Should definitely rewrite for clarity it's a mess. For example:
"My own experiences with Adwords quickly showed me that people will click an ad, even if it isn’t at all relevant to what they are searching for. For example people searching for “747 seating plan” will click on an ad with the title “wedding seating plan”. It is the nature of the web that people are surfing rather than reading, and clicking on an irrelevant ad doesn’t cost them anything [...] you can be sure that I have “747″ set up as a negative keyword."
He switches voice within the para and there's not much hint he's doing it.
He's using the supposedly humorous "say the opposite to what you mean" method of blogging. He should just have dropped that right off the bat:
My edit: "My experiences with Adwords shows people don't click an advert unless it's relevant to their search. For example, people searching for '747 seating plan' don't click ads for 'wedding seating plans'. People are not surfing the web, rather they are reading. Clicking an irrelevant ad is rare [...] thus I have '747' set up as a negative keyword."
Where it says "clicking an irrelevant ad is rare" I'd probably say "following an irrelevant ad leads to virtually zero conversion rate". But I tried not to change the meaning with my edit.
FTFY: how did I do?
Edit: re-reading the original I can see now that he may not have been continuing his negative voice. He may have posted this para in the positive. It does work either way. So, is he saying people click irrelevant ads, or is he saying they don't?
I came here to post the exact comment. If you must use double negatives ("not waste"), then just do it once and be positive for the rest of the article. The title could be "How not to waste money". Then you made your point about how dumb it is to ignore the rules you are about to list, and you don't confuse people with weird negative-ness in the rest of the article.
Or, if you really want to do it right, skip the whole negatives thing. "How to best spend your Adwords money. 1) Use conversion tracking. 2) Use negative keywords..." Clear and helpful!
For what it's worth: this is a micro-ISV guy that patio11 respects (PerfectTablePlan is the Bingo Card Creator of wedding seating plans). This post was less sophisticated than some of what Patrick has written, but you can bet I now have his blog RSS'd.
In a very real sense, Bingo Card Creator is the Perfect Table Plan of bingo cards. I have a notebook from ~3 years ago somewhere listing audacious dreams for the future. It includes the line "I want to be like Andy Brice when I grow up." (Incidentally, I still have a year or two to go to catch up to where he was 3 years ago.)
He's also forgotten more about AdWords than I'll probably ever know. (Note that if you were to graph my ROI on AdWords it would on a very good day hit one of the minima on his graph.)
I'll start using Google adwords when they let me pay only for clicks that result in a conversion. They have the technology, put it to use. I'll come write it myself and then pay for the adwords, but I won't pay for adwords until they enable pay for performance for adwords.
They actually did start to role out this kind of thing. At first it was invite only, then available in certain circumstances (place, budget, etc.). I don't think it was very successful. They pulled some of the campaign types associated with these things.
It was a sort of automated system for specifying what you would like to pay per conversion and Google guaranteeing that you won't be charged any more for it.. I thin Given your conversion rate performance, it could give you some ppc bid for the system to work with. Then it could "optimise" your system to get you as many conversions as possible at the price you specified.
I think the problem was that they had to offer it to customers who were fairly sophisticated already. In the back-end it was really just converting it all back to pay per click anyway (I think). These advertisers were in control of their costs per conversion anyway. All the system really did was (potentially) save them time. But, you lose some flexibility which I think made it not worth much. I found that it performed less well then I could do myself.
Now they offer automated bid management, which really does something fairly similar, it automates your campaign for conversions.
What they cannot do under their system is offer you X conversions @ Y cost.
someone needs to build stuff that helps developers make money with their apps. we all cant be 37 signals or salesforce, nor want to be, but we all certainly want to sell our software.
The company I work for does Adwords setup/optimization. I'm not too involved with that side of things, but I know that previous clients have experienced as much as a 250% increase in their business volume after starting adwords campaigns with us (relative to their pre-online-advertising sales)
The goal of selling your software is to make profit, so that's what you maximize. Let's look at some examples for comparison.
Alice and Bob are both selling software. Their per-copy expenses are $1.
Alice advertises on AdWords for $.10 per click, and has a 10% conversion rate. So, her cost per sale is $2 ($1 cost + $1 AdWords). She sells each copy for $3, making $1 profit. She sells 100 copies per month, making $100.
Bob advertises on AdWords for $.199 per click, and has the same 10% conversion rate. His cost per sale is $2.99 ($1 cost + $1.99 AdWords). He sells his software for $3 per copy, making $0.01 profit.
Homework questions: how many copies per month does Bob have to sell to make more profit than Alice? Is it likely that an increase in AdWords bid from $.10 to $.19 will drive that kind of difference in click-throughs?
The goal is to reach your optimal profit point; where an increase in expenditures would result in a decrease of overall profits. For adsense, this requires careful/constant measurement/iteration.
I think we had a different interpretation of the situation, but let me know if I got something horribly wrong below, because I'd love to know before going out and doing the mistake in the real world.
Note I said _bidding_ 99.999% of profit. If Alice makes $1 profit when she bids $.10, then even if she bids $1.10 she would still get all those $.10 clicks and make her $100 profit, but additionally would get some other profitable clicks as well.
Does this make sense, or am I misunderstanding something?
Well no. First of all conversion rates are random and average conversion rates are just averages. You want to give yourself some headroom for volatility and the fact that you simply miscalculated your conversion rate.
