I’m currently running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Yahoo (can’t afford Google!) for my new cheap theatre ticket site, which is themed from the main Cheap Event Tickets site.

September is apparently peak booking time for theatre tickets in the UK, so I decided to go for a big push on some of the most popular & well known London shows.

I’ve set up targeted ad groups – for these shows, containing well researched long tail keywords (which all have a decent KEI) and have carefully worded the ads, drawing on existing ads by well established companies in this sector. Most of the ads are displaying ticket prices, so the “clicker” knows what to expect & won’t click just to see what the price is.

Most of the ads are displaying in position 1 on Yahoo (these bids are around £1, on Google you are looking at around £3 for these keywords!!!) & the click through rates are currently between 3.5% & 14%, which I believe is not bad.

So, following all the rules & strategies I’ve read over the last couple of years for successful PPC advertising & marketing, how are the ads doing?

Well, I’ve had ONE SALE, from 44 clicks! Admittedly it was a decent sale & my commission will be £12 from it, but it has cost me £25 to get it!!!! On Google, I’d have paid triple that, without any guarantee of more sales. The companies that advertise theatre tickets on Google presumably make more money per sale than I do, but I still don’t see how they can make a profit when they’re paying such huge amounts for clicks!

It doesn’t seem possible to make a profit from affiliate marketing using Google (or even Yahoo), unless you’re using such obscure terms, that you then really should be able to obtain natural search engine positions for if they’re THAT obscure.

So, once again I’ll be grateful to break even on PPC & would love to know if any other affiliate marketers makes a profit from Google Adwords/Yahoo Search Marketing?!

I’ve been using IBP for a few years now & have found it a very useful tool to assess the search engine optimisation of both my own sites & those of clients.

A new version has just been released by Axandra – IBP 11.5, with a much improved keyword tool.

Finding the best keywords for search engine optimization is crucial if you want to succeed with your website. For this reason, they have completely revamped the keyword tool in the new IBP version.

The new keyword tool in IBP helps you to find good keywords as quickly as possible:

Just enter a keyword and IBP will quickly return the following information:

• keyword suggestions for the entered keyword
• the estimated number of monthly searches for the keywords on Google
• the number of search results for the keywords on Google
• the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) for these keywords

A unique keyword database + support of the official Google keyword tool!

IBP’s keyword tool uses the unique keyword database of KeywordIndex.com. KeywordIndex offers you a unique database that cannot be accessed through any other keyword tool on the Internet. KeywordIndex.com provides you with 38 million unique English keywords, and 20 million unique German keywords.

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Find keywords in 13 different languages

IBP’s new keyword tool will also help you if you’re looking for keywords in other languages. In addition to the keyword database of KeywordIndex.com, IBP’s keyword tool can also access keyword suggestions of Google, Amazon and YouTube. You can even access the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool without entering a captcha.

You can use IBP’s keyword tool to find keywords in thirteen languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new IBP version also creates targeted keyword lists for Google AdWords, long tail keywords and much more. It even shows you the Google AdWords adgroup score while collecting your keywords to make it as easy as possible to get a high Google AdWords QualityScore.

Top 10 rankings or your money back

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Got this e-mail from Google today:

***Important news regarding your account***

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that your AdWords account will be upgraded to the new AdWords interface within the next few working days. After that time, you’ll no longer be able to switch back to the previous AdWords interface to manage your campaigns. The new interface doesn’t change how ads run, so bidding, ranking, Quality Score and the rest of ad serving will remain the same after the upgrade.

We think that you’ll like how AdWords has changed to meet your needs. Campaign management is now more efficient, with tools and reports that are easier to find and use. We’ve continued to add features and controls based on advertiser feedback and now the new interface is ready to be used exclusively.

We know that it can often be time-consuming to learn a new interface, so we’ve developed help materials to make it easier for you. To quickly familiarise yourself with what’s changing about campaign management and to watch videos about the new features, visit our new interface website: http://www.google.com/intl/en_GB/adwords/newinterface/

Should you have any questions as you’re getting up to speed, you can also use our full Help Centre (or simply look at the Help box in your account): http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/?hl=en_GB

We hope that you find the new interface easy to learn and we hope that the improvements have a positive impact on your business. As always, thank you for advertising with AdWords!

Yours sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

So, the fact that I told them I hate it & haven’t seen many people complimenting it for it’s speed or usability, they’re just going ahead anyway. I’m starting to expect this from the Google Empire – marching on its way to world domination!!

