Tag Archives: ppc

Microsoft PPC broad match goes nuts

With Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) you can bid on 3 different match types: exact, phrase and broad. These match types take a successively broader interpretation of your search term. Broad match has to be used with care, but can be useful for casting a wider net. However broad match seems to have gone a bit nuts for Microsoft pay per click. Witness these recent results:

broad match keywordsearch term matched
perfecttablecore muscle machine
perfecttablemy plate
perfecttableto be able to
perfecttablenumista threepence
perfecttablesplitwise
plans tableofloxacin tablets
table plan softwaresmall business software
table plan softwarehr software for small business

What!? How is “numista threepence” in any way a match for “perfecttable”? That is stretching the concept of ‘broad match’ to weird levels. I have deleted most of my broad match keywords. Is anyone else seeing this?

Google CPA bidding goes wild

I have been using Google’s AdWords Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding for a number of years. I set the maximum I was prepared to pay for a conversion  (e.g. a successful install of my software). AdWords then set the bid price to try and get me conversions at that price or less. It worked pretty well for a number years and it saved me a lot of time tweaking bid prices. But Google recently phased out Maximum CPA bidding and forced me to switch to Target CPA bidding. From this point I could only specify the average price I was prepared to pay per conversion. This is where it all started to go wrong.

AdWords started to bid crazy prices. Check out the screenshot below. You can see that in each case the average Cost Per Click (CPC) is more than the CPA price. For example, in the first row I have set £0.50 as the price I am prepared to pay for conversions from the ‘seating charts’ ad group. Typically about 10% of people who click on one of my Adwords ads will install the software and trigger a conversion (which is fairly standard). So a £0.50 CPA means that AdWords should be bidding somewhere around £0.05 per click. Google knows this, because they have vast amounts of data from my AdWords account (11 years worth). But the average price for the last 3 clicks was £1.17 per click. WTF Google – that’s my money!

Given that the base version of my software costs £19.95 (one time fee) there is no way I can make a profit at £1.17 per click. Not all the bids are this crazy. But there are enough crazy bids to put my whole AdWords campaign into a tailspin. So I have been forced to switch back to manual CPC bidding. If you have also been forced to switch from Maximum CPA to Target CPA bidding, then I suggest you keep a careful eye on your cost per click.

Keyword Funnel is now FREE

Adwords Keyword FunnelI launched Keyword Funnel last year. It was only my second software product launch in 10 years. Keyword Funnel is a utility to help AdWords advertisers efficiently add hundreds or thousands keywords to their campaigns. It was based on some tools I wrote for running my own AdWords campaigns.

It was a commercial flop. I sold a few licences, but not many. Most telling was the lack of any engagement. There were very few emails from website visitors and not many people who visited the website downloaded the free trial. There wasn’t even much interaction from the people that did buy licences. This was very much in contrast to my PerfectTablePlan product, where there was much more engagement straight away.

I could have tried to pivot or push on through using some of the stuff I have learnt over the last 10 years, but it felt like kicking a dead horse up a hill. Better to focus my finite energy and resources on more fruitful areas. I also decided that I just didn’t like AdWords enough that I wanted to spend all day thinking about it (and that was before my recent falling out with Google). I didn’t want to take money from people for a product that had no real future and for which I had lost enthusiasm. So I pulled the plug within a few months of launch. But it seems a shame to waste the work that went into it, so I am re-releasing it as a free product in the hope that someone will find it useful and to increase my luck surface area. You’re welcome.

As far as I can determine, the reasons it failed are:

It didn’t solve a real problem for enough people. This is the reason most products fail. I like to run my AdWords campaigns with hundreds or thousands of ‘long tail’ keywords. I assumed that plenty of other people did to. And, if they didn’t, they would once they had a tool that made it practical to do so, especially in the face or ever increasing competition and bid prices. But not many other people seem interested in long tail campaigns. I should have researched this more.

The AdWords market seems to be sharply divided into amateurs (people running small campaigns for their own products) and professionals (people running multiple large campaigns for other people). The amateurs have a million other things to do and want to spend as little time as possible on AdWords. In fact most of them seem to set up a campaign and then completely ignore it (bad idea). The professionals are happy to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a tool, but they want it to do everything, including creating ads and setting bids. There doesn’t seem to be much of a market in between for low cost utilities, such as Keyword Funnel. I’m not sure how I could have found this out without trying to sell into this market.

