Took advantage of the $100 Google Analytics Adwords Bonus that was given out recently to all Analytics user to start an Adword Campaign. I have never ran an Adword campaign before and thus had no idea how to run a successful campaign. Even though it was a free $100, I did not want to just simply waste it away, so it was 2 days of scouring for information around the Net.
Like always, if you look hard enough, you can get almost everything for free in the Net. There is no need to spend $97 to buy any e-books or pay $197 to join any e-course if you really want to learn something new. One that I found to be extremely useful is this 7 part free video course on how to generate a successful Adword Campaign.
Though there are many different methods being taught by different gurus, some obviously half baked, having copied their ideas from some one else, I settled for the one that was taught in the videos. It seemed very sensible and practical to me. However, since I am a total newbie to these things, I can’t say if it is the best method to use.
Advantages Of Adword Campaigns.
The biggest advantage of running an Adword campaign is you can get precisely targeted traffic, which means to say, if you sell weight loss pill, you can set your keywords so that only those looking for weight loss pills will see your Ads.
Secondly of course is the enormous number of sites displaying Adsense Ads in Google’s network. Your Ads has the potential to be seen and clicked by millions.
Disadvantages Of Adword Campaigns
Though you might have read that running a PPC campaign is cheap, it can be, on the contrary quite costly. To me at least, or maybe I am just learning and have not mastered the right way to price my bids.
Cheap by way that you need only pay 10 cents or less for a click. Costly in the sense that your $100 will not last very long, even when you are paying only 10 cents per click. Simple maths, $100 = 1000 clicks = 1000 visitors to your site. Ideally that is. If you had bidded higher, you will get less.
With that 1000 visitors you better pray you get your returns and make a profit. So if you make $10 per sale, you must sell at least 11 products to make a gross of $10. If you don’t, you lose. As if I had to tell you that!
In view of that, there is also quite a steep learning curve on how to test and tweak your Ads to get the maximum returns in terms of clicks versus return of investment. You have to keep constant attention to your daily campaigns to see which are the keywords that brings in the most clicks with the least cost. You will have to tweak your keywords to find out which combination gets the most clicks.
Google makes it very easy for anyone to start a campaign. Everyone can have one running in minutes. It is making the campaign successful that is the hard part.
My First Adword Campaign
After making sure I understood what was taught, I ran my campaign based on keywords that people will use when they are looking for a good WordPress Theme.
As I had only $100 to spend, I decided to set my budget at $20.00 per day with a maximum cpc of 50 cents. That would span my campaign to 5 days. In which I hope would at least bring me 4 sales in order to make a profit, assuming the $100 is from my own pocket.
Today is the fourth day of my campaign. Of the maximum 50 cents CPC that I set, I ended up only paying 30 cents per click. So for a $20 daily budget, it should bring me about 60 odd clicks, which was exactly what I got daily for the past four days.
To date, I have received about 260 odd extra visitors. Tomorrow will be my last day with the remaining $20 from. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I should receive another extra 60 plus visitors to bring my total of visitors from this experimental campaign to about 320 or a little bit more.
My latest check to the Premium Themes affiliate sites that I am promoting here shows a big fat zero, though I see an extra number of clicks in their tracking stats. I can only be hopeful my cookies stays should they decide to buy later on.
Success Or Failure
I really do not know what to conclude. If the $100 is from my own pocket, getting 320 non-returning visitors that did not buy a single product seems like an utter failure.
On the other hand, knowing the conversion rate of affiliate products, which is around 3 to 5 percent, there is slim hope to make any sales with 320 visitors. I will need at least 1000 visitors to effectively make 3 sales.
Now if I had to pay $100 for 320 visitors, I would have to pay $300 to attain 1000, which in turn would mean I have to sell more than 12 Thesis Theme to cover my ass. I only get that kind of sales from my average 30,000 visitors monthly. From that let’s deduct half of those who are here for other information, so in theory, I am only able to sell 12 Thesis themes from an average 15,000 visitors on a monthly basis.
To be honest, I did not really plan my campaign well and thorough. I did not make a dedicated landing page. I did not tweak and split test the Ads I wrote. I did not do a lot of things that I was suppose to do, because I had an expenditure limit. If I had dug out the $100 from my own wallet, I would have lost it clean with nothing to show.
Looking from that aspect, I doubt I will be running another campaign if I have to pay for it myself. Not at least until I have learned more about how to start a successful Adword campaign.
