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
-
How to deal with the InCorrect Price Issue for the Google Shopping Product Listing Ads?
Hello All, Yesterday when i was checking with the one of the search term for "canvas prints"..i come to know that one of the advertiser EasyCanvasPrints.com is showing Incorrect price. On Search result they guys are showing $7.46 incorrect price for the PLA - Product listing ads. Go to below links: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=webhp&tbs=vw:l,mr:1,seller:8521978&tbm=shop&q=canvas+prints&sa=X&ved=0CJkGELMrahUKEwjmj-PSgfzIAhUHBY4KHc0VBBQ https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=canvas+prints&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=canvas+prints&start=0 But when we click on it then i can not this price $7.46 http://www.easycanvasprints.com/single-canvas?singlecanvas=1&height=19&width=14&pcode=5345334C6B74647246774137536C786768544B5458776C35644F747855796D39&utm_source=google_base&utm_medium=data_feed I have done various claim and send to Google support about this misguiding price for the Easy Canvas Prints but they not taking any actions on it. Guy Can u please help me how can i pass this message to Google to take actions for this advertiser? Waiting for your reply Regards Dinesh
Paid Search Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
Adword San Francisco Reach number
Hello, I have noticed in Adwords, when I select San Francisco or San Francisco county as a location for the campaign, it shows the reach as 7,220,000 Now I know that reach may be different from census data and depends largely on number of google signed-in users. But this number is waaay of. According to census there are only about 850,000 people in SF county, lets add as much that commute to SF for work, then we still have only 1,700,000 - not even close to 7,220,000 google is reporting. Also note that for the rest of the Bay Area counties the Adwords reach numbers match very closely census data. Any ideas?
Paid Search Marketing | | SirMax0 -
Name of Reliable, Cost Effective Service for Setting Up Adwords??
Could anyone suggest a reasonably priced service for setting up an Adwords campaign? My monthly advertising budget is no more than $2,000 and the objective to target Google Adwords and Yahoo/Bing. There are companies providing this service but they seem to require fees of $750 to $1,000 per month for their services for a six month commitment and a mimimum advertising spend of $5,000 per month. Certain tools like Wordstream are available for around $300 per month, but I am not sure how much value they add, if in fact they facilitate the process. Also, I am not sure if advertising spend is completely wasted unless I create special landing pages just for PPC. My category, commercial real estate in New York City is very competitive with keywords ranging form $5-$15.00 click. I would greatly appreciate some advice regarding PPC. Thanks, Alan
Paid Search Marketing | | Kingalan10 -
Why you should never use Google Adwords To Conduct Key Word Research
Buongiorno from 22 degrees C too damn humid Wetherby UK, The other day a client wanted to know how much a ppc campaign would cost with a specific bank of keywords. So off i went and loaded in the key words and set the ads thinking it was not live.... A week later i get a tap on the shoulder asking why weve been invoiced for £xxxx oh dio mio!! The damn campaign went to live. So ive got two questions: 1. Do Google adwords automatically go to Live once youve loaded up phrases and ads, i really thought it would have made it more obvious, A " Would you like your campaign to go live" prompt would have been appreciated. 2. As a safety measure is configuring a Google Alert in Analytics to ping when paid traffic is picked up not a bad idea just so ive got a warning sytem set up so to speak. Grazie tanto,
Paid Search Marketing | | Nightwing
David1 -
AdWords *free* vouchers hurt SEO?
Maybe it was the penguin, or maybe it was Panda, but around about the time of the three updates close together and the rumoured 'parked domain' update that went wrong, I used a free adwords voucher. The site in question used to rank for practically every search term relevant to the niche. Now, I can search back to 60 pages in Google results and nothing. Now, I know its not been de-indexed, it still there when I search for info:TheDomainInQuestion.co.uk It also has 6 site links when searching for the url alone. Each and every page is hand written original content built up over many years and also edited and updated regularly. On linkdetective, I have a very nice rainbow type graph regarding the type of links and also a very very good spread of anchors. 118 different phrases pointing in and aside from one site that linked to me sitewide (16000+ but since removed and now down to 3300 and dropping almost daily). Even with that, the highest percentage of anchor text was 20%. Basically, gone through practically everything that is available on the web about combating penguin and panda, yet the site kept dropping and has disappeared completely for keyword phrases. Might sound a bit paranoid, but could Google have done this on purpose to try to make me carry on with adwords?
Paid Search Marketing | | NinJaSkrtel0 -
Whoa! Newsletter Subscription Form in Adwords Ad??? How can I do this?
I just googled the term "Mobile Lead Gen" and found this ad: http://cl.ly/260X3f0t1z1j1R1m212d Sweet! It has the subscription form signup directly within the Google Ad. Looks like Chrome even pre-populated my email address in the form. Does anyone know how to set this up within Adwords? I've never seen that option before. wXOGJ
Paid Search Marketing | | shawn810 -
Keyword quota exceeded! Need help with Adwords Strategy
Hello, I was playing around with my Adwords and received a nice message from Google saying "Keywood Quota exceed". Basically I have too many keywords. That made me wonder if I could organize my keywords better. I sell tractor parts online. The majority of traffic is from people putting the part number into Google i.e 0J51MP5ON . It therefore made sense to use the manufactures SKU as keywords. The problem is that we have 30,000 keywords and will be moving to 100,000 - which above the Google limit. Each keyword links to the appropriate page on the website i.e. 0J51MP5ON goes to the 0J51MP5ON page. To make things simpler I could cut down on keywords by redirecting all parts starting with 0J5 to a 0J5 landing page for parts being with 0J5. The would be from the same Tractor manufacturer. However, I am worried this will reduce conversation rates. It will make it easier to manage the keywords. Anyone got any better suggestions?
Paid Search Marketing | | DavidLenehan0 -
Tweaking Adwords
Hi, I want to understand how one can tweak adwords and make first line long. I am showing the example as attachment. Please check and guide. Is this ethical ? Regards, Preet adwords.jpg
Paid Search Marketing | | PreetSibia0