Friday, January 14, 2005
Update & Project On Hold
This week, I pulled the plug on the Traffic Secrets experiment. In December, we ran up well over $500 in Adwords expenses for the http://www.create-ultimate-ebooks.com campaign. Yet that campaign yielded only a single $79 sale. A great deal of the expense was coming from one or two keywords or phrases that were costing around $1.50 per-click.
I've got competitors in this niche that are comfortable spending $3.50 or more per click. I've seen their products and services and, in my opinion, they're losing money but seem to be corporations where the person doing the bidding isn't the person who's actually paying the bills.
At the same time we've been running this PPC campaign, other promotional methods like writing articles, marketing to our own lists, etc. have yielded thousands of dollars in sales. While I'm not convinced PPC won't work for this particular site, it definitely has not been profitable to date. When we ran up another $200 in PPC costs for the site in January without a single sale, I temporarily paused the campaign.
Does that mean John Reese's methods won't work? Not necessarily. John suggests adding thousands of low-cost keywords to your campaign. With the holidays and other projects in the works, I have not been able to devote more time to doing further keyword research and even finishing John's course.
One conclusion I have made to date that I can share with you. In Traffic Secrets, John says that making your Adwords headline a question will yield a higher click-through-ratio than a statement style headline. In other words using a headline like "New to Internet Marketing?" rather than "Internet Marketing Secrets". John said the question headline would blow away the traditional ad.
I tried this on several of my campaigns and the results were mixed. In some cases, the question style headline outpulled the traditional headline but just as often, the reverse was true.
Based on what I've seen so far, I think that Traffic Secrets would be far more effective outside the 'make money online' niche. For one thing, I'd be willing to bet that 75% or more of the people using this course will be marketing to that audience. With a couple of exceptions, I'm not sure that PPC is the most effective way to promote a 'make money online' type of product.
Also, there's been a few noticeable changes since this course was released. For one, costs have been rising steadily. Across the board, PPC advertisers reported cost increases of over 20% in December alone. Some say this is due to holiday advertising. Personally, I think this is just the result of more and more people using Adwords.
For my longest running Google Campaigns (running since early 2003), I've seen costs triple for the same amount of traffic. In certain niches, I still find Adwords to be profitable but it is becoming quite a bit more expensive than it used to be.
Bottom Line: It would be unfair to pan this course without having finished it and applied all of John Reese's tactics. I'd like to try this again with a site that promotes a product outside the 'make money online niche'. In the meantime, I'll consider applying Reese's tactics to see if I can improve other successful PPC campaigns I'm already running.
When I do, you'll see the results here.
Bill
I've got competitors in this niche that are comfortable spending $3.50 or more per click. I've seen their products and services and, in my opinion, they're losing money but seem to be corporations where the person doing the bidding isn't the person who's actually paying the bills.
At the same time we've been running this PPC campaign, other promotional methods like writing articles, marketing to our own lists, etc. have yielded thousands of dollars in sales. While I'm not convinced PPC won't work for this particular site, it definitely has not been profitable to date. When we ran up another $200 in PPC costs for the site in January without a single sale, I temporarily paused the campaign.
Does that mean John Reese's methods won't work? Not necessarily. John suggests adding thousands of low-cost keywords to your campaign. With the holidays and other projects in the works, I have not been able to devote more time to doing further keyword research and even finishing John's course.
One conclusion I have made to date that I can share with you. In Traffic Secrets, John says that making your Adwords headline a question will yield a higher click-through-ratio than a statement style headline. In other words using a headline like "New to Internet Marketing?" rather than "Internet Marketing Secrets". John said the question headline would blow away the traditional ad.
I tried this on several of my campaigns and the results were mixed. In some cases, the question style headline outpulled the traditional headline but just as often, the reverse was true.
Based on what I've seen so far, I think that Traffic Secrets would be far more effective outside the 'make money online' niche. For one thing, I'd be willing to bet that 75% or more of the people using this course will be marketing to that audience. With a couple of exceptions, I'm not sure that PPC is the most effective way to promote a 'make money online' type of product.
Also, there's been a few noticeable changes since this course was released. For one, costs have been rising steadily. Across the board, PPC advertisers reported cost increases of over 20% in December alone. Some say this is due to holiday advertising. Personally, I think this is just the result of more and more people using Adwords.
For my longest running Google Campaigns (running since early 2003), I've seen costs triple for the same amount of traffic. In certain niches, I still find Adwords to be profitable but it is becoming quite a bit more expensive than it used to be.
Bottom Line: It would be unfair to pan this course without having finished it and applied all of John Reese's tactics. I'd like to try this again with a site that promotes a product outside the 'make money online niche'. In the meantime, I'll consider applying Reese's tactics to see if I can improve other successful PPC campaigns I'm already running.
When I do, you'll see the results here.
Bill
