Arrggh!! AdWords!!

So after months of working on my ebook, I decided to buy some traffic on AdWords with a couple of goals in mind:

1) To see whether which of my targeted keywords would get traffic (and convert) so I could then attempt to SEO for them.

2) To see whether I could put together a successful AdWords campaign that I could get to turn a daily profit in addition to my eventual SEO efforts, so as to diversify my traffic sources and not be exclusively beholden to organic SERPS.

I knew it wouldn't be easy. I'd gotten slapped (hard) in a novice campaign I tried a few months ago as AdWords determined that my landing page was too "money making" oriented (the irony is that it wasn't about making money but had some language about musicians making a living). All my keyword Quality Scores at the time ending up being 1s, minimum bids were $10 a click. Slapped.

I've read up since then. Bought Perry Marshall's book, read all the AdWords posts I could find on Warrior Forum, Red Fly Marketing, etc. Got a new domain and new AdWords account that was unaffiliated with the old one's email address. I wasn't expecting it to be easy, but I figured I'd have a shot.

48 hours later, I'm completely aggrevated and ready to give up on AdWords.

Here's what happened this time:

I complied a list of approximately 100 keywords. I made a separate ad group for each keyword and then bid on the three different match types of each keyword (exact, phrase and broad) so I could see which match type converted best.

(Note: I knew the broad matches would be a long shot, but I saw that the exact match alone wouldn't give me enough impressions and I wasn't sure about the phrase match - so this is the route I took.)

I wrote 2 versions of each ad group's ad so as to split test. I set my bids and let the campaign start running.

Fast forward 24 hours later - not surprisingly, many of the broad match keywords did not results in click throughs, lowering the overall campaign's CTR. Some exact matches had decent CTRs but were based on low impressions and not a lot of clicks (say a 10% CTR for like 2 clicks).

Dragged down by the broad keyword CTRs, the campaign ended up with a 0.64% CTR 24 hours into my testing.

Now, it appears I've been slapped. Even the exact match keywords that had decent CTRs now have quality scores of 3 or 4 (originally all the campaign's keywords had quality scores of 6-8) and are now demanding absurd minimum bids ($1.50+, which is crazy for this market and totally undoable).

I paused the nonperforming keywords, but I basically cannot keep testing new keywords at this point because now I need to pay such ridiculous CPCs to even continue testing. It's not worth it.

How does AdWords expect a new advertiser to put together a new campaign??

You obviously need to test your keywords and doing that will mean you're going to find some crap keywords you'll need to dump along the way. If I dumped all my crappy keywords 24 hours in and they've basically made it impossible to keep testing by raising the minimum CPCs so high, what am I supposed to do?

The barrier to entry is just too high. It's infuriating.

(By the way - this all happened on the search network only...no content network ads.)