Google Ad Words & PPC campaigns

[Matt Gwinn]

I was just wondering if anyone had tested the usefulness of the Pay per Click campaigns at Google and Overture?

If so, how has it worked out for your sales and site traffic?

I know the company I work for has doubleed their internet business every year since we started using PPC campaigns.

I started an account today with a recommended max spending of $8 per day at an estimated  5 cents per click.  That's 160 clicks per day.  Only 1 of those clicks needs to result in a sale for me to make my money back.  Sounds like a good deal to me.  And that's assuming I max out my spending every day.

I figure I'll try it for a week and see how things shape up.  if it doesn't pan out i'm only out a max of $61 ($8 per day + $5 set-up fee)

Any thoughts?

,Matt

[Ben Lehman]

I can't add anything, but I would be interested in your results.

yrs--
--Ben

[Matt Machell]

I know the company I work for has doubleed their internet business every year since we started using PPC campaigns.

Are you actually tracking directly from PPC to sale? Cos the doubling in a year may well be natural site expansion, not from PPC. I'd recommend using some method of direct tracking as part of your test to see how things go.

From my experience PPC isn't too worthwhile, there are generally much more cost effective ways to market on the web. People are more likely to click on links that are part of an article, newsitem or forum, something that gives them confidence in the link and a reason to follow it.

To give you an idea of how often people follow ads, Realms displays RPG-related Google Adwords, last week I had a 788-1 display to click ratio. Even though you are paying per click, that still gives an idea of the interest level for ads that are even relevant.

-Matt

[Matt Gwinn]

People are more likely to click on links that are part of an article, newsitem or forum, something that gives them confidence in the link and a reason to follow it.

That's quite true, especially for people that are part of the online gaming community who istit places like the Forge and RPGnet.  

Some games, however,  might garner interest from outside that community.  For example, my game Kayfabe is something that a non-gamer wrestling fan might find fun to play.  That person isn't going to be cruising the roleplaying forums or reading gaming magazines.  And thus far I have been less than successful in getting wrestling sites to even mention it and I can't afford banner ads.

From my experience PPC isn't too worthwhile, there are generally much more cost effective ways to market on the web.

So far (1 day) the PPC campaign has cost me 25 cents from 5 click throughs.  4 were from people looking up pro wrestling, not gaming.  Granted, those clicks did not result in sales, but it indicates to me that there is some interest.  the lack of a sale may very well be from the stigma attached to PDFs (my game is currently not avaialble online in book form).

I guess time will tell.  I wasn't terribly optimistic, but it's better than doing nothing and doesn't take much time like hunting down gaming and wrestling forums does.  In the past I'd spend hours a day trying to drum up interest on wrestling and gaming sites, but found that I got more business from word of mouth than anything else.

,Matt Gwinn

[daMoose_Neo]

~_- Many places are offering banner ads very cheap if you're dealing with the webmaster of the site. Granted some ad agencys that service dozens of high profile sites will want a chunck of change, especially if they're used to WotC sized budgets, but you can get a few thousand for $10-20 a month through some of the smaller webmasters looking to make some cash back for their site.

[Matt Gwinn]

Well, it's been a couple weeks now and I have determined that Google Ad Words are a complete waste of my money... at least for me.

The good news is that being that this experiemnt has been an utter failure it has cost me less than $10 overall.

The biggest problem I noticed is that Google has a tendency to slow or disable keywords that it feels are not meeting expectations.  Unfortunately, those were the only words resulting in significant clicks for me.

For example, "sports games" resulted in 29 clicks for me which is much better than many of the other keywords I chose.  However, since that 29 was out of 1622 impressions, the click-through rate was too low in Googles eyes and the keyword was disabled.

Meanwhile, keywords like "wrestling rpg", which resulted in only 1 click out of 158 impressions, are still active.

IMO starting  a pay per click campaign for your roleplaying game is not really worth the effort.  You simply can't get enough click-throughs with generic keyword like 'roleplaying games' to keep your campaign active, and using words like your game's name is likely to turn you up in teh free listings anyway.

If anyone else has better luck i'd be happy to hear it.

,Matt

[Paul Czege]

Hey Matt,

Did you tweak your ad text to try for more click-throughs per impression? Were you successful? Will you share the various iterations of your ad text?

Paul

[Matt Gwinn]

I tried a wide variety or word combinations both rpg related and wrestling related.  I even used Google's suggested word combinations which typically made no sense and/or had worse results than the words i started with.

