PPC and keywords

[Ryan Ward]

I have been tracking my keywords for my campaigns and I have found that the keyword I am using that shows my ad more than any other is alpharetta houses. Not alpharetta real estate or any variation with real estate in it. My question is would it be safe to assume that for me in my particular case that this keyword is being used for searches more than alpharetta real estate? The keyword bid amount does not seem to change this no matter what price I put for a max bid. Does google make some sort of analysis that they think my ad will work better for the term alpharetta houses? I checked digitalpoint and according to what they have it should not be anywhere close to the number of times alpharetta ga real estate is being used for a search term. I ask this because I incorporated this new keyword intothe content on my site, but, I am not sure how important I should make it.

[RonnieG]

Not alpharetta real estate or any variation with real estate in it.

What you are seeing seems to be unusual to me, too. I would check the AdWords "spyglass" on all of your keywords to see if they are actually showing ads. Many may be inactive or may be activated infrequently or not at all because bids are too low or because of what Google considers low QS, despite showing as "Active" in the Google stats. In my experience, the "houses" keywords are generally very low frequency, and usually do not require as high a bid to be active all the time. If they are active, and your other keywords aren't, that would explain the discrepancy you are seeing.

[Ryan Ward]

Well that really is why I thought it was weird also. It just doesn't seem like that word would be more popular. Here aree stats form Dec. 1st.:

Alpharetta houses: 16/232 6.89% @ $1.58 ave cpc -ave pos 3.6

Alpharetta georgia real estate: 15/168 8.92% @ $1.92 ave cpc -ave pos 1.9

Alpharetta real estate: 11/147 7.48% @ $1.89 ave cpc ave pos 2.5

There are more, but, these are the only ones over 100 impressions. All of the keywords are active and during this trial period for me, I have set $2.50 for the words just to get things started off right and to help with initial positioning and get the QS up. I have seen my cpc go down over the last couple of days by about $.40/keyword. I havn't changed my bids yet as it seems things are working fine as is. I don't know if this helps to see a pattern. It just seems out of line with conventional wisdom and overture and wordtracker keyword suggestions.

[waynelong]

Wow! $2.50 per click?? You could run up quite a tab at that.

[Ryan Ward]

Well, as I said, I am testing the waters out here a little bit. I budgeted $500 to get started and I understand that higher bids get you higher on the page. Higher on the page gets you higher CTR. Well written ads with these factors and time get you higher QS. Higher QS gets you lower bids. I am not trying to half-blank this. I want this to be an effective augmentation of my lead generation. I have spent a little over $300 so far. I got 1 phone call, we talked, she drove by the property and now she emailed me and wants to see it. That's a good lead. I have also received one email from someone who wants to meet with me in Jan to show her properties. Two contacts, both warm, in 2 weeks. This might work. I don't expect that kind of capture over the long haul, but, it is a promising beginning. BTW, I run my ads from 4 p.m. to midnight and it goes over my $40/day budget.

[waynelong]

I am just learning about PPC but that seemed really high. I am sure you know what you are doing and like you are saying ROI is really all that matters. If they click thru do they go to your homepage or another page on your site? Just curious. As I said I am trying to learn.

[Ryan Ward]

Wayne,

I am just learning as well. Yes, they seem high to me also. I have seperate ads for very large subdivsions like Windward (3500 homes priced at $250,000 - 2.5 mil). Those bids are about $.50. Alpharetta is very high for keywords so I might just do individual community ads in the future if I see that they result in clicks. I have my alpha ad which goes to the Alpharetta page, Sandy Springs to the Sandy Springs page, Windward to the Windward page, which is under the Alpharetta page and so forth. I just created 4 subdivision pages under Alpharetta on my website and I am off to get some pictures to add to their pages. My understanding, is that the more targeted your ad is, the more targeted your audience is also yielding higher click through. I took RonnieG's advice and purchased two new domains: alpharettahometourDOTcom and the same for Sandy Springs and used 301 redirects to my Alpharetta page. When someone sees the ad it doesn't say ryanwardrealestateDOTcom, which is more or less meaningless to the viewer, instead it says alpharettahometourDOTcom. I think it appears more credible and targeted. When I changed the domain name, my CTR went from below 1% to about 7.5%. Should help to drop the bids if G sees that people are clicking on my site rather than other sites.

[itgl72]

Ryan, let me see if I can get your thought process.

You purchased a domain alpharettahometourDOTcom, and made it redirect to a custom page about Alpharetta on your ryanwardrealestateDOTcom page.

I assume because the PPC ad takes the visitor to alpharettahometourDOTcom which then redirects to ryanwardrealestateDOTcom that all is well in the eyes of Google.

I ask because I use MYNAME.COM as my display URL, which in real life redirects to my company website but in the destination URL inside Google I entered my actual companies website URL that goes to the MLS search. At one point the Google boys contacted me about that not being accepted along with capitalization in ads. I changed the capitalization problem but left the display URL and all has been fine since then.

I see the value of a customized URL and would jump at that idea to improve the targeted clicks. Clicks are like a drug, targeted clicks are very addicting.

I don't understand the different options for redirects though. What are the different 301's? I see them inside my godaddy forwarding page. Guess I need to understand that help file a bit better.

[Lydia]

One thing I have noted about my campaigns is that you have to be very careful about going national.

For instance, the city I target is Augusta GA, but there are at least seventeen other cities called Augusta! So I use an extensive list of negative keywords in my campaign to make sure that I don't get unwanted clicks, as well as making sure I say 'Augusta GA' in the ad! This lowers my impressions quite a bit, but the ones that are left I get a decent CTR on. I also monitor the keywords through Analytics and if I'm getting a high bounce rate or just 1 or 2 pageviews per click I'll either pause the keyword until I can finesse it or just quit using the keyword.

I have an extensive set of local campaigns, but I budget less than $10/day total locally. National I use more generically targeted keywords but my budget is only $4. Obviously, expensive clicks can make your day short.

Ronnie has mentioned a few times that he typically doesn't use 'city state real estate' keywords and I tend to do the same, on the premise that the clicks get so expensive. I try to 'mine the longtail' and keep clicks under $1. It's funny when I started, I just couldn't come up with any long tail keywords and I wanted desperately to ask in this forum... but decided against it. Now that I have a decent and growing long tail list, I find I don't want to share it since it's taken a lot of work to figure them out (lol)! I suspect that most of our long tails are unique to our areas anyway and what works for one of us probably won't work for the rest.

[RonnieG]

Ronnie has mentioned a few times that he typically doesn't use 'city state real estate' keywords and I tend to do the same, on the premise that the clicks get so expensive.

As I have increased my daily AdWords budget, I found that for the limited number of communities I currently do ads for, I could not spend my entire budget with only long tails and my other keywords. So, for a very small number of high end communities, where the ROI would be very good, I have set up separate ad groups for the "real estate" and related keywords. With separate ad groups for those keywords, I can turn them on and off easily.