What's The Best Way To Ramp-Up A Profitable Adwords Campaign?

[Moon54]

Hi all,

I been tweaking and testing an Adwords Campaign for a while now and I'm finally getting some profitability from it. I am doing Direct to Merchant linking with broad/phrase/exact/content keyword tracking. Almost all of the 150 Keywords have Great for the Quality Score. Default cpc for keywords is 0.05 - 0.10.

My ROI is pretty nice, with a ratio of about 5:1, but even with a budget set of $100/day, I would usually never exceed an ad spend of $10! I have tried setting a higher adgroup CPC price of 0.50 for those keywords/adgroups that do generate sales but then the campaign seems to lose profitability.

I was wondering, what do you think would be the best way to ramp-up this profitable adwords campaign?

 

[lylaster]

Are you tracking your campaign as in do you know which keywords are converting? If you do then up the bids by keyword level.

Also expand beyond 150 keywords.

Split tests your ads and keep tweaking them.

Make sure you're doing this with statistically significant data.

 

[Moon54]

Hi Lylaster,

Yes, I am tracking down to the keyword level and sales are coming from a mix of mainly broad and exact match, eg ***** ***** problems , [ ***** ***** problems] etc... I've just doubled my bids on the individual keywords that do generate sales, so it will be interesting to see how it pans out.

Also, I do have multiple Ads running per adgroup but perhaps I should reword certain ones better. I'll give that a try. A few keywords are inactive for search, so I'll also break them out into new Adgroups to try and get them active again.

Average CTR for all campaign is 3%, some adgroups get as high as 20% CTR, average position is 4th or 5th for most keywords. I'm going to try to expand my keyword list further. Thanks for the tips,

 

[fluidc]

Moon54,

Lemme guess, you're promoting some type of international offer?

Anyways, you definitely need to expand your keyword set. Although you are profitable on those keywords right now, your lack of diversification is going to hurt you in the long run when other people start bidding on the same keywords.

With regards to testing your ads, you should test your display URL as well. I have found that the way your display URL is formatted impacts ad CTR. For example, having www.exampledomain.com had a lower CTR compared to www.ExampleDomain.com based on prior testing.

Also, since CTR is naturally correlated with position (exponentially higher in the top positions), bidding higher on your keywords may be worth it in the long run despite the short-term drop in profitability that you may experience. By having a higher CTR, you will be able to enjoy lower CPCs at higher positions and it's a nice upwards cycle from there.

In addition, you should do what you can to optimize your conversion rates. Is the page you are directing traffic to relevant to your keyword + ad? I understand that you are sending traffic directly to the merchant, but would it be feasible for you to create your own landing page in the future that would be more optimal from a conversion rate standpoint? By expanding your conversion funnel, this will definitely have a positive monetary effect on your campaign as well.