Apparently not many people search for wrestling games online.  Lot's of people search for wrestling stuff, but too small of a percentage of those people clicked on my ad.  I expect that, because only a small percentage of wrestling fans are gamers too. But I'd gladly take the one click per 100 impressions -those are teh people I'm trying to reach.  People that are specifically looking for a wrestling rpg will see my regaular listing or read about Kayfabe somewhere else.  It's the non-gamer and potential gamers that that 1 in 100 clicks give me.  Apparently that's not good enough for Google.

,Matt

[Mernya]

I'm the web developer for a large health staffing company. I'm not in the habit of name dropping or anything, but my company, Maxim Healthcare, runs most of the flu shot clinics each year (although we primarily staff hospitals and home health). We partner with companies such as the American Lung Association and various retailers, such as Costco and Publix, where the clinics are held. The site generally does very little traffic outside of the flu season, but once flu season is underway, we can get upwards of 30 million hits in a month (generally, October is the largest) - unique sessions are generally an order of magnitude less.

A few years ago, I tried using overture. The setup was easy and I believe our marketing department spent about $3000 on various key words, such as flu and flu shot. Some words were expensive, others were the minimum amounts. I had overture's tracking and my own tracking system in place and saw that very few of the sponsored links were being hit. Although we saw a minor increase in traffic, I did not feel it was the result of that campaign and it was cancelled. I'm sure there are segments where the pay per click is worth it, especially if you don't even turn up on a search, but I think that is easier to remedy than people believe.

So, let me give you some advice.

Paying for banner ads is probably a waste. Banner ads and popups are pretty much considered a dead method for getting people to visit. People zone them out. Banner exchanges are a little different, so I will explain.

Prior to flu season, our site findaflushot.com was on the fourth or fifth page of google results on "flu shot." It should be known that Metatags are pretty much unused these days, except by maybe the Inktomi engine. As most people know, the content matters. You need to have text on the page that synchs up with the key words you expect to lead to you. But more importantly, you need references to your site from other locations. Banner exchanges, partnerships, references in blogs... anything you can do to get mentions will raise your ranking. Why? When web spiders find your site in other places, you go up. Basically, it is a popularity and reference process.  Also, Google ranks based on clicks. If you are number 3 on the page, but people pick you over number 1, then you will move up.

If you do a search on flu shot now, you will see that our partner site with ALA (in the lungusa folder) is ranked higher than ours. Why? Because ALA is a non-profit organization and they have more sway to get things linked to them. They had all the partnerships with AOL and MSN and various government agencies like the CDC (I can see it all in our referrers log - the CDC won't partner with us since we are for profit), while we really didn't have those self-referring links.

And one final basic link to help out...

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/sbc/0,6136,317788,00.html

[ffilz]

A very interesting topic. Monte Cook recently posted that his montecook.com website now shows up first on a Google search for "monte" (above the Del Monte coporation and Monte Carlo). Suggests that there must be lots of linking to montecook.com from gaming pages.

Frank

[Mernya]

If you do this (no quotes necessary) "link:montecook.com" on google you can see who is linking to that site.

There is also a google browser.

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

This uses a java applet to show you the nodes and dynamic relationships between sites. For the Monte Cook example...

We can see that there are several large nodes pointing into it. RPGHost, WotC, Asylum Software, EZBoard, and Troll Lord Games all seem to be the biggest overall contributors to his site's ranking success. By double clicking on Monte's site, we also get some additional info on the linking. There is a cluster of the guys he worked with at TSR like Sean Reynolds, Bruce Cordell, Stan!, etc. We can see that DriveThruRPG sends traffic his way, as well as a few other publishers.

All of these things contribute to your ranking.  :)

[Paul Czege]

Hey Matt,

I tried a wide variety or word combinations both rpg related and wrestling related. I even used Google's suggested word combinations which typically made no sense and/or had worse results than the words i started with.

You're talking about the keywords? I was asking about the text of your ad itself. When Google slows your ad, they say that's to give you a chance to change the text and make it more compelling and provocative of clicks. I'm curious how successful you were at changing the text of your ad to provoke more clicks.

And can you have different ad text for each of the keywords you attach it to?

Paul

[Matt Gwinn]

Oh, I never changed that part.  this is what I had:

Kayfabe
The Inside Wrestling Game
A Tabletop wrestling RPG
errantknightgames.com

You're only allowed so many characters, so you're pretty limited in what you can put in the ad description.  You're also not allowed to use certain words like best or #1 unless a thrid party substantiates your claim.

,Matt