I have burnt over 800$ in the last week in adwords and am still in the red.
I copy successfull campaigns(i do not create my own campaigns)
my quality scores are above 7.
I am not direct linking.
The campaigns which i copied are spending thousands of dollars per day from months.
so what am i doing wrong?
I also tried only copying there keywords which had high roi.then also i am in the red.

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Hmmmmm.

I made my first campaign yesterday and made 70$ profit in a very competitive niche.

did you copy someone's campaign?
direct linking?
avg position?

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No, I made this campaign myself.
Not direct linking.
Avg position = 7.9

you get clicks and conversions on a position of 7.9?
my position is 4.maybe thats why i am in the red.
how much do you spend per day?

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In simple words: testing and tracking.
On average, I found 1 winners out of 7.

Talking about Copy a campaign...here are some food for though:

Copy a campaign could be tricky...

Personally I don't do a copy campaign method, simply because I will never able to know whether that campaign is a looser or winner.

Second, even if I copy the same campaign with the same keywords, your Adwords history will be a deciding factor whether your campaign will rank better than others that also bid on the same keywords as you do.

Straight copying is for douchebags. There are so many intricacies to each campaign that make it profitable, you will never know all the details unless you split test your own variations. No spy tool will ever show you the whole picture and they leave out the most important elements.

The difference in advertising cost between a Quality Score 7 and a Quality Score 9 or 10 is enormous. Account history and campaign performance over time will factor into that. You won't have those benefits until you get the same.

QS 9 pays about 40% less than QS 7.

Do your own work.

how much do you spend on a campaign before deciding its a looser?
also i copy only those campaigns which have been spending above 500$/day from atleast a month or so,they cant be loosers,right?
also what are your average positions like,quality score?

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It depens on my level of comfort actually.

Sometimes I cut the campaign once I get 100 clicks, sometimes 200.
But most of the time, I cut them on 200 clicks.

Note: I use the 100-200 clicks with a strict rule that I am bidding for action keywords, not general keywords.

I can't say for sure. There are plenty of people who are doing PPC-Adwords, some don't know what they're doing. The one who spend $500 could be one of the newbies, or could be one of the super affiliates.

IMHO, you have to have your own standard, judgement, whether the campaign is good, the merchants landing page is good, the keyword selection is good, etc.
In simple words, check and double check before you copy.

My average positions are 3-6. I don't aim 1st position though.

Sometimes I am on 1st for non competitive, action keyword.

Quality score average is 7 to 8

My 2 cents

Copying campaigns is pretty risky imho. The good hard work always pays off in the end.

To be honest I can't see how you are not making money with PPC marketing.

To take a guess, you are spending alot of money bidding on high competition keywords in a saturated niche.

Direct linking DOES work.
Stats show under 10% of directly linking campaigns do work, but if you can find the right one via testing on a small scale it will pay off.

A friend of mine was doing 3k a day profit purely from copied directly linking campaigns even ones in high competition niches.

PPC marketing does pay off, you wont always find that one campaign that is going to make you a million dollars on your first attempt.

Quite often it can be through trial and error.

Good Luck

i am getting conversions,have very high QS,good landing page.
use only highroi keywords only.
but my main problem is,i burn through 300$ in 1 hour even though i bid on only 25 keywords.
so by the time i make any changes,i am through for the day and 300$ into the hole.
any solution for that?

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What is your daily budget set at? Also, how targeted are you KWs?

If you are going through $300 in an hour I am guessing that you are paying $2-3 per click trying to end up on the front page. Super competitive KWs are generally a bad idea unless you have the cash to burn and don't mind paying for your data.

My advice would be to drop your bid price down a bit, even if it does kick you off the front page. This way you can take some time to analyze your data. You can scale up after you know what converts.

Also look at some more targeted KWs that get between 2k-8k searches monthly instead of one or two that get 500k+. Google will decrease your first page bid once your campaign has an established CTR... always try to keep it above 1%. I had a campaign with a CTR of 6% and my first page bid went from $.75 to $.10 within a week.

Finally take a look at scheduling to see if you can limit the times your ad shows to peak time for wherever you are. This will help with increasing your CTR as well.

