I am back in PPC marketing lately, but with much less success then before. I stopped in September after the Google Adwords changes bumped up my pricing by about 20% and my profit margin shrank accordingly. As I was operating on a 30% profit margin the risk of making money or losing money was way too risky. I had all my PPC ads on auto-pilot and in such a case 30% for doing no monitoring whatsoever was a good deal. Those days are gone. I am now trying to break into a much more competitive PPC niche and that is difficult. I am using a couple different software packages to figure outpricing and to spy monitor competitors. The numbers for certain keywords are just crazy and I see people bidding on them day after day after day. I am not sure how long these guys are doing it and so I am watching for now. The interesting thing is when you look at the landing pages (please note: I copy the URLs and DO NOT click on the ads). In some cases I wonder how they can maintain a quality score that is not “Poor”?! There is almost no text on those landing pages and mainly images. I tried that in the past and always came home with a ‘bloody nose’ because Google slapped me hard.
So far I spent about $70.00 on PPC ads and I expect that to increase dramatically over the next few weeks. No conversions yet – I am mainly testing the waters. I also have not yet fully decided on landing page layout and will have a lot of work to do in that area. If the other guys continue to spend money I might try a similar design, but hopefully will be able to get better quality scores assigned and therefore reduce my cost to beat them.