I found it hard to get any traffic. I am not an ‘Internet famous’ authority on AdWords. I wrote to various AdWords bloggers offering them free licences. But most of them seemed to be associated with other AdWords tools and weren’t going to promote a competing tool. I also tried an AdWords campaign, but unsurprisingly the competition was very strong.  It was hard to get clicks at a price I could afford as competitors with more expensive products could afford to spend a lot more per click. Also conversion rates on the clicks I did get were poor.

The user interface wasn’t perhaps as intuitive as it could have been. I didn’t really think enough about workflow.

Failing is never fun, but I knew it was a very real risk when I started and I did learn some useful lessons.

Before I wrote any code, I tried to do some validation of the product by talking to friends and people at conferences who used AdWords, including some AdWords professionals. There seemed to be some interest and I managed to get 60 people signed up to the beta mailing list. But I found it hard to get people to understand my vision of the product. That should have been the first warning signal. But, being a developer at heart, I used that as an excuse to build a beta.

I did the validation back-to-front. I mostly pitched them my idea for Keyword Funnel and then tried to gauge their interest. That doesn’t really work very well. What I should have done was ask people what problems they were having with AdWords and then waited to see if any of them mentioned ‘adding lots of keywords’, ‘grouping keywords into ad groups’ etc.

As I released new beta versions of the product, the initial interest seemed to peter out. I probably should have killed it at this point. But I persuaded myself that, having come this far, I might was well release it (paying customers being the only true validation). This was more down the the ambiguous nature of the feedback than sunk cost fallacy.

I followed my own advice and cut some corners in the development, but not enough. The planned 2 months part-time, ended up being 6 months part-time. I wasted time on activities such as: having a logo designed, writing licensing code, writing detailed documentation and setting up payment processing. In retrospect I should have waited until I was sure there was a market for Keyword Funnel before I bothered with any of that. When I launched my new Hyper Plan product I released a public beta within 5 weeks of starting work on it (part-time). I offered it free for several months (it just died on a certain date). I only added licensing code and set up payment processing when I felt there was sufficient interest to justify the effort. Hyper Plan just has a 1 page quick-start guide and the logo was designed in 10 minutes by me (both still on the ‘to do’ list to improve soon).

It is hard to get noticed in a new market. I knew this already, but perhaps I had forgotten how much hard work it was in the early days of PerfectTablePlan. As I already have an audience of thousands of event planners with PerfectTablePlan, it is much easier to cross-sell them Hyper Plan than it would be to create that audience from scratch.

Having had one successful (in my terms) product, I was perhaps a bit arrogant and didn’t spend as much time researching the market as I should have done. But validating a software product is hard, especially when it’s a bit different to everything else out there (I’m not interested in copying existing products). I had no real idea how successful any of my products would be before I launched them. PerfectTablePlan was much more successful than I expected. Keyword Funnel much less successful than I expected.

While the opportunity cost of Keyword Funnel was quite high, in terms of cash, I only spent a couple of thousands dollars. This was mostly on the website design and I reused a lot of that for Hyper Plan.

You can download Keyword Funnel here. Despite its lack of commercial success, it does (I think) do some pretty cool things:

  • Cleans up lists of keywords which you can import from various sources (e.g. removes foreign characters, capitalization and duplicates).
  • It has a nice keyword multiplier (much better than the Google equivalent IHMO).
  • Removes an unwanted keyword from all phrases in a single click.
  • Allows you to analyze all the phrases a keyword appears in.
  • Groups keywords into related ad groups.
  • Produces output in a form you can read straight into AdWords via AdWords Editor.

It’s completely free, you don’t even have to give me your email address. Maybe I will find a way to make some money off it at some point in the future (NB/ I am not interested in taking on AdWords consulting work at present).

Thankfully my new Hyper Plan product is doing much better than Keyword Funnel did. I wrote a bit about my approach to launching Hyper Plan here. It is too early to tell if it well do as well as PerfectTablePlan, but I am very happy with how it is doing so far.

Are you wasting your AdWords budget on in-app ads?