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"you can put some tennis balls in the dryer..." <- ?

maybe you are stuck in a niche with extremely high cpc. have you experimented with the content network or direct placement? you might get better roi going that route when dealing with an expensive niche.

That's a big problem if you don't make enough profit to cover the spending...

I agree with s0ap, and if I were you, I'll take his advice on lowering down your bids and analyze which keyword you should bid on.

Simple, you need to choose how your ads are distribute.

I assume you have it set to accelerated at the moment.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bi...n&answer=37611

adwords is one of those things that takes a while to get the hang of and a lot of people lose a lot of money before they ever get the hang of it. Some people never even make money from it, it's best to test out lots of different campaigns to help you get the hang of what works and not.

Are you tracking on a keyword level? This is very important. This way you can cut out those kws that are not converting and increase the bids for those that ARE converting so they get more traffic..

Also, if that niche is just not working for you.. then drop it!

The problem most of you will have with Adwords is your feeble affiliate business model. In many markets, you'll be competing against someone like me who has a full business - front and back end. I know what my cost of acquisition is and I guarantee I can spend more than ANY of you to acquire a customer.

Who do you think Google will favor, a complete business offering value front and back? Or, some thin affiliate trying to provide the least value possible for a one time payment, or even worse, some useless CPA offer. This is where most of you blackhatters just don't get it and need to get clued in.

oh this is going to get good now, i can feel it.

I agree, I can afford to outspend any of you as well.

This is one of the first rules I learned when direct linking to a affiliate site. if the Company is bidding on the ad then never touch it. Remember as an affiliate you only get a % of the sale. The company is still making a profit so remember they can ALWAYS spend more then you to make the sale. There is no was to beat them so don't even try unless you have a few tricks that don't require you to outspend them.

see Nick's pandora box.

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In a nutshell.

We will assume some folks, as you say, are spending $500.00 plus on adwords in your niche so it should be profitable.

Don't try to bid on the same keywords they are. They are getting a much better rate and it looks like they have a good budget.

Choose good, low competition long-tail keywords. Your ad rates will be lower and the competion less severe so you can get them at a better price.

Only bid on the "low hanging fruit", long tail targeted keywords.

Don't copy anything exactly, you have to change each ad to suit your own website or landing page (you do want to capture emails, don't you?).

Rewrite each of your ads to include your keywork in the first line of your adword's ad. It should also be repeated in one of the next two description lines.

Make sure your keyword is also in your destination url, either in the url name or as a subdirectory - example: keyword.foo.com or even foo.com/keyword.

Put your keywords in the title tag of your landing page.
Put your keywords in your "well written" meta tag description.
Put your keywords in your meta keywords tag. No stuffing allowed.

Use your keyword in your h1 tags as the heading of your landing page. Also use h2 and or h3 tags as appropriate. Also use your keyword in the body of the page several times. Don't overdo it. Your landing page must be relevant to your keywords.

Split test with two similar ads, different keywords. You will need about 50 clicks to get a descent comparison. Basically, choose the highest performing ad. longer performing ads/test ing can produce different results but this will depend on your pocketbook and resillience.

Set up your ads so they only run during certain hour of the day. Choose specific countries or limit your advertiseing to US, Canada, UK, etc.


Good luck with your campaign

noob

use competition to give you ideas.....but don't copy them word for word...

most likely the competition has crafted their ad to their site.

also, try using negative keywords to

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Spending $300 a day is never a good idea in the beginning.. I always keep my daily budget small and I always start off with a small selection of highly targetted keywords first.

This way, you can test the offer, see if it converts and sometimes get a feel for which keywords perform the best before you start ramping it up.

My campaigns generally start with $15-$25 daily budgets and I always target the lower hanging fruit, less traffic, but conversions are generally much better.

Once I see conversions coming in, I might go up a level and do more research to add in the next level of keywords... every level of course adds more searches per month and higher CPC's, but that is to be expected.

