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Yes, more context would be very much appreciated!

Hi Chris,

Apologies for not getting back to you quicker.

I believe that Daniel was correct. There are only so many slots available on one page. Even if you search for Grand Theft Auto, there are only roughly 20 positions for a consumer to choose. Then they are listed by price, as most consumers want to see them by price.

You can really shine in the shopping section like this by getting a large number of reviewers to review your product. I don't know of many people who use the Google Shopping area without the reviews section. so Even if you were selling something for .99, if you had zero reviews you were probably more likely to not get the click.

These ads have always been the cheapest I've ever run. I would definitely recommend playing with your bid and monitoring the impressions, click through rate, and conversion totals. Every business has its own difference when working  with the Shopping campaigns so I would highly recommend spending some time to really isolate your top performing products from your feed and bid on them individually. The more specific you make your bids the less you will likely end up paying.

While I do agree that there are difficulties in explaining the value to clients, the most common reasons I have come up across are accounting & cash flow.

When I was managing agency side and I just wanted an additonal $1000/mo (which seems like nothing for most advertisers), there was significant push back. One reason is the client is not only footing the bill for their account, they are also footing the agency bill. There could be added costs when expanding budgets depending on the pricing structure, and everyone wants everything as cheap as they can get it. So if the added cost of the agency + the added cost on the business for the advertising is too much in comparison to the budget the business had put forward for the year, then there is no way they can plan on spending more.

In addition to this, if you are working with smaller businesses, they don't have the flexibility in their cash flow to spend more even when there is a proven opportunity. Not to mention, advertising is very likely not the only bill they are paying each month. They have all the costs associated from man power to tools & software internally to operational overhead. They might say their profit is $65/item but it might actually be more like $15 after everything else is accounted for. Which is poor planning and communication from your client.

If you are working with a larger or public company, accounting requires that you bring in X amount of money (because Stock Market or Parent Company, or Investors, etc). If you are advertising based on LTV (lifetime value) not New Sales, then the accounting team doesn't see the same return you are assuming you are getting. It appears to the accounting team that you are overspending and not getting the same value on more cost compared to previous years.

But, take your client out for a beer if you can. Get them to unload on you about the issues and tribulations that they are coming up across internally or if the company does have a cash flow issue. There are real business reasons behind not spending more, and it might be as minor as "we are exploring another channel that is proving to be quite costly right now" and wont' have anything to do with you or your work.

Good luck! This is the hard part of consulting

A few things to add to this great response, ad type will make a huge impact in your overall performance. Some sites have better CTRs on different ad sizes or types - image v text. It's very important to run all sizes throughout your test.

I agree that display campaigns will suck up your budget, if you can spend the time to manage them well, then they can really turn a great profit for you - branding/remarketing or not. I didn't believe that was possible until I started working under a manager with 10 years of experience in both SEM & Media buys. It takes longer to crack the Display nut than it does to make a profit on Search, but I highly recommend it. There's a significant learning curve but stick with it and keep testing.

Hey Garth,

These are all great options listed, and I'm sure there are more that you can explore (don't forget Gemini, Yahoo's native advertising platform).

I would like to briefly touch though on the part of your post where you mentioned that Google is too expensive. Do you have an experienced person managing your PPC efforts? There are many things that could be contributing to the expense of your Google campaign. If you haven't looked into having a third party review your campaigns, I would highly recommend it. (but don't have Google look, they just want you to spend more money.)

There are different solutions for different issues. The one you have specifically referenced is a offline call tracking. I have used several different companies: IfByPhone, Invoca, Mongoose Metrics, Marchex, CallTrackingMetrics. Each one offers some level of call recording and all have caller ID. Some can integrate with Google AdWords directly to see where calls came from, and others may be able to merge with your CRM. They can get pricey depending on your needs, but it's good to review everything.

With call tracking, javascript replaces your phone number with a unique call number that associates itself to that keyword's GCLID (Google CLick ID). That information is then pinged in their system and will show up in their system or in several other areas depending on your chosen settings.