2 out of the last 3 AdWords campaigns I have looked at for consulting customers were spending substantial amounts of money on worthless in-app ads, without even realising it. Feast your eyes on the following:

in-app placement ads$1,071.04 spent on clicks from a single game app, that resulted in 0 trials of the software product being advertised. Hardly surprising given that it was a B2B app that cost around $1000. On further investigation this company was spending a substantial percentage of its AdWords budget on completely useless clicks from in-app ads. Ouch.

And this is from a different AdWords account for another B2B software company:

in-app display ads

Many of the apps in the iOS and Android app stores are now funded by in-app advertising. The creator of the infamous Flappy Bird game claimed to be making tens of thousands of dollars per day like this.

Flappy Bird In-App ads

(Note that the ad shown in the screenshot is not related to either of the two companies I mentioned above).

At least the ad is well away from the ‘play’ button. Some, less scrupulous, app makers place the ad in such a way that it is easy to accidentally click on it.

Who would want to pay for in-app ads, knowing that most of the traffic will be accidental clicks from frustrated gamers (many of them children) just trying to get to the next screen? If you run ads on the Google display (content) network, it might be YOU. Google started showing display ads in apps some time ago and it seems that all existing display campaigns were automatically opted in. Worse still, the apps they are advertising in appear to have no relevance at all to your content campaign keywords.

App makers get some money, the public gets free apps and Google makes mega bucks. The advertiser is financing the whole thing and getting (in many cases) nothing in return. But don’t feel too smug. If you have a display campaign that you aren’t carefully monitoring, you might also be throwing away money. To find out:

  • Log in adwords.google.com.
  • Click on All online campaigns.
  • Choose a sensible time frame, e.g. the last 6 months.
  • Click on the Display network tab.
  • Click on Placements.
  • Click on the Cost column to order from highest to lowest cost.
  • Look down the Placement column for entries that start with Mobile App.

Adwords display placements report

While you are there, it is also worth checking the relevance to your product of the other sites you are running display ads on.

Hopefully no horror story awaits you. If it does, you can exclude the offending placements to stop your ads appearing there again.

exclude AdWords placement

But this is a bit like playing whack-a-mole, as you will be continually excluding new apps (I haven’t found a way to opt out of in-app ads wholesale). Alternatively, just pause your display campaigns. Personally I gave up on display ads some time ago. The conversion ratios were so miserable (much lower than search ads) that I could never make any money on them.

If you have been stung for hundreds or thousands of dollars, it may be worth complaining to Google, to see if you can get any money back on the grounds:

  • You never explicitly opted in to in-app ads.
  • The apps your ads appear in bear no relationship to the search terms in your content campaign.

I have no idea if that will be successful, but it might be worth a try.

Google are continually changing the rules of the AdWords game and you would be naive to assume they are doing so with your best interests at heart. If you are running an AdWords campaign you must monitor it continuously or bad things will happen.

Related articles:

5 things you can do to improve your AdWords profitability in the next 30 minutes

Lots of people set up AdWords campaigns and then leave them to run unattended for months at a time. Bad. Idea. I know, I know, you’ve got a million other things to. So I am going to give you a very short and very specific list of things you can do to improve your AdWords account. Right now. No excuses.

1. Check your ‘Geographic’ report for under performing countries

Different countries can perform wildly differently for the same keywords, ads and bid prices. This is particularly the case if you compare rich industrialised countries with developing countries.

  1. Choose a campaign and date range.
  2. Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Geographic.
  3. Remove any geographic columns apart from Country/Region.

adwords geographic report

Are some countries performing considerably worse in terms of click-through rate, cost per click or cost per conversion? If so, depending on how differently the countries are performing:

  1. Stop targeting the under-performing countries; or
  2. Make a duplicate of that campaign for the under-performing counties, but bid less ( It is easy to duplicate a campaign in the free Google Adwords Editor); or
  3. Use a negative bid adjustment for the under-performing countries:

adwords geographic adjustments

2. Check your ‘Time>Day of the week’ report

Some products sell much better on certain days of the week. For example, B2B products probably sell better during the week than they do at the weekend. The opposite might be true for some B2C products. You can easily check this.

