For PPC, how much traffic should you aim for with your keywords?

[werdnax]

How much combined traffic should you aim with for your keywords?

I see people talking about testing with thousands of clicks, but how much traffic are their campaigns setup for?

Reason I ask, is because I setup a campaign for a bunch of keywords that combined are supposed to get 50,000 impressions/mo...and I'm getting squat(103 impressions in 1 day on Google/70 impressions on Yahoo)

So to get the ~1,000 clicks in 1-2 days...how big of a campaign are you supposed to run? 1 million monthly traffic from combined keywords? 500,000?

 

[moratraffic]

It is such a hard question to answer, because like most areas of PPC, it all depends on the niche, ad copy, ad position, etc. For example, one of my campaigns constantly gets a CTR of 10%, which I think is amazing. But I have run other campaigns where the CTR is .1% or worse. Here is how I generally try to see things.

The more broad your target audience is, the lower the CTR, which means you are going to need a ton more impressions to get traffic to your site. Take for example what I said earlier. My 10% CTR ads run on a very specific TV offer targeted to kids. So parents come online looking for that exact thing. However, if you are running something targeting say entertainment, it is highly unlikely that you can target a specific offer to a large demographic such as the entertainment industry.

So, I am sorry to say, but it really all depends on your target, for the most part. Once you get that down, then you can tweak your ad copy, keywords, lander, etc. But the main thing to worry about is who are you targeting and will it sell to that demographic. If you don't have something specific, it will be much harder to target them and get them to click your ad simply because they are not interested in it.

 

[Mike]

Let's see, first consider your budget. Can you afford thousands of dollars in adspend if the keywords you target don't convert? If you just want impressions / clicks, go broad. Want better chance of conversions? Get more focused.

For example:

Let's say you are selling widgets (we've all pushed widgets at one point or another). If you target the broad keyword "widgets" you will get more impressions / clicks but those clicks are not necessarily buyers. A broad single word keyword will show up for:

"buy widgets"
"widgets killed my dog"
"what kind of widget is this"
"purple widgets that control pests"
"widget scamming"
"how to cook widgets in the microwave"
"funny widgets videos"
"widgets in the military"
etc. etc.

Assuming your goal is to sell widget, you probably want people that are in a buying state of mind. So, narrowing your keywords to buying keywords will help get more targeted people to your lander.

"buy widgets"
"widgets for sale"
"get widgets"
"discount widgets"
"where to buy widgets"
"widgets coupon codes"
and so on.

Think about what you want the end result to be and work backwards from there. Don't just slap together a bunch of keywords to get clicks. Or you will destroy your budget and be back here crying in a few days.

"I had 10,000 keywords and got 5000 clicks at $0.50 each. Not a single sale. Now I'm out $2500 and have nothing to show for it. I'm done with PPC"

Seen that a bunch of times. Forget about massive clicks, unless you have a massive budget.