Does This Happen To Your Google Adwords Campaigns?

Posted in Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords | Friday, January 19th, 2007 | Trackback

I don’t consider myself an adwords expert, I have however been using Adwords since the day it was started and have spend 10’s of thousands of dollars on it.

When adwords first came out I used it alot then for a while I got away from it. Last August (2006) I got back into using Adwords once again.

I measure everything I can in every campaign I do to the best I can. Meaning, sometimes I can’t measure something because of a limitation of an affiliate tracking mechanic.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed which I can’t remember anyone talking about (could
be just me not paying attention to them) with adwords, which is…

>> The longer you advertise the better your results

Now I have noticed a few exceptions to this which I will explain in a second but for most programs that I’ve been working with, which is a wide range of markets testing adwords (I have about 54 campaigns/sub-campaigns running) there is a common trend.

First let me say there are going to be many factors to this, for example some of my campaigns get 15% clickthrough some get 1% but they both have one thing in common…

It took MONTHS before I started to see a steady flow of sales from the campaigns. In fact if I had deleted some of the campaigns that were doing nothing for weeks I would have never knew they were actually some of the best converting.

The majority of the campaigns converted like CRAP for the first month or two, then all of a sudden one day they started converting and more and more started to do the same in approximitely the same time from when they had started.

So, if you have a campaign that’s failing you may want to test lowering your CPC to something managable you can maintain and not worry about losing too much money because one day the sales may start rolling in (and when I say one day it’s very strange to all of a sudden get several sales a day consistantly what has been a failing campaign.

Let me note with Adwords my basic strategy is to bid on extremely specific keywords a
person would enter when they were ready to buy something, AND i bid extremely low. Usually the products I promote I can get in the top 8 for 10-15 cents.

So, what I also wanted to explain is that adwords DOES seem to work extremely well for me when I’m bidding on keywords that have not been searched for heavily in the past. I’m talking about products that got a big buzz in the news or something that were not searched for in the past.

This article is simply an observation from my testing. There may be external factors that
are causing this with my ads (such as the way I setup the landing pages). However I do want to note I’ve gotten the same results testing a review page, squeeze page and a direct affiliate link (while there was no other affiliate links in the results) in multiple markets.