  1. Choose a campaign and date range.
  2. Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Time>Day of the week.

adwords day of week reportAre some days of the week performing significantly better or worse than others? If so, you can schedule your bids to be more or less on different days of the week.

adwords bid adjustment schedule

3. Get rid of the dead wood

Keywords with low quality score and low click-through rates can drag your whole campaign down. You can easily set up filters to find the culprits.

adwords filteradwords filterAnd then pause or delete these keywords.adwords delete keywords

4. Add sitelink extensions

If your ad appears at the top of the page, you can optionally show sitelink extensions that hyperlink to particular pages. These increase the amount of screen real estate and text available to you and they don’t cost any extra. What’s not to like?

adwords-sitelink-extensionsTo add sitelink extensions:

  1. Select the appropriate campaign.
  2. Click on the Ad extensions tab and select Sitelinks extensions.
  3. Click the +EXTENSION button.

site link extensions

5. Check your ‘Search terms’ report for negative keywords

Unless you are only bidding on exact match, the queries that result in your ads being shown are not the same as the keywords you supply to Google. You need to use negative keywords to further control which search queries your ads appear for.

For example, if you are selling Windows backup software and bidding on backup software (as broad or phrase match) your ad may appear every time someone searches on mac backup software. This hurts you twice: wasted clicks (which costs you money directly) and reduced click-through rates (which reduces your quality scores and costs you money indirectly). You can avoid these issues, just by adding mac as a negative keyword.

To look for negative keywords:

  1. Choose a campaign and date range.
  2. Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Search terms.

dimensions search terms report keywords

You will see a list of the searches that actually triggered your ads. Are there any searches there that shouldn’t be? If so, add the offending words as negative keywords, (either at campaign or ad group level).

Plug:  My Keyword Funnel AdWords tool can be very useful for sifting through large amounts of search queries to find negative keywords. Just paste in thousands of keywords from your search terms report and look at each keyword by frequency and context.

keyword funnel adwords tool

(This article was first published on www.keywordfunnel.com)

Exploit the long tail of Adwords PPC with Keyword Funnel

Adwords Keyword FunnelI released my new product Keyword Funnel today. It is a tool to help Adwords advertisers improve the profitability of their Adwords campaigns.

I have found the best way to get a decent volume of affordable conversions from Google Adwords is to use a ‘long tail’ strategy. For my Perfect Table Plan product there are a few ‘head’ keyword phrases that have high search volumes, such as “table plan” and “seating arrangement”. But these aren’t very well targeted (“table plan” might have been typed in by someone who wants drawing plans to make their own dining room table). Also lots of other people are bidding on these head phrases, pushing the bid prices up. This combination of poor targeting and high click prices makes it hard to make a profit on head keywords.

So I prefer to concentrate on ‘tail’ terms such as “table plan software mac” and “wedding seating arrangements program”. These are much better targeted, so convert a lot better. The clicks are also cheaper because less people are bidding on them. However the search volumes are much lower, so you need a lot of these tail terms to get a reasonable amount of traffic. At least hundreds, and preferably thousands. Hence ‘long tail’.

the long tail of Adwords PPCThe good news is that you can mine lots of different sources of data for these long tail keywords. For example you can extract keywords from your web logs, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools accounts. Even though many searches are now listed with the keywords ‘not provided’ by Google, it still isn’t hard to come up with thousands of candidate keyword phrases. The bad news is that they aren’t in a usable form. Before you can import them into Adwords you need to:

  • Sort out duplicate phrases, foreign characters, capitalization and other noise.
  • Remove unwanted and negative keywords.
  • Group keyword phrases into tightly focussed adgroups.
  • Put the results in a form Adwords understands.

I tried to use Excel for this. But, marvellous tool though it is, it really wasn’t up to the job. So I wrote my own tool. This worked very well, but it wasn’t a commercial quality product. So I started again, from scratch 6 months ago. Keyword Funnel is the result.

Keyword Funnel allows you to add hundreds of keywords to new or existing Adwords campaigns in minutes, rather than hours. This makes long tail Adwords campaigns with hundreds or thousands of keywords a much more realistic proposition. It also allows you to set up new campaigns in a fraction of the time.

