I'm a Money Grubber

Google Adwords Experiment – Week 1

Here to tally the official results from week 1 of my first google adwords experiment, and frankly the result are a bit disappointing. Google adwords is a complex beast to tame, and for someone with no previous internet marketing experience, this has been a harsh learning experience. But I don’t give up so easy!

The Results

After running my campaign for 5 days, I spent a total of $229.12 and sold 3 copies of my study guide. This produced a net loss of $139.27 (sad face).

During the 5 day trial, my little adwords campaign made 501,889 impressions and received 3,586 clicks. I’m actually really satisfied with the amount of traffic this experiment drove to my website. My GMAT study guide site usually receives around 50 unique visitors a day, and during this campaign, my traffic skyrocketed to over 400 visitors a day.

However, I didn’t like how that the campaign ate up my budget so quickly. And I really didn’t like that my conversion rate was so low. As I mentioned in my previous week’s post about how I setup my google adwords campaign, previous months show that I average a conversion rate of 0.34%. Yet my conversion rate during this adwords campaign was a pitiful 0.08% – a whopping 76% less (double sad face).

I think this is definitely a testament to traffic quality. Most of the people that come to my website usually find it through organic google search or are referred from gmat related internet forums. I feel like these people (1) give my site more credibility since they are the ones actively seeking me out and (2) enter my site with greater purpose and hence are more willing to spend money. The adwords traffic I received definitely seemed to be on the poor side of the quality spectrum. I also didn’t like the fact that my click through rate (CTR) was a pitiful 0.71%.

First Week Mistakes

• Don’t just let your campaign run. Monitor it closely for the first few days. I foolishly let my campaign run for 4 days before I checked it and was a surprised to see that I had already spent $200 but received only 3 study guide sales. The first two days were definitely not profitable, and I should have known to first pause the campaign and then to figure out why.
• Know the difference between the Content and Search Network. My next warning signal should have been when I didn’t see any stats next to the keywords I was bidding on. For some reason I stupidly thought that maybe the system lagged a bit and the statistics would populate within a day or two. It never did. If you look at my results table, you’ll see that my ad impressions are split into two groups: search and content. The search network refers to regular google traffic as seen when you perform a engine search, and content traffic refers to advertisements placed on websites by using adsense. I only spent $0.32 on search traffic but I spent $228.80 on content traffic! The differences in money spent and traffic received leads me to believe that I should follow different tactics when targeting a search or content audience, so I’m going to split this into two campaigns in the future: one for search network and one for content network.
• Track and Analyze Everything. One of the biggest reasons why I’m running an adwords campaign is because I wanted to test which keywords convert well for my niche topic. Advertising on the google search network is an excellent way to track this. The content network on the other hand is not. The content network doesn’t track keywords because your ads show up depending on the content of the website its placed on. I tried to track where my ads were showing up on the content network, and it’s showing me that the majority of my content ads were placed on random pdf and ebook download sites. No wonder I got such crappy traffic – the majority of visitors were people not that interested in studying the GMAT to begin with.
• Don’t be afraid to reduce your budget. $50/day is a lot of money to spend on traffic that isn’t converting. I already laid out my thought process for how I came up with this budget. But if you find that it’s not working, you can always reduce your risk by lowering your budget to a level that’s more tolerable. I really just need this experiment to show me some signs of life before I throw anymore money on it.

Campaign Improvements

• Focus on Search Network Traffic. While I’m not ruling out advertising on the content network, I’m really not impressed so far. I spent a lot of money running ads on both networks and it seemed like the content network just ran up the tab without churning much in terms of results. So I’ve changed my campaign settings to only focus on search for now. I want to master one element of adwords at a time.
• Reduce my Budget. I reduced my budget from $50 to $20. I want some proof that an adwords campaign can actually be profitable before I scale things up. I should have started out small like this from the beginning.
• Increase Adgroups and Keywords. I noticed that I actually have very few clicks on my search ads, so I’m going to try to overcome this with an increase in quantity. I had about 10 adgroups running, targeting around 50 keywords. But I’m adding an additional 10 adgroups to increase my total number of keywords to 500.
• Include Spelling Variations and Typos in Keywords. 500 keywords seems like alot for 20 adgroups. But less than 200 of these are actual different keywords. I’m using this Spelling Typo Generator to come up with a list common typos and variations of my most popular and expensive terms. It’ll be interesting to see if spelling variations are a successful tactic to increase exposure in my campaign.

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