Show Google You’re The Man

This goes along with what I posted about a few days ago – you can’t be afraid to lose some money initially. We know that Google factors CTR a lot into your quality score. So in the beginning (when your minimum bids haven’t been slapped yet), instead of bidding at your target bid prices and working on different ads with the best CTR, show Google that you’re the man! If you’re bidding for your target range, your ad may be in the #8 spot and a good CTR for you would be 1-2%. That’s not bad, but you may get slapped (unless your landing page is insane). While a 1-2% CTR would be nice in the low positions, CTR in the premium spots have for me been on average of 8%-20%. That’s a HUGE difference! Jack your bids up like crazy in the beginning and see that crazy CTR (you’ll be spending a ton too), and Google will reward you.

note : this tip is not for those who can’t afford to lose a lot of money initially. Your CTR is going to be sky high which means you’re going to get a lot more clicks that are all a lot more expensive. But this will give your campaign a crazy CTR which means the slap will have a much less (if not any) impact on you.

It’s easier to describe by example, so here’s an example of a campaign I launched a couple weeks ago. The landing page for this campaign started out very simple. No articles (just main page text), single page, no outbound links, no privacy policy or any of that. It was a very relevant page to the keywords though (domain, title, header tags, article), and did look awesome (low bounce rate which is also good for quality score). All my quality scores were great, with $0.05 or less minimum bids. So I bid $1.50 on this group of very short tail keywords that got a lot of volume. CTR started off at about 10% with my clicks coming in at about $1.25 a pop, average position was 1.5. At this point I have great quality score and a lot of volume, but I’m losing money. Over the next couple days, bid prices naturally fall to about $1.00. I dropped bids down to $1.25 – over the next couple days average CPC naturally fell to $0.80, average position still 1.5. A couple weeks later, my average CPC has dropped down to about $0.58, my average position is still the #1 spot and quality score is still great. Once it drops naturally below a certain point, I’ll just keep dropping bids lower and lower and lower, until I start to lose position.

Plus, getting huge volume also allows you to test things faster (ads, landing pages, everything) because you’ll compile data much quicker.


7 Comments

  1. Hamish
    October 8, 2007

    Nice post/blog, two quick questions.
    1. Do you typically launch one page sites or do you usually put a little more meat on the bones?
    2. With a “one page” site, are you manually changing the landing page to do tests or do you swap the traffic between 2-3 landing pages (that only link to the merchant site)?

  2. Steffen
    October 9, 2007

    Nice tip, I got one question: You are talking about the bounce rate, how is it possible to get the bounce rate of my site? What tools can I use to get this rate?

  3. Desmond
    October 9, 2007

    I F*&kin suck @ss at Adwords…thats one thing i really have to work on. I hate it….ok i vented. Before I used to to put thousands of keywords in a group then i learned that was a no-no…so I now group them to be relevant and I noticed that with my last campaign I really didnt put the keyword in the ad only the healine and the bids i started with are 10 cents pointing to a clickbank product with I would think had relevant content. So once i started the campaign just about all my ads were 10-15 cents and a few 10 dollar and 5 dollar (which I refuse to pay) so I was wondering if I should raise my bids or make a landing page and direct them to my money page.

    Desmond

  4. rhys
    October 9, 2007

    Excellent information on your blog. I am learning a lot from you. Would you be able to let us take a peek at your landing page? If possible, that will really accelerate our learning. Thanks again for the great blog. Keep up the great work!

  5. October 9, 2007

    Hamish – 1. no, my landing pages all eventually are multi page sites. 2. yep I test many different variations to see which yields the highest CTR/conversion rate.

    Steffen – google analytics

    Desmond – start your bids higher than the minimums.

    rhys – lol no way, sorry.

  6. October 9, 2007

    Good post. I find that this works also on the context network if you do it a similar way.

  7. jl
    November 5, 2007

    You say you keep dropping your bid until you start to lose position. When that happens do simply up your bid (a bit) again and do you get your old rank back ?

    Or does the whole bid high and then drop your bit slowly process begin again ? (I ask because losing positions also implies a lower CTR and thus higher bids)

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