Keyword Funnel is available for Windows and Mac. It is priced at a one-time fee of just $49 (up to 2 Adwords accounts) or $99 (unlimited Adwords accounts). You can download a free trial from the website and it comes with a 60-day money back guarantee. The website is currently a little unpolished, but the software is well tested and robust. Any feedback is welcome.

Try Keyword Funnel now!

Adwords vs Twitter vs LinkedIn ads, a small experiment

I am running a course for people who want to create their own commercial software products. Promoting the course has been a challenge. How do you reach a programmer, sitting in his cubicle, dreaming about making a living from selling his own software? In particular, how do you reach ones who might pay to attend a weekend  course in the UK in March? Most of the attendees of the last course came via this blog. But I also want to try to reach people who have never heard of this blog. So I have been experimenting with paid ads via Twitter, LinkedIn and Adwords. Crucially, all 3 of them allow me to restrict my advertising to people in the UK. I thought the initial results were interesting, so I am sharing them here.

Adwords

Google Adwords allows you to show your ads alongside organic (non-paid) search results when people type relevant phrases. But it is hard to think of phrases my target audience (and only my target audience) might be searching on. Terms such as “software marketing” and “software sales” are too vague. In the end I came up with about 200 phrases, including  “sell my software”, “software startup”, “start a software company”, “name software product” and “sell software online”.

One of my Adwords ads (I tested several).

One of my Adwords ads.

But there just aren’t a lot of searches on these phrases. Bidding between £0.25 and £1 per click (depending on relevance) for UK searches over the last 47 days I have managed a meagre:

  • Impressions: 1.7k
  • Clicks: 20
  • CTR: 1.13%
  • CPC: £0.31

Looking at the Dimensions>Search terms report to see the phrases typed by the people who clicked, the clicks seem fairly well targeted. And my impression share is >25% for the majority of the adgroups, so I don’t think increasing my bids is going to make a big difference to the amount of traffic. Adwords just doesn’t work that well unless there are unambiguous phrases your potential customers are actively searching on. I haven’t tried display (content) ads, as these have never worked well for me in the past.

LinkedIn

I also tried running LinkedIn ads targeted at people who are based in the UK and list programming skills such as “Programming”, “SaaS”, “Subversion”, “Git”, and “C++”. The minimum bid per click is $2.00 (ouch), so I bid $2.05 per click.

linkedin-ad

One of my linkedIn ads.

The result over 12 days have been:

  • Impressions: 133k
  • Clicks: 54
  • CTR: 0.04%
  • CPC: $2.00
  • Leads: 2

That is a good number of impressions, but a horrible CTR. Looking at the breakdown of clicks by industry and job function in the reporting, the clicks seem fairly well targeted. A ‘lead’ is where someone expresses an interest and LinkedIn allows you to send them a message. But you don’t get their email address and it appears you can only message them through LinkedIn once.

Twitter

I paid to put a sponsored tweet in the timeline of Twitter users in the UK, based on who they follow. I picked the Twitter handles of 4 other people who blog about bootstrapping.  Note that Twitter claims they won’t show ads to all the followers of these Twitter handles, but to people who are interested in similar things to the people who follow those Twitter handles. That seems a rather hair-splitting distinction, but I guess it allows them to claim they aren’t exploiting the popularity of their customers directly. I bid a maximum of £0.75 per ‘engagement’ (click, retweet or follow). I didn’t include an image with the tweet as I couldn’t really think of anything relevant at the time (a classroom?). The text of the sponsored tweet was:

Sell your own software. Be your own boss! 2 day course, 22/23 March, Wiltshire, England. Full details at: https://successfulsoftware.net/software-business-training-course/

The result of this 1 sponsored tweet over 2 days has been:

  • Impressions: 5.8k
  • Clicks: 174
  • CTR: 3%
  • CPC: £0.29
  • Favorites: 7
  • Retweets: 2
  • Follows: 1

Given the small number of favorites, retweets and follows, it is hard to know how well targeted this was. I guess a 3% CTR implies it was fairly targeted. The fact that the CPC was a lot less than my maximum bid may be down to Twitter ads being a relatively new medium, without too much competition (yet).