I have a average cpc of 1.07$.is it too high?
my daily budget is set at around 400$/day.which i now release is a mistake.
my keywords are straight forward but they are on broad match.is that a problem?
my ctr is around 4% to 5% mark.
also this is my QS breakup.
out of 25 keywords:
17=7 quality score
3=8 quality score
5=10 quality score.
is good?

my avg cpc comes to 1.07$.not sure if it is high or low.
also i have not tried direct linking or content network till now.

my ad delivery method is standard.not accelrated.
but my 25 keywords amount to around 0.5million searches monthly.atleast according to google keywords tool.

i have experimented with that niche in adcenter.70% roi.then fucked up that as well in my greed to get more returns.
yes am using prosper for keyword tracking.
but these all 25 keywords are my top converting ones from adcenter.

thanks for these tips.
will try them out today.


and guys i do appreciate your help and advise.

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it doesn't have anything to do with how big you are or if you're a blackhat/white hatter/what ever

what are you doing on this board if you're so better than the rest of us black hat, thin affiliates promoting, useless cpa pushing, hacks anyway? it's obvious you're too good for this board.....or at least you're trying to make yourself sound like you're too good for us


to the op, you might want to try advertising with other programs like yahoo and msn as well

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You are right on some points here. Most BH in general lacks a sustainable business model and I think this is the point that most fail to realize.

But a legitimate affiliate marketer's model as opposed to yours can be just as profitable. What I think you are failing to realize is that apart from a few hours invested in throwing together a landing page and doing some keyword research, we have no vested financial or personal interest in whatever product we are selling.

This means that my sunk costs are almost zero, and I can close up shop tomorrow on any of my offers if they don't convert or the advertiser starts jerking me around. On top of that, we have the resources to run 10-15 offers all day every day, where a full-on business is generally a full-time endeavor.

So in short they both have their pros and cons. Just because your cost of acquisition can be higher than mine doesn't mean that you are making more money.

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"you can put some tennis balls in the dryer..." <- ?

Adwords Plan of Attack

1. Make a Landing page, dont use the CPA OFFER DIRECT, but get a 1.99 DOT INFO website from godaddy, and make it for your niche (ie: selling pet stuff, make a pet type landing page)

2. ON Landing page, get email and name on a form (I use aweber) and offer some kind of free ebook or something about the niche

3. When they signup, you got their name and email, and the autoresponder make sure its not double optin. First email just thank them, and then make an autoresponder series about the niche, keep plugging in cpa or cb or cj offers... whatever you got

4. Offer some more free stuff if you can in some email broadcasts

5. On the page they are sent too after they fill in the form, put your CPA offer that you would have used on Adwords

BuIld a List, find as many products as you can on the niche, and repeat for other niches

White hat method that works
ME

Boooom! goes the dynamite.

Find cheaper keywords or:

Some of your competitors might be more proven with adwords so their cost per click is lower. If I am in a competitive niche, I start my keywords pricing very high then lower daily for about 7 days. Next thing you know, you are paying 10-20% of what you were before. I read that method in an ebook, it has saved me a shit load of money. I normally make 500% profit in adwords now.

Pretty big claim to make.

I fail to see how you know the budgets of BH and WH (yes there are quite a lot here) PPC marketers here.
Some of which who spend large amounts with Google.

A man once said "Assumption is the mother of all f**kups"

People doing BH marketing via PPC are not trying to prove their worth to Google, that's irrelevant. For them AdWords is but a tool.

And the matter of Google favoring an advertiser over another what does this have to do with this topic what-so-ever?

Google does not go through each users campaigns and compare them with another and go "Hmm I like this guy better" *+1 QS*

Please keep your thread hi-jacking and pissing contests off of BHW.

Wasn't that in Under Siege with Steven Seagal?

Shhhhhh!

Yes it was, haha but I like the quote.

1. they are not paying a high as youre, possible cloaking + individual account's history+ possible mcc accounts volume + back end sales + email listing etc...
2. you cant know for sure which kw's have higher roi if you dont have their conversion data at hand. unless you've hacked their tracker which is illegal. those kws you ve spotted may have the lowest bids for them and also gaining a low margin profit for the campaign, eventually they are not being removed. in both situations you are using the wrong kws with the wrong lp.

Since my 9-5 job is Adwors specialist and this topic is hella long i will give you few hints.

