I recently implemented Adwords on this site and decided on the longtail approach of getting loads of niche keywords at bidding costs as low as possible. This approach seemed to work for a week or so, getting lots of impressions and relevant click throughs, only costing a few quid.
As I was getting bored by the amount of time it took to get what was only a miniscule of traffic, a click or so a day, I decided to speed things up by going for a big keyword that was for the best phrase I would want for my site without it costing an amount that would bankrupt me with one click.
Already my Adwords was targeted to not appear on the content network so I made the keyword more targeted by making sure only users in the UK would make the advert appear:
And that the exact phrase had to be entered by using the square brackets to signify an exact phrase match.
The keyword I opted for was "uk news". I added it, did an advert with text as relevant as my SEO hat could conjure up and I put a bid amount of £1.
All seemed fine for half a day until Adwords made the keyword inactive by moaning the bid wasn't high enough, shouting it had to be £2.50. So I increased it and managed to go another half a day getting lots of impressions and luckily no click-throughs. I was hoping the exposure would be good enough for now, without having to pay any click costs and besides this was more of an experiment than anything.
Soon enough Adwords started moaning that now the bid will have to be a whopping minimum of £5 a click! So I increased it to that.
A few hours, 89 impressions and one click later I got charged £5 and made sure it was the only click that happened by setting my daily budget to £5. I went into analytics and looked into the details of the specific person who clicked the ad and guess what!?
The person came from Malaga in Spain!
Unless Adwords "complex" algorithm is so advanced that it managed to work out it was a British person who now lives over in Spain clicking my ad, then I would say that Adwords really is the money making machine that The Register recently wrote an article about here.
The keyword phrase I aimed for had UK in it, with it targeted to display only in the UK and on a .co.uk site with UK in the PPC ad text and it still brought me a Spanish visitor that did nothing but leave my site within a couple seconds, costing me £5.
And just to think, most online marketers rely on Adwords as being the best PPC marketing tool available. If this is all we got, a lot of sites are going to lose a lot of money, and fast, with no one gaining anything but the big G people themselves.
As I was getting bored by the amount of time it took to get what was only a miniscule of traffic, a click or so a day, I decided to speed things up by going for a big keyword that was for the best phrase I would want for my site without it costing an amount that would bankrupt me with one click.
Already my Adwords was targeted to not appear on the content network so I made the keyword more targeted by making sure only users in the UK would make the advert appear:
And that the exact phrase had to be entered by using the square brackets to signify an exact phrase match.
The keyword I opted for was "uk news". I added it, did an advert with text as relevant as my SEO hat could conjure up and I put a bid amount of £1.
All seemed fine for half a day until Adwords made the keyword inactive by moaning the bid wasn't high enough, shouting it had to be £2.50. So I increased it and managed to go another half a day getting lots of impressions and luckily no click-throughs. I was hoping the exposure would be good enough for now, without having to pay any click costs and besides this was more of an experiment than anything.
Soon enough Adwords started moaning that now the bid will have to be a whopping minimum of £5 a click! So I increased it to that.
A few hours, 89 impressions and one click later I got charged £5 and made sure it was the only click that happened by setting my daily budget to £5. I went into analytics and looked into the details of the specific person who clicked the ad and guess what!?
The person came from Malaga in Spain!
Unless Adwords "complex" algorithm is so advanced that it managed to work out it was a British person who now lives over in Spain clicking my ad, then I would say that Adwords really is the money making machine that The Register recently wrote an article about here.
The keyword phrase I aimed for had UK in it, with it targeted to display only in the UK and on a .co.uk site with UK in the PPC ad text and it still brought me a Spanish visitor that did nothing but leave my site within a couple seconds, costing me £5.
And just to think, most online marketers rely on Adwords as being the best PPC marketing tool available. If this is all we got, a lot of sites are going to lose a lot of money, and fast, with no one gaining anything but the big G people themselves.