The reports have left me confused. Twitter report 3,112 impressions and 106 clicks for followers of my own Twitter handle @successfulsw.

twitter-reportingBut:

  • I didn’t tick the Also target your followers check box, as it seems idiotic to be paying for tweeting to people that I can tweet to for free.
  • I don’t have 3k Twitter followers.
  • I direct messaged a few of my Twitter followers based in the UK and they said they hadn’t seen a sponsored tweet from me.

This was the response when I queried Twitter support:

Thanks for the information. We have investigated this issue and we can see that your handle is in your @handle section of your campaign, this is because implicit targeting was enabled (targeted followers with similar interest as your followers), that is why your handle is showing there. We have confirmed you have a nullcasted Tweet and this Tweet is not showing to your followers. We realize this may be confusing and we’ll work with our product team to improve how this looks on the user interface.

The reporting of the interests of the people that engaged doesn’t make sense either. It says that of the 5.8k impressions, 4.7k were to people interested in “Hip hop and rap” and 4.5k to people interested in “NFL football”. We don’t even play NFL football in the UK!

twitter reporting interestsThis was the response when I queried Twitter support:

I understand it’s confusing, and I’ll share this feedback with my team. What you’re seeing is a cumulative total of paid/earned/organic engagements. This total also considers secondary account signals eg a users prime interest is photography, and a secondary interest in baseball. I can assure you that you paid for primary interests only, and organic/earned and secondary engagements were not charged for.

I am still none the wiser about the “NFL football” result. It does make me wonder how accurate their ‘targeting by interest’ option is.

Conclusion

This is obviously only a very small experiment and it is hard to judge exactly what the quality of the traffic was like (I was sending traffic to a wordpress.com page and I am not able to measure detailed analytics, such as bounce rates or time on page). But I even these limited results are still illuminating.

I like Adwords, particularly the fact that it shows your ad to people at the point they are searching for a solution to their problem. It has worked pretty well for my table planner app over the last 9 years, despite bid price inflation. But Adwords is only effective when there are well defined phrases with reasonable search volumes you can target. That doesn’t seem to be the case for my course.

LinkedIn is a good way to target people according to their skills or job function. There are lots of different targeting options and the traffic volume was better than Adwords. But the clicks are very expensive. Given an industry standard 1% conversion rate I can afford to pay $2 per click to promote a £600 course. But forget it if you are selling less expensive products.

Twitter ads seem quite promising. There are lots of targeting options and you can get a lot of traffic quickly for a relatively low price per click [but see update, below]. I could have got a lot more clicks by targeting more Twitter handles and/or increasing my bid. But its not something you can leave running continuously like Adwords or LinkedIn. You have to keep sending new sponsored tweets. Also the reporting is confusing and of dubious veracity. Finally it feels slightly grubby to be targeting the followers of your peers and/or competitors so directly. But I think it shows promise. If you are going to try it, I recommend you do so soon. The law of shitty clickthroughs means that it is sure to be a lot less cost effective in a few years time.

**** Update ****

I noticed that the clickthroughs to the URL in my sponsored Twitter post was only about a third of the clicks reported by Twitter. When I asked Twitter about this they replied:

Twitter Ads measures engagements which we define as “clicks” within the Promoted Tweet Dashboard are defined as follows: clicks on the URL, hashtag, Tweet copy, avatar and username, or the expand button. It’s likely that the other analytics you are seeing are tracking link clicks.

So I am paying for someone to just click the Tweet copy (text)! The cost for a clickthough to my site is actually around 3 times the CPC reported by Twitter. That makes it around £1 per clickthrough, which is much less attractive.

Upgrade your Adwords accounts before the 22nd July – or else!

google adwordsGoogle will automatically switch all Adwords campaigns to ‘enhanced’ on 22-July-2013. If you don’t do it before then, Google will do it for you. And you can be confident they will be thinking of their interests, rather than yours. The changes are mostly bad news for those of us that sell software for desktop computers. In particular you can no longer choose not to bid for clicks on tablet devices. I would like to have more control over how I bid on different platforms, not less, so I am not happy about the changes. However your choices are either to upgrade your campaigns to ‘enhanced’ or close your Adwords account.

