Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Some Results to Share

Well, I have been busy on the Google Adwords site fine-tuning the ads and keywords in the manner of the Project X book and the Adwords Miracle book.

This stuff actually works! I have finally got a CTR (Click Through Rate) for some keywords that is over 1% (some as high as 3%) for the first time ever. Now I have had several attempts at Google Adwords over a period of 2-3 years and never exceeded 1% CTR. This truly represents a break through and a 300% improvement. Thanks Chris.

But...my conversions are really low because the actual traffic is really low. This is all based on averages and percentages. The facts are - for 1 sale at an average conversion rate of 2% requires 50 visitors to the sales page. If the CTR is 2% then it will take 2500 impressions (the number of times Google shows your ad) to get the 50 visitors.

If 1 sale makes you $20 then your cost to get that one sale must be less than $20 or you'll go broke i.e. your 50 visitors must cost you less than $0.40 per click. Check your campaign to see the cost of each click.

So what can you do about that? Fortunately Google have a brilliant algorithm for calculating your position on the page that is based on CTR as much as bid price and they only charge you $0.01 more than the next lowest bidder to be above that position. Improving your CTR will actually reduce your cost. How do you do that? I lashed out and bought Perry Marshall's book to find out and WOW!

I downloaded the book last night, read part of it and started making changes. It is still a bit early to know if there has been a significant change but I can see on the tracking software that there has been 3 hits to the landing page even though Google indicates that there have been no ads shown yet. It is true that you can get traffic instantly.

I also had a look at "Instant Internet Empires", no, not the old Frank Kern rubbish but a new (to me) package from Frank Lord. It is just the old Traffic Hurricane scripts with the usual "get it free, get instant traffic free" guff. Yes you'll get traffic, for a while, and then Google will ban your site forever.

This rubbish creates hundreds of keyword specific pages with lots of links to sites that all land back on your main site. Google hates this stuff because the pages have no content at all, they are purely designed to generate traffic and clicks on the Google ads. They pervert the search results and clog up servers and the internet.

But, you won't get any benefit from this at all, the traffic is all very low quality and they perpetrators who promote this rubbish are the ones who get the Google Adsense money. They win, you lose. Of course it is free, to them, it'll possibly cost you your domain name and or your host. Don't Do It!

Have a nice day, good luck with your legitimate endeavors.

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