Hi EGOL,

I see that you have quite the opinion on SEM! I think you have some really great tidbits in your response (like not trusting published recommendations because it can be coming from someone like Google who just wants your money, recommending to do the math before new advertisers dive in, and that there are too many variables to determine if you will be profitable your first go). However, there are a few areas that I think are necessary to provide an alternative opinion on for the sake of discussion and public information.

I was completely in agreeance with you until you mentioned that people who run SEM accounts don't care about profit margins and business owners barely know their own profit margins. I've been working in paid search for 5+ years and never once have I ever met a business owner or dedicated paid search specialist who wasn't concerned about their profits and overall business impact.

I'm glad that you've done the math and have decided that it isn't going to work out for your business, but there is a lot about PPC that doesn't fit well with the math - unless you assumed a 10 QS for every KW and your product still doesn't sell in that atmosphere. As you gain positive account history, you essentially get "discounts" on your bids. From my experience, the Keyword Planner is only a tool to give you a general idea of what you will need to bid and rarely have I seen my actual bids match exactly what the planner suggested - they've been both up & down on the suggested CPC. It's very difficult to assume profit or volume of conversions in a system that is very fluid.

As you've already mentioned, when working in PPC it's very possible the target market can be quite competitive. If you're in a competitive niche it will be harder to turn a profit on a per-product basis. And even that has conditional standards against it, like how large your orders are, how many times you have return customers, how optimized your PLAs are, if you're driving the right traffic to the right pages, your conversion funnel. If you make it difficult at any piece of the process then PPC is going to be costly because the experience is poor and competitor experiences are likely much higher quality.

I agree that there are many opportunities for failure, however there are just as many times PPC succeeds - or else companies wouldn't continue paying for traffic or putting $500,000+ a month into Google AdWords.

This is also a question from someone who is interested in experimenting and seeking generalized recommendations for how much to spend with no inclination to their intended market or vertical. Things that may not work for one company might work incredibly well for another.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your response on the aspects of what make PPC hard, but I definitely challenge the notion that it's not worth investigating.

Hey Crystal, how is this going? Are you still seeing 0% bounce rates?

Martijn is completely correct. Organic & Paid in no way assist in the other's performance.

The piece of information you are lacking in this is what keywords are people coming to your site for. Your brand, of course. but there are other nuances to organic that keeps your time on site up than from PPC. You might not want to be using your home page for your PPC Brand traffic either. It might be too broad for the fast clickers who tend to click on ads. Making sure that you're sending them to a landing page on your site that answers pertinent questions most users are looking for will liekly help with your time on site.

Also, make sure that your PPC account isn't broad matching to your brand name. You will want to make sure you're using a modified broad match on your brand and keeping your PPC account in good shape or else it will pull in irrelevent traffic and not perform as well as it should.

The AdX network requires a significant amount of finessing to get it running smoothly. I know you make more money from DoubleClick but running Adsense allows you to stop spinning you wheels as frequently. It's a little less intensive to manage. With DoubleClick, you are going to need to do a lot more scheduling. Your settings may be restricting other advertisers from being able to appear on your site. I would play around more with the settings until you are serving more ads.

Competition does matter, and the landscape does change based on different keywords. Most head terms don't have significant amounts of competition because they are too vague. Something like Wedding Cakes is not a good PPC term when you are looking to make money on your money as fast as you can.

It's always best to try bidding on the term (especially on Broad Match Modified) to see how it performs for you, but it is highly likely you will receive a low QS and a low CTR and higher CPCs which make it not as important of a term when you are looking at everything from a returns or profits perspective.

As far as low v high volumes for keywords, it's not something that I take into significant consideration unless my client is trying to get close to a specific number or is very concerned about a specific keyword. PPC is about throwing out a wide net for low, mid and high volume keywords, bidding on all of them, and learning over time what creates good return for your particular niche. What works for my business might be a horrible strategy for your business.

You will only be able to monetize them if you have ads enabled on your current channel and are targeting the channel with the real estate ads. However, this is not a good strategy. Real Estate may not share the same user base and then your video ads will not have been beneficial.