What makes a world dominated by Google, any more attractive than one dominated by Microsoft?! There’s no room for the little man & basically you “get what you’re given”! The new interface is going to be imposed on users despite the fact that it’s slow, clunky & for me, unusable!

Along with the ridiculous PPC prices, it’s one more reason to stay off of Adwords!

I received an e-mail from Google, telling me about their new search-based keyword tool!

They state “the Search-based Keyword Tool compares the content of your website against actual Google search queries to provide a list of relevant keywords which you don’t currently have in your AdWords campaigns. This new tool can help your business to grow and innovate on your keyword choices by taking the guesswork out of the process. Rather than adding keywords to an ad campaign based on what one thinks a user might search on, this tool enables you to manage your keywords based on what you know users are searching on.”

I visited the tool & was presented with a list of over 800 keyphrases, which Google says have been searched for & appear on relevant pages in my site. I decided to pick all the phrases that had a suggested cost per click up to and including £1.00 (246 of them).

I’ve spent the last 4 hours adding the phrases to my AdWords campaign, targeting the landing pages to the ones indicated by the Tool & using the suggested bids. However, as soon as I checked the keywords, all bar one are not displaying due to the bid amount being too low (even though it was the one suggested!). The quality score of the landing pages are also deemed poor, despite them being the ones that sparked off the whole process!

So, thanks Google; for suggesting I use your new tool; only to find that despite following all your suggestions, you STILL don’t display any of my ads unless I bid some ridiculous amount per click! I’ve just basically wasted an entire afternoon on this nonsense & on top of it, the new interface is rubbish! It’s slow, jerky & very frustrating to use.

What on earth is the point in giving me this information, which appears to be totally useless? Their e-mail ended:

“The Search-based Keyword tool actually found 2954 recently-searched keywords related to your site. For each suggested keyword, the tool will also show you:

• The average number of searches per month
• The competitive bidding level for each term
• The estimated bid to appear in the top three ad positions
• The suggested landing page for each keyword

To see all 2954 new keywords and decide which ones to add to your campaigns, go to www.google.com/sktool, sign in to your AdWords account, and enter your website URL. We hope that you find the Search-based Keyword Tool useful in driving even more business to your website through Google AdWords!”

Errrrrr! No it isn’t useful, has wasted my time & has not given me any new (& reasonably priced), keyphrases that I can bid on!

I will definitely not be returning to AdWords any time soon!

I’ve recently dipped my toe back into the world of Google Adwords!

Recently I have concentrated my efforts on Miva & Yahoo PPC campaigns because they are still affordable for particular sites, whereas Google is not. But, with so many UK users only using Google for their internet searching, is it worthwhile; how many potential customers are going to my opposition?

So, I have once again bitten the bullet & decided to run a campaign on Google for Cashback Shopper, with a daily limit of £5. But, as the minimum bid amount quickly went from £2, to £2.50 & then in some cases to £5, is this value for money, or just a rip off?!!

Although the minimum bid to activate the keyword [cashback] is £5, the actual average CPC over the last week has been £2.35. However, this is still taking half my daily budget for clicks – two clicks & my campaign was off / With a CTR of 4.28%, maybe it’s not worth running this phrase & working only on longer tail keyphrases which will leave the campaign running longer and with a higher CTR. The table below shows how many clicks I’m getting for my £5 over the last 7 days & Google reckons I’m not receiving 82% of my eligible impressions!!

18 Aug Campaign activity: 4 Clicks 5.24
19 Aug Campaign activity: 7 Clicks 4.99
20 Aug Campaign activity: 6 Clicks 5.10
21 Aug Campaign activity: 4 Clicks 5.01
22 Aug Campaign activity: 7 Clicks 5.00
23 Aug Campaign activity: 6 Clicks 4.75
24 Aug Campaign activity: 5 Clicks 5.26

Google suggests a daily budget of £27.34!!!! Is this beyond the reach of many affiliate marketers? It certainly seems beyond mine!! But would those clicks convert to “sales”? This is the choice that has to be made & for many new PPC advertisers, it can be an expensive one – I know, I’ve been there!

My overall CTR for the last week has been 6.98% at an average CPC of £0.91, so this isn’t too bad. Purchases made through the site have increased substantially over the last couple of weeks & the new £50 prize draw competition I am running should create more sign ups from friend referrals, at much better value than PPC!!!

Because of the decent ROI I seem to be getting from the Google PPC campaign, I have suspended all my other search engine campaigns for now & have upped the daily Adwords spend to £10 (not yet the £27.34 recommended!) and will keep monitoring the CTR & ROI closely.

Naturally, if spending continues to grow, it would certainly be worth re-investing the income back into further advertising!