Which of my products should I advertise for first using Adwords?

[machineuser]

Serious Adwords noob here. I have been reading a great deal in preparation for my first Adwords campaign. Strangely enough, I have not been able to find information that might help me determine which of my 180+ products I should begin with and use in my first campaign. I imagine that there is some sort of general criterion like the highest selling item, lowest, one meeting certain criterion in the popularity of it's keywords/difficulty, one with least competition or, most likely, something that I haven't even thought of. Does anyone have any suggestions or a link to something I might be able to read to solve this? Thanks for your help!

[TheeDigital]

I tend to agree with everyone's thoughts here. The idea of "starting generic and cheap" is a great thing to do. It's often best if you start off bidding on a "broad" perspective compared to a phrase match or exact match bidding philosophy, to get a better idea of how people search for you.

Be of the understanding that you will lose money the first 3 months, but just like anything this will allow you to research and better fine-tune your strategy.

Also PPCHero.com is a great blog to read for PPC tips, tricks, and overall advice.

[machineuser]

Hi Gregory. Great advice, and more along the lines of what I was looking for, thanks so much! I will indeed contact you through one of your stores.

[GregB123]

Hi Chris,

If your product is in a market that is saturated, high volume, and highly competitive (like iPods or hiking boots) then stick with Egol's advice.

But from your profile it appears you sell specialty table legs, and I think that may be in a different realm of Adwords where the volume and competition are both low. The products my two stores sell are specialty items that are low volume and low competition, so I can share my experience.

The executive summary is "Start generic and start cheap". Doing that will give you an education focused on your niche at a reasonable cost.

My specialty items do not have a high search volume, so starting with broad keywords allowed Adwords to give me data on the full range of keyword searches it was actually displaying for. Depending on the search volume, it can take a week or three for Adwords to create a good list of actual keyword searches. As this list develops, use negative keywords to prune out phrases that are just wrong. Also start to add phrase and exact match for the phrases that appear often.

And I mentioned "start cheap" because Adwords has this weird habit of over-valuing itself. If I start with a bid of $0.15 it will immediately tell me that I need to bid $1.80 to be on the first page. If I ignore that expensive suggestion, I appear anyways. It may take a couple of days, but I will appear on page 1 or 2. Then I can start upping my bid a nickel at a time until I appear in the upper slots.

So budget $100 to do live research on Adwords, and consider it a market research expense. During that time, also go to the library and use their public computer to make a test purchase after clicking one of your ads - to be sure the tracking is correct. Also never delete a campaign, instead pause it so that the old data is always there to refer back to.

So much more could be said, but I need to go eat breakfast. You are welcome to contact me through one of my stores. Just google my name without the "ory". Good luck!

[EGOL]

Glad you are looking to prioritize.

My first priority would be to get an education.   The more education I have obtained the better my results.  However, I only use adwords for a very small percentage of the items that I sell.

If you want to compete in adwords you should pick a product that you can purchase in volume at a fantastic price, pack and ship efficiently and at very low cost.

Why?  Because for most products you are competing against a person who is able to purchase at 60% below MSRP instead of the 40% below MSRP that most people receive.  He also has a website that is finely researched and tested to obtain an extremely high conversion rate.  And, he has high volume purchasing that gets him rock bottom prices on shipping, shipping supplies... along with an extremely efficient warehouse that gets orders out at lowest possible employee cost.

Adwords is a mathematical game of profit margins, bid amounts and conversion rates.  You need to become a mathematics expert to find the sweet spot among bidding levels, conversion rates and profit margins.

I have posted information about getting an adwords education here...  http://moz.com/community/q/adwords-training-resources

Some information about an adwords alternative here... http://moz.com/community/q/seo-is-dead-long-live-adwords