You can at least bid less for clicks on mobile devices. If you are selling downloadable software that doesn’t run on mobile devices, I recommend you set your bid adjustment much lower for mobile devices. My own analytics data tells me that mobile devices only have one tenth the (measurable) conversion rate of desktop/laptop computers. So I have set my mobile bid adjustment at -90% for mobile devices. Presumably you can set it to -100% if you don’t want to bid for mobile clicks at all. I don’t understand why advertisers aren’t being given the same option for tablet devices.

Note that you can’t set a mobile bid adjustment for CPA campaigns. However Google should notice the lack of downloads and sales on mobile devices and adjust the mobile bids down for you automatically.

Upgrading is pretty straight forward and should only take a few minutes. More details on the software promotions blog.

Amazon PPC Ads

The ever-expanding Amazon empire is now offering their own Pay Per Click ads.

Amazon Product Ads is an advertising programme designed to provide Amazon.co.uk customers seamless access to products available on external Web sites. As a seller, you simply upload your catalogue of products you wish to advertise and set your cost-per-click bids and budget. Amazon will then display your ads to Amazon.co.uk customers when they shop for your product or related products. Customers who are interested in buying your product can click through to your Web site and purchase the product directly from you.

amazon-ad

As with Google Adwords, you bid for clicks. Minimum bid prices depend on the category of goods you want your ad to appear in. On amazon.co.uk the categories and minimum bid prices are currently:

amazon ad prices

There doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on advertising downloadable software. So it might be worth trying if you software fits into any of the above categories and has a relatively high ticket price (given that typical conversion rates are 1% there is no point paying £0.10 per click for software that you sell for £10). For example, if your software is related to music, you could advertise it alongside musical instruments. I would consider advertising my table planner software alongside books or DVDs related to wedding or event planning. Unfortunately that isn’t an option at present.

amazon ad categories not supported

I could try advertising my software in categories such as Kitchen&Home›wedding favours. But people looking for wedding favours aren’t explicitly searching for table planners, so the click to sale conversion ratio is likely to be well under 1%. Also the minimum bid price in this category is £0.15 and I am guessing that my ads wouldn’t even show if I bid the minimum. Paying >£0.15 per click with a <1% conversion rate for software priced at £19.95 doesn’t make sense. So I haven’t signed up.

It is inevitable that the bid price will inflate over time. So, if you want to try it, now is probably a good time. Amazon.co.uk are also offering £50 in free clicks if you sign up now. You can find out more on the Amazon Product Ads FAQ.

Have you tried Amazon PPC ads? If so, do you have to bid significantly above the minimum bid prices and how do the conversion rates compare with other PPC ads (such as Adwords)?

The declining profitability of Google Adwords

Google Adwords used to be a great way to get targeted traffic cheaply (if you knew what you were doing). I think those days are well and truly over.

I have been using Google Adwords to advertise my table plan software since 2005. The following graphs show some metrics from my Adwords campaigns over that 8 years. The graphs show 12-monthly cumulative figures (e.g. each point represents the value for that month plus the preceding 11 months). Using cumulative data hides some of the noise, including the seasonal variations that are inevitable in a business related to weddings (more people buy my software when it is summer in the northern hemisphere), and makes the overall trends clearer.

Average cost per click (CPC)

Average cost per click (CPC)

Clickthroughs

Clickthroughs

Conversions (sales)

Conversions (sales)

Profit per month

Profit per month

The trends are clear and it’s not a pretty picture. Less, more expensive clicks = less profit. I can either pay more and more per click to maintain the same number of sales. Or I can continue to pay the same per click and get less and less clicks. Either way, my profit goes down. It isn’t a trend I see changing direction any time soon.

I think these long-term trends are mostly due to increasing competition. As more and more companies bid on Adwords for a finite number of clicks, it inevitably drives up the cost of clicks (simple supply and demand). It also doesn’t help that a lot of Adwords users are not actively managing their campaigns or measuring their ROI, and are consequently bidding at unprofitably high levels. Google also does its best to drive up CPC values in various ways (suggesting ridiculously high default bids, goading you to bid more to get on page 1, not showing your ad at all if you bid too low – even if no other ads appear etc).

Of course, this is just my data for one product in one small market. But the law of shitty clickthrus predicts that all advertising mediums become less and less profitable over time. So I would be surprised if it isn’t a general trend. Are your Adwords campaigns becoming less profitable? Have you found another advertising medium that works better?