which should get you onto the front page at times. Alternatively up your bid price temporarily, get a few more clicks in and then play with your price, afterall as we know more clicks gets you higher without cash, so if you get yourself in a clickable position, get some clicks in and as your ad position improves, drop your price by a cent/penny, then watch it again and keep doing this until your clicks start to slow down a little and then you're at about the right place. Of course this means you need to be watching that campaign like a hawk.
G'luck with it
By Sarah on Aug 7, 2006