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
-
CPC of Adwords Remarketing for Search (RLSA)
When a previous visitor to your site clicks on an RLSA ad, is the cost per click the same as if you were bidding on that same Keyword for a new visitor?
Paid Search Marketing | | richdan0 -
What's the best call tracking system to use for PPC & subsequent landing pages?
Client has about 30 locations. Not planning to get too fancy (i.e. like putting JS on the page so that a dynamically generated phone is displayed to track keywords). At this point, just we only want to see if PPC is providing telephone conversions. I've used Mongoose Metrics before and it seemed good. However, I don't want to go with something simply because it's what I already know. Would love to know some of your favourites and if there are better options. Also - client is in Canada. Not sure if that makes a difference.
Paid Search Marketing | | woodsy10100 -
Why would a business want to cap their Adwords budget?
If a business has an unlimited supply of product and an unlimited capacity to distribute that product why would they want to limit their Adwords campaign budget? If your Cost per Acquisition for a conversion is lower than the Customer Lifetime Value for any given keyword bid, why would you want to prevent your campaign from reaching as many people as possible? Thanks in advance Danny
Paid Search Marketing | | richdan3 -
Session and conversion data missing from AdWords campaigns in Analytics
Hi all, For a client of ours, we're not seeing session & conversion data for AdWords campaigns in Analytics. We are seeing click & cost data. Adwords and Analytics are linked and autotagging is enabled. The site where we're experiencing this problem is www.maxifleur-plantes-artificielles.fr. It's a Magento-based store with the Web Cooking Universal Analytics extension installed. The bulk of AdWords traffic is landing on the page www.maxifleur-plantes-artificielles.fr/plantes-artificielles, which has no active redirects that could remove the ?gclid parameter for as far as I can tell. Yet, click IDs that I manually tested won't show up in the reports either. Mid April, all traffic aside from direct traffic just disappeared from the reports. Google's Tag Assistant gives a lot of errors, but in the source code the snippet looks just fine and we don't have problems with other web shops that use the aforementioned extension. Suggestions as to what could be the problem are most welcome. Thanks! Bas
Paid Search Marketing | | Evoworks0 -
Adwords keyword vs exact match kw
Hi guys, I have been using an excellent script that showed me the keywords I was bidding on and the keywords they were matched on by Adwords. I was using the following script: http://www.getelastic.com/exact-keywords-google-analytics/ But I'm under the impression Google changed the way these data can be matched. I now have multiple questions: Does anyone have another script that gives me the same results? Has anyone seen an announcement on why Google has changed this? Might this js solution still be working? http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2008/02/exact_keyword_tracking_with_gajs.php Cheers and thanks for all the suggestions! Arnout
Paid Search Marketing | | hellemans0 -
Adword competition between exact match and related broad match
If I have two company A and B. Company A: bid on key word exact [Nike and Jordan] Company B: bid on broad match Jordan shoesks Considering that broad match use related words I noted that google display both ads if I search Nike and Jordam (shoes is related with Nike). My question is: bid of B is competing with bid of A? therefore CPC of A increase because of B? Tks
Paid Search Marketing | | fabrico230 -
Do Google Autofill and Instant Search affect Adwords' Keyword Tool reports?
While performing keyword research around the term "windows", I noticed the keyword "windo" gets 18,000 global monthly searches with .23 competition. Why is this? Do y'all think the Google Autofill and Instant Search features affect reports generated by using the Google Adwords keyword tool? For example, if a user starts typing a search query only to find the site they were looking for before they finished typing the search query, does Google count the partial keyword the user never finished typing into the Adwords Keyword report? I've always wondered about this. Sometimes I find it tempting to attack a misspelled keyword because of the massive search volume and low competition for that keyword. I realize that many consumers may not be very good at spelling, and this may reflect a large search volume towards a misspelled keyword. On the other hand, I see this trend of high volume, misspelled keywords many times while performing keyword research for a variety of clients. Thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | GlobeRunner0 -
New v Returning in Google Analytics with Adwords
I am trying to figure out an issue with Google Analytics. What i am stumped on is I see traffic from AdWords coming in (accounts linked) and I see new v returning user. Does the return visit still show even if a user came back in via direct or organic? Or is it that these return visits are clicking on the ad again to come back as visits and clicks match in the reports?
Paid Search Marketing | | RadicalMedia0