Adwords - not hitting daily budget

[BaldShark]

I have my first adwords campaign ad up and running. It's basically a test for me to get used to how it all works. It points to a clickbank affiliate page with my link in it.

I've set a daily budget of $20.00. I've researched my keywords for my niche, and have about 12 keywords im bidding on in one ad group...from .18 to .65 CPC. According to Google Im getting in ad positions between 3 and 5. The ad has been up for for two days, and I have a 11 total hits.

My question is really, why am I not meeting my daily budget? So far, for my two days I have a total ad spend of like 4 dollars. What do I need to do to actually spend that $20 a day?

Thanks!

[intellect22]

Adwords is a strange game that will make you want to pull your hair out sometimes lol...having a brand new account effects a lot of things such as CPC, ad aproval time, and traffic flow. You can try bidding higher for a few days to get google to send you more traffic and get a good CTR, then lower your bid and see if they still send you the traffic.

Your niche can be a reason also, does it get a lot of traffic? Is your CTR horrible, you may need to change your ad. Try using Dynamic keywrod insertion (DKI) as your headline to grab more attention to your ad. If you are not familiar with that you set it up like this:

{Keyword: default phrase is Keyword is too long to fit in ad}

(literally put the word "Keyword" in there, this will get replaced with the searchers search phrase)

Also you can go to campaign settings and click on "Accelerated" which will show your ad more often, but I usally dont do that until I know my campaign is profitable because if its not, then you will spend much more money.

How many countries did you target? The four main ones are US, Canada, Australia, and UK

One last thing, I personally don't think google likes low daily budgets becasue they wont make much money in their eyes. I always set it to either $50 or $100 a day when starting out and just watch the campaign.

Oh and if you are not tracking that's a huge mistake too becuase you will not know which keywords are converting for you.

Hope this helps some....

Kevin B.

[BaldShark]

Thanks for the info. I did use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Im going to try and raise my daily budget and see how that goes. I can see the keyword tracking inside the Google Campaign Manager...is that enough?


My two most active CTR's are 1.2% and .61%

Thanks!

[jaypick]

Awesome reply. That helped me too. Good stuff.

[Lucid]

You want to meet your daily budget? You need impressions and clicks. The number of times people use your keywords, there's nothing you can do about that. You can expand your keyword list to get more impressions. The clicks are dependent on your CTR which you can control.

For the numbers you gave, you'd need 31 clicks (assuming you pay the full $0.65 but that is unlikely) to spend $20 per day which means at 1% CTR, you'd need 3100 impressions. Are people searching on your keywords that many times?

Your CTR is low. Improve your ads. Once you do and get 2, 3, 5% or more, you'll spend your budget that much faster.

[Samuel Craig]

What is your quality score? If it were higher you might get into the #1 spot which means more clicks.

Is the landing page optimized for the keywords you are bidding on?

[thomasr]

What kind of keywords are you targeting if they are only costing you less than a dollar? They must be some pretty long tailed words.....try going a bit broader.

[BaldShark]

I think it must be my ad.

I've had over 6000 impressions and 25 clicks. (no sales of course)
Twenty of those clicks come from one keyword...over 3200 clicks
The keywords quality score is 7/10
Average ad position is 4.
Average CPC is .44

Is it better to change my current ad, or create a new ad in my ad group and run both at the same time? Then I can compare the two. Should I be running multiple ads using these same keywords?

Thanks!

[Lucid]

QS of 7 is a good start. This suggests that your competitors likely have low CTRs too.

Yes, change your ad. Run two ads in the same group with the same keywords. This is how you test, one ad against another. Repeat and your CTR will go up as you have better ads in the long run. Once you do, with 6000 impressions, you'll have to increase your budget, even as your CPC stays the same or even decreases and your position goes up.

[tinstar]

Originally Posted by BaldShark

I have my first adwords campaign ad up and running. It's basically a test for me to get used to how it all works. It points to a clickbank affiliate page with my link in it.

I've set a daily budget of $20.00. I've researched my keywords for my niche, and have about 12 keywords im bidding on in one ad group...from .18 to .65 CPC. According to Google Im getting in ad positions between 3 and 5. The ad has been up for for two days, and I have a 11 total hits.

My question is really, why am I not meeting my daily budget? So far, for my two days I have a total ad spend of like 4 dollars. What do I need to do to actually spend that $20 a day?

Thanks!

Thank your lucky stars?!

Once you do some sensible tweaking, you'll meet your budget and then watch how fast $20 a day adds up! If you increased your budget, watch it closely.

I think the comment about Google not liking a low budget seems to be true, at least for the first few days. I can't prove it, but that usually seems to be the case for me.

You'll be fine. Good luck!

[BaldShark]

Yes, the help and info has been awesome! I've already made some changes to my ads and keywords, and my CTR has increased a bit. Still need to do more tweaking and look for my first sale.

[Finch]

Have you placed all your keywords in one big list with one ad for the whole group?

If that's the case, your campaign will never get close to fulfilling it's potential.

Take every keyword and create a separate ad group for each one. Include the keyword in the title line, in the first line, and as a virtual sub folder of your display link. This will draw automatic relevance to your ad.

1% is very low for a CTR. Depending on the competition, of course, I like my exact and phrase match keywords to be at least 10%+

You can only really do this if you write a separate ad for each keyword.

[BaldShark]

Yes, i only have one ad group with two ads, and 25 keywords all in that group. Only 4 or 5 of the keywords are getting clicks though.

How does the virtual sub folder of the display link look? is that where I add a ?keywordname to the end of my URL?

Thanks!

[Lucid]

You don't have to have one keyword per group. You should however group keywords by theme. Here's an example taken from one of my clients offering Karate classes:

He offers karate and tae kwon do, in other words, martial arts. The groups are therefore:

Martial Arts Classes
Tae Kwon Do Classes
Karate Classes

So you'd have keywords such as "martial arts classes", "martial arts courses", "martial arts lessons" and other variations on class (including singular and plural) such as tutorial and workshop in the Martial Arts group.

You could separate even further if you wish and have a group called Martial Arts Workshop for example and do the same with karate and tae kwon do. Each of these groups would have a handful of keywords.