Which of my products should I advertise for first using Adwords?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will google consider it as one click for adwords?
Hi All, Many times I want to check actual page of competitors they are targeting in google adwords. Like when I search for any keywords and my competitors page comes on top ads in google, then I copy url from search result and paste in any other browser will it be consider as click and google will charge to my competitor? Example url - https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?------------------------------------------------------------------------&adurl= Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | pragnesh96390 -
Adwords Expanded Text Ads - How are they working for you?
I think it would be nice to get a consensus from more people. The day expanded text ads came out last week, I immediately jumped on it and created them for all my campaigns. I still left some of the old ads running in each ad group so that I could compare. Looking at the conversion data from the last week, the conversion rates are between 2-7x lower on the expanded text ads, and as a result, the cost per conversion is 2-5x higher as well. Basically, they're performing horribly. The click-through rate is mildly higher, but who cares if they're not converting? I know it's only a week's worth of data, but it seems the difference is enough to be statistically significant. I'm wording what everyone else's experience has been.
Paid Search Marketing | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Adwords account suspended for talking about SEO. Why isn't Moz suspended, too?
First let me say that we don't care that much about Adwords. We were spending about 20 bucks a month and we never optimized it, tinkered with it, or cared that much. Business is booming for us just with organic search and referrals from happy customers. (We're a blog writing service called BlogMutt. Motto: We work like a dog to fill up your blog.) But we just got suspended from Adwords. After multiple inquiries and multiple unhelpful responses, we got a note that said: "Please note that your website contains matter which states your site's SEO increases. Anything which relates to SEO is not allowed as per Google Policies. Please make appropriate changes to your website." Now, we don't say your site's SEO increases with BlogMutt. What we do say is what everyone says, that blogging is a best practice for any modern marketing effort. We certainly are less clear about improving search rankings than, for example, moz.com. Why is it OK for Moz, but not for us? Don't get me wrong. I think Moz should be able to continue advertising. I'm just wondering how we got into the Adwords crosshairs. Any thoughts?
Paid Search Marketing | | scodtt0 -
Adwords & Bingads? How to link?
Hi all! I am new to MOZ and i am trying ot set up my first client: bingadsm, adwords, social and google analytics. Only problem i am having is to link bingads and Adwords, anyone has an idea on how to solve this? Thanks in advance! Sandra
Paid Search Marketing | | EyeonResponse0 -
Adwords Code help required
I have questions related Google adwords. 1. I want to use Google adwords code, remarketing and Google analytics code.Site is in OSCommerce and php based.Which thing I can use and how can I set my settings so that none of the stuff is affected by each other. 2. We are selling tours and want to track sales for our site.How can we use Google>tools>conversions to track sales?Settings and code help required.I know Google help Center link but not getting it.
Paid Search Marketing | | csfarnsworth0 -
What is a good CTR for a Google AdWords Remarketing banner campaign?
Hello there, given that in the banners we offer a promotion with "some bonus if you sign up", what is from your experience a good CTR for a Google AdWords Remarketing banner campaign? Many thanks to everyone that answers. YESdesign
Paid Search Marketing | | YESdesign0 -
Top Ad in Google Adwords
Hello. How much of a difference does it make in click-throughs to be the first listing in Google Adwords versus the second or third (still at the top of the page)? Thank you!
Paid Search Marketing | | nyc-seo0 -
Downtrodden Adwords Quality Scores -- Really?
Wow! 93% of our Adword keywords in our new campaign received a Quality Score of 4 or less. That means most of the keywords aren't showing. I received the quick answer from our Adwords advisor that, "Quality score is created from a variety of factors ... etc." Yes, I know that by reading Google's documentation. I dug deeper into the data. When I looked at keywords dashboard for this campaign, what vexes me is that it's all about "Keyword relevance: poor". That is repeated time and again in the keywords hover, bubble pop-up in Adwords. "Landing page quality: no problems". "Landing page load time: no problems". 63% of keywords have quality score = 3 29% of keywords have quality score = 4 We have thousands of keywords that are electronic part numbers. All keywords use phrase matching. We use dynamic keyword matching in the ads. I dug deeper. I chose random keywords (and corresponding landing pages) from lower quality scores (1,2,3,4) and higher scores (5,6,7,8,9,10). What is the difference? Examples: Quality score 1 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LM2901 2 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/BZX84-A20 3 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/MAX4796 4 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TMP302A 5 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LTC4267-3 6 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/CAT1161LI-28-G 7 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/DS1216C 8 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/R10S-E1Y1-J5.0K 9 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/208M822-19B11 145785-000 10 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TP3-PNEU-0.250 243362-000 Notice URLs with score 9 and 10 have url-encoded space (%20) -- just pointing it out. What is the difference between these pages that have such different quality score? And, interestingly enough, the majority of example keywords in the Urls above (LM2901, BZX84-A20, etc) have zero impressions and zero clicks thus far. Yes, the keywords have low traffic because this is exactly what people search for an purchase when making a B2B component buy. It's all about the exact part number. **I'd love specific suggestions of how to improve quality score of pages with a 3 or lower! ** Thanks kindly, Loren
Paid Search Marketing | | groovykarma0