Use longtails, its chaper and more targeted. Better get 3 chaper clicks that convert than 10 with 1 conversion and higher price.
Dont copy others directly, use some of their words but not whole thinge.
Use [ ] instead of empty words
Block hours which you think are less profitable

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The statement 'I know what my cost of acquisition is and I guarantee I can spend more than ANY of you to acquire a customer. ' is a clear indication of being a clueless adwords user.

The main component of how much you pay is the CTR of your ads on google. Whatever you can pay for a user to hit your page from a known traffic quality benchmark doesn't mean shit.

It is your ability to monetize google's inventory that matters. For every order of magnitude you convert better, the exponentially less you will have to pay. You may make razor thin margins in what you are selling and hence can't afford to pay anything extra to attract traffic. But if your ad converts 5x as well as your nearest competitor for google, you get your traffic extremely cheaply and in much greater volume than your competitors.

As for quality score, this does play into things. However the implication of quality score depends upon the competitiveness of the auctions you are a part of and is mostly a relative measure. If you have 5 bidders in an auction all with 5 quality scores, QS doesn't play. Instead bid price and CTR are at work. That being said, if you have QS1 you won't serve really as you are in a penalty QS range designed to weed you out of the auction.

In short your bid price isn't the only or most important factor in your ability to buy traffic. Your google CTR and QS will be the primary factors on which your campaign sinks or swims, so long as your bid price is in range.

Great info guys. do you think adowrds listing convert better than natural organic SE listings? I must admit I prefer to click on the adwrods sites when buying something...and a few web masters have told me their adwords converts better than natural.

Is there a great course,guide on adwords?

Is Yhoo/MSN worth doing?

Don't forget to use negative keywords - can greatly help inprove conversion rates by weeding out the tyre kickers

ok can you explain what are negative key words? Examples etc?
Why does it weed out tyre kickers?


Thank you

It depends on the keyword. If you advertise on a phrase like "buy xyz" then I would say that the ads are better converting than the results of the organic listing.

@negative keywords: These are keywords that prevent your ad from being shown to "untargeted" users. For example if you SELL mp3s on your landing page and you don't offer mp3s for free, this
-"free"
would be a perfect negative keyword. If a user now searches for "free mp3s" or "mp3 for free" your ad won't be displayed.
So use negative keywods! It will raise your CTR and ROI.

I agree. Never expected to read such an informative thread on adWords on this forum.

In answer to your question, I wouldn't get hung up on CTRs. What you want to look at is Cost Per Acquisition.

So, for instance, if you get an average of $50-sale/10 clicks, say, you need to look at your CPC. Anything under $5/click, in this instance, will yield you a profit.

Once you have that solved, you need to then figure out ways to drive your CPC down without messing with your cost per acquisition. Many ways to do that. For instance, maybe you can drop you bid per keyword some, still keep you same relative ad position. You can try to increase your ad rating by doing some simple SEO, to make the page a more relevant click for your targeted keywords. The options are legion.

You can also work on the cost per acquisition side as well. G will do things for you like split A-B testing and multi-variate testing for different landing pages.

B4 this post gets much longer, I'm gonna stop.

First goal, find your profitable niche, longtail, or general keywords.

Second, once you have targeted the profitable ones, then you have to tweak them from both ends -- both the CPC side and the cost per acquisition side.

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It's not converting because you are copying. You think customers don't notice the same exact LP/Ad copy/Sales copy showing up for their search term? All you're doing is causing the original landing page owners conversion to drop because the customer now distrusts them, and you.

Come up with your own shit, compete, don't copy. And how did you get all his campaign data anyway? If you didn't outright steal his tracking database you have about 1% of his whole picture.

Don't be a d-bag, make your own LPs. Copy peoples strategy and compete, that's the capitalist way. Who knows, your ideas might be better than his anyway.

Sounds like you need to target your keywords better.

Plenty of info on this out there.

Example: If you are marketing a beauty cream, you do not want to use "beauty cream" or "make-up" as keywords. You will want to use the EXACT name of the product as your keyword(s) until you make enough money to where you can afford to test other keywords.

You MUST be specific in the beginning, or you will end up going broke.

I can help you get it straightened out. PM me if you would like help.