I’d appreciate some feedback

A short time back I launched a Review Site and hope to attract visitors to it via AdWords campaigns, it has seventeen reviews to date, split into different catagories, although I’m only promoting one product via AdWords at the moment. Why only one? Well I’m still new to this type of venture and I’m adopting a cautious approach until I know what I’m doing. At the moment I’ve committed $10 a day and AdWords lifts about $4 - $5 of this, my maximum bid is 20 cents.

My first attempt at this site was, shall we say rather amateurish, the CTR never rose above 0.6 per cent. I rebuilt the site using a new layout which I’m pretty happy with, ditched all of my ‘inactive for search’ keywords, spent a lot of time targeting keywords in my AdWords campaign and seem to have been rewarded by Google with a decrease in the amount I’m been charged for many keyword. Since dumping the inactive keywords Google is no longer asking for funny money and my CTR has increase to above 1 per cent – it has went as high as 1.9 per cent – but the sad part only one sale.

There are people coming to my site because I’ve sold one of Holly’s book on the site, and I don’t promote IM books, they are just there as fillers. I’ve also sold one other ebook which I haven’t been advertising. It’s from a different vendor but is, I suppose, complementary to the product I am promoting.

I’d appreciate advice on where to go to next in order to convert that CTR into sales. Over the past seven days I’ve had 167 clicks costing me in the region of $30, and an average CTR of 1.2 per cent. Should I let it run until I reach 200 clicks; ditch it now and move on, possibly to the product I’ve mentioned above; or perhaps increase my AdWord budget to say $40 a day in the hope that more exposure will result in sales coming in; or maybe I should commit another $20 to promoting a second product in a different catagory?

I’d appreciate any comments and any other suggestions.

Well, I'm not much into the Adwords game but I will share with you something that should have stuck in my head a long time ago, but didn't for whatever reason. You'd never know it by looking at my SEO site either. I guess it could be considered an information site with reviews and recommendations for SEO products.

What I'm referring to is one product=one site. Especially if your playing the Adwords game where you want your clicks to be highly targeted and people are expecting to find just one product really featured. They already know what their interested in or they wouldn't have clicked through to the featured product based around your keywords.

By having filler products you may be confusing the visitor with "what to buy". I've had a lot more success with any campaign where I featured just one product for sale, and if you have other products on the page, just have them as bonuses to the main product.

Think about your A.I.D.A rules.

A=Attention
I=Interest
D=Desire
A=Action

Have an attention grabbing headline!

Start creating interest by mentioning the benefits and how the "said" product is going to help the reader. Pre-selling your reader!

Create desire by adding some bonuses to the product.

And then have "one" call to "action", which will be "clicking through to either purchasing the product" or "clicking through to the vendors website". From there on it is the job of the product owners site to close a sale.

Perhaps that might help with sales, it should, from my experience anyhow.

Also, consider some way of trying to "save the sale" if you can find a way to do that. Use an exit pop-up or something like that for people that may be going up to close your site. In the exit pop-up you could try one last dig at tossing in another quick bonus, or something along those lines.

Cheers
Davin

Davin, thanks for the reply. Don't know if I've mis understood you but while I have a review site it is one product one page. So if a visitor comes via adwords then they land on the page they were expecting.

For obvious reasons I don't want to mention my url on line but I'll pm it to you and I'd appreciate any suggestions you might have

Kevin

Adwords is a hard game to play...

You need to track everything, every single keyword. You need to know which keywords result in sales and which ones don't convert at all. You should also do split-testing with different versions of your website and find the best sales copy.

Guido

I published an "interesting" article on my blog. I think it could help you. So if you're interested in it :

http://fywayd.wordpress.com/category/advertising/

Best regards.
Olivier

If it was me, I would not throw any more money at this - in fact I'd probably pause it and just do some more research into the type of customer and what they are really looking for, and once you have tweaked things then give it another whirl. I've made the same mistake of throwing away money on something that got lots of clicks and not many sales. It comes down to research and being much more targeted.

You might already have a good idea of who your customer is and what they actually are seeking, but perhaps you are just not presenting the information the way they need to see it - ie tailored enough to their real motivation for wanting to buy the product.

In my sig there's some Adwords material that might help narrow down what the problem could be and the best bit is you can get some really great information from there for free.

Cheers!