The great thing about
Adwords is that
you can measure the results from your marketing efforts in a short
amount of time. We're not talking weeks or days but literally minutes
after setting up your ad campaign.
One of the ideas I had when I started using Adwords was to promote
something seasonal. So at the end of January, I opened an Adwords
account and created an ad campaign. It was related to a major sports
event in American life - The Super Bowl.
I signed up as an Amazon affiliate and looked through the Amazon site
for Patriots and Panthers apparel. Then I searched on Google for
"superbowl" and found only one Adwords ad. "Great!" I thought, "What an
opportunity!" By the way, if you're not familiar with Adwords, each
Google search page contains only 8 paid ads on the right-hand side.
This means that if there are only 7 ads showing, you can get the 8th
position by paying just 5 cents per click.
My Google Adwords campaign
So I set up an
Adwords campaign with the following keywords: superbowl
shirt, superbowl hat, superbowl cap and related variations with a space
between "super" and "bowl" as well as using plural nouns. I let the ad
campaign run for 5 days starting from Super Bowl Sunday. I paid 6 cents
per click for all my clicks.
After 5 days, I had
the following results:
|
Keyword
|
Clicks
|
Impressions
|
CTR
|
|
superbowl shirts
|
63
|
575
|
10.9%
|
|
"superbowl hat"
|
59
|
445
|
13.2%
|
|
super
bowl caps
|
16
|
289
|
5.5%
|
|
superbowl
shirt
|
7 |
899
|
0.7%
|
|
superbowl
cap
|
3
|
329
|
0.9%
|
|
super
bowl
hats
|
0
|
25
|
0.0%
|
|
super
bowl shirts
|
0
|
10
|
0.0%
|
|
super
bowl
hat
|
0
|
5
|
0.0%
|
|
super
bowl
cap
|
0
|
0
|
0.0%
|
... plus a few
deleted keywords.
The top two key
phrases had click through ratios (CTRs) of 13.2% and
10.9%, respectively. Those were very decent CTRs. The keywords that
contain the words "shirts", "hat" and "caps" did better than "hats" or
"cap". Why is that? I don't really know. That's just what people were
searching for and clicking on. Another lesson to be learned - sometimes
what you think are the best search keyword(s) aren't necessarily the
ones that people are searching for. You have to test everything to find
out which ones work best.
The Results
What
about sales? After all that's the bottom line - whether you can convert
your traffic into sales. I had 10 sales and 1 returned item. The total
commissions was $19.09. My Adwords cost totalled $9.24. The cost was
slightly inflated due to the fact that I started off the campaign using
broad terms such as "superbowl" and "super bowl". In
general, the more targeted your keywords, the better your CTR and
return on investment will be. Since Amazon only pays 5% commission on
sales, the numbers here are low. However, you can run more campaigns
and sell other affiliate products with higher commissions. You get the
idea.
Here's an analysis of the performance of the campaign:
Total clicks: 163
Average cost per click: $0.06
Total revenue: $19.09
Total cost: $9.24
Revenue/cost: 1.07
Return on investment (ROI): 107%
No. of sales: 10
Sales/Clicks: 0.06 (6% conversion rate or roughly 1 sale for every
17
visitors)
That's not a lot of money but for the sake of an illustration, this
shows that seasonal campaigns can work very well. Of course, you would
need more data in order to generate better statistics. Sales started
slowing down about 3 days after the Super Bowl, so I stopped the
campaign after 5 days.