billbenson
07-07-2009, 01:46 AM
Some of the recent posts here got me to take a look at the keywords for my main site. The site is a mature site. It places 2 for my best keyword on G and does well on adwords. I haven't been saving search terms from my stats, so I have lost information, but I have 2k keyphrases from the last 2 years. A few thousand keywords from Adwords as well.
To side track to adwords for a minute. Adwords was what allowed me to get the site going. It took a long time for the natural SERPS to bring in traffic. It probably took me about 6 months to get a good adwords campaign going. I started out with low budgets. I raised the budget, but turned the campaign off and on until I was sure I could be profitable. After tweaking it for about 6 months and constantly writing ads, adwords was costing me about 10% of my profits. I cut way back on my adwords campaign when my natural SERPS started doing well. I'm going to ramp up the adwords again though.
Adwords made some changes recently and I have been looking at that this evening. I've had some lousy ads that I want to edit or delete. Some that work well, that I didn't think would.
So, in three years, I've had 80k clicks, 5M ad impressions, 1.38% CTR, 0.24 CPC. I have about 200 different ads. Glancing through the data, I have quite a few really good ads getting a lot of impressions and clicks (40% CTR at 0.17 CPC).
Even with the new reporting, there is two much information to properly analyze, so I'm going to put the adwords data together with my site statistics in a database. It's not enough to just look at a CPC or CTR etc. in determining your ads. You need to look at which products are the most profitable and see how they work with your ads etc.
So I'm going to stick everything I can in a keyword database and write some custom reports to help me not only with ad campaigns, but in finding new keywords, products to push, price points, page optimization etc.
For any adwords skeptics out there, it can be profitable. Remember, it can also help you with refining your site and finding keywords. It is a lot of work though.
I have a lot of ideas as to what I want to do with this data. I am very interested as well if anybody else here has some suggestions.
To side track to adwords for a minute. Adwords was what allowed me to get the site going. It took a long time for the natural SERPS to bring in traffic. It probably took me about 6 months to get a good adwords campaign going. I started out with low budgets. I raised the budget, but turned the campaign off and on until I was sure I could be profitable. After tweaking it for about 6 months and constantly writing ads, adwords was costing me about 10% of my profits. I cut way back on my adwords campaign when my natural SERPS started doing well. I'm going to ramp up the adwords again though.
Adwords made some changes recently and I have been looking at that this evening. I've had some lousy ads that I want to edit or delete. Some that work well, that I didn't think would.
So, in three years, I've had 80k clicks, 5M ad impressions, 1.38% CTR, 0.24 CPC. I have about 200 different ads. Glancing through the data, I have quite a few really good ads getting a lot of impressions and clicks (40% CTR at 0.17 CPC).
Even with the new reporting, there is two much information to properly analyze, so I'm going to put the adwords data together with my site statistics in a database. It's not enough to just look at a CPC or CTR etc. in determining your ads. You need to look at which products are the most profitable and see how they work with your ads etc.
So I'm going to stick everything I can in a keyword database and write some custom reports to help me not only with ad campaigns, but in finding new keywords, products to push, price points, page optimization etc.
For any adwords skeptics out there, it can be profitable. Remember, it can also help you with refining your site and finding keywords. It is a lot of work though.
I have a lot of ideas as to what I want to do with this data. I am very interested as well if anybody else here has some suggestions.