I'm not familiar with a tool to track all 3. However you can link Google Webmaster Tools in AdWords to show more insights for organic rankings. Read more about it here.

Also, I want to make sure you're not leaving any profit on the table. According to WordStream, 64% of google clicks are on adverts. If I were you, I would just double check that strategy and maybe plan to run some tests to ensure it will net your client more profit than without the adwords traffic.

Google shopping listings are probably some of the most profitable types of ads I've ever run. I would not expect to rank organically for shopping products and make up for lowering bids on the product/removing it completely.

Hey Christopher,

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's anything you can do for the ad copy relevance. This is definitely the problem with all competitive advertising in PPC.

Something to try, if you're super set on this tactic, would be to use the competitor name in your descriptions by saying "An alternative to X". I've never seen that done before. Most people have TMs filed with Google so your copy will be denied, and typically as soon as they find that you are using their brand in your copy they will file it with Google so there's not much you can do.

Good Luck!

Google is constantly testing things, and your competitive market may have shifted. Maybe your position didn't change, but your competitors have improved? making you a less desirable choice? UI changes have a significant impact on how people use the web. Google went though several ad colors before they found the one that induced the highest number of clicks. and I bet they still test it.

Hey, how did this work? Did you get it to track appropriately?

Alick & IssueTrack are right on point regarding ad copy. The reason no one has automated ad copy or adwords management yet (to complete non-human interaction automation) is because it generates zero results. If you're looking to be very hands off with the account, you should set your expectations now that it's not going to do what you want it to do.

I think what you're primarily seeking are the Google Product Listing Ads. After your one time setup you shouldn't have to edit them again, but they need to be managed on an ongoing basis by a human with the knowledge of how to make them profitable and generate the volume you need.

Each time you update your product feed in the Google Merchant account, it will be translated into your ads - but that doesn't mean your bids have decreased with trending amounts of merch on hand.  And when you add new products, your ads won't auto-populate.

I would recommend github for finding a developer if you still want to continue on with this course of action. I haven't tried it, but I think that an API would be better than a script for what you think you want to accomplish.

I would suggest doing some keyword research from the Keyword Tool in AdWords to find exact match terms that align with your product, then using the +broad +modified match type to gather volume around it. Run it on CPC with significantly lower bids on broad and higher bids on exact.

I don't understand this portion though: you are a reseller of this product and other people have it as well OR you are a reseller of this product that is coming out but no one has it yet?

Either way, does anyone know about the product's release? is this a hard sell? You might need to do some content network retargeting from your current traffic sources to show people who already know that you're a good company that you will have this product release.

If you have very little traffic and are trying to get up and running then you might want to consider content network (aka Display advertising) to drum up some awareness. Brand building can be done with search advertising as well, keep your queries focused around your product but don't grab the short tail high volume keywords or they will eat your budget.

For the reasons above, you should noindex them, but do make sure that the Google AdWords bot can crawl them - if this is the same bot as the organic bot, then don't noindex. I heard from a reliable source that noindexing will lower your ability to gain a higher Quality Score as google doesn't know what your page is about. If you are using Dynamic Search Ads then you will need to point those to the seo pages on your site, not your ppc pages.

There are several reasons why AdWords & GA data won't match up, and this is one of them, but don't ever expect them to be the same.

I know we keep harping that things need to be linked appropriately and I'm glad you've gotten it handled, Anna, but it's the most common reason for any real mis-attribution. And by most common I mean nearly everyone gets it wrong Glad you're on the right track here.

There is also an attribution modeling between GA & AdWords. AdWords is a first touch attribution interface while generally GA is last touch. Though your site is relatively new, if you have any return visitors at all from brand then they will appear as Organic and not PPC.

Knowing that GWT says you don't have any non-brand traffic and you are sure you don't rank for anything, where is the traffic going? What are the landing pages you are using for PPC? Are they different than the pages organic traffic is getting traffic on? (side note: please tell me that you aren't sending PPC traffic to the home page )