Need some direction with a PPC campaign

You're doing it wrong. You're only gonna get bottled up blog advice posting questions...

You need to get your head out of your ass and start experimenting more with other traffic sources and stop depending on organic shit...

Well...ok. Didn't mean to offend you with my request for help, but since you've chimed in, do you have any thing that might help that isn't "bottled up blog advice". You must have some PPC skills if you're so quick to come in and say that I'm not doing it correctly.

As I see it, you're either buying traffic or you're getting it organically. The latter takes a completely different skill set and patience level than just entering a credit card and starting a PPC campaign. I realize that PPC isn't easy, and I'm trying to figure that game out, but bashing how I make a living for no other reason than to sound cool doesn't do anyone any good. If you have any real suggestions as to what I might focus on to be more successful with PPC, then I'm all ears.

Back to business here....

Keywords - Now that I'm seeing what keywords are getting some good action and CTR, I want to expand those, but I'm having a tough time coming up with alternate versions. Also, I've been running everything on broad match anyway, so if I add the word "buy" to some of my keyword phrases, wouldn't they have been found anyway without the additional word since I was doing broad matching. Is this wrong? Should I run this type of thing on exact match to get more targeted? Also, negative keywords, what's a good way to put together good negative keywords lists?
 


lol I wasn't trying to be a dick (I guess I was), I was trying to say that you should be focusing in on other traffic sources...

I guess that was my way of saying it. fuuuck
 
Ok, so you're not a fan of Adwords? Too expensive? I've tried Yahoo & Bing as well, but they're not much cheaper. I'm still learning here, so I wouldn't know where else to look for buying ads that would work for this campaign. Facebook and Myspace definitely aren't the place for this one.
 
content network rocks.

You have to watch the automatic network though as you are going to be getting a ton of clicks and low conversions. It sucks you have to wait two days to see where those clicks/conversions are coming from as well.

Another thing you are going to want to probably do is exclude gmail.com. You could get like a 100k impressions a day, but then again if you can get a 10% ctr that would be pretty awesome and say 1% conversions you may be on to something.
 
^^ Can I still exclude gmail.com etc if I'm using automatic placements. If so, where in the dashboard is that control?
 
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Update here..I've been running the campaign on Search in stead of content and I've got some stats to work with, but right now I'm only $100 in the hole and I've spent about $600 bucks. I'm just not sure what I should be doing from here.

I'm using Prosper and I'm running between 3 different landing pages. No one LP is performing much better than the other 2. I've been working on my keywords, ditching the ones that are just not doing anything and trying to expand on the ones that have a good ctr, but I think my problem might be my ad copies. I can't seem to get much better than 5-6% CTR on the keywords that are generating a fair number of impressions and clicks.

I'm trying to write my ads so they stand out and appeal to those in buying mode, but I'm not sure what I could do to improve them.

After you run a campaign for a while and have some stats, what steps do you generally do from there? Maybe my niche is just shit, I guess that's always a possibility too. How long will you work a campaign until you decide that you just can't get it profitable? I'm not giving up yet, but I need some ideas to help break this thing loose.
 
Did you look at your competition? See what kind of ads you are competing against. And then, decide whether you can make a better ad and get some decent conversions competing with them. If you cannot, shut off search completely, and focus on content network.

You said your ads will appeal to buying mode searchers. Are the keywords "buying mode"? If users are just looking to get "tips" and you show your "Buy This" ad, it won't work well.

Wait for a week at least, and then gather stats. If it is content network, DELETE all keywords and ad groups not giving you any impressions. If you do not have enough stats, keep running the ads (by pruning them regularly) until you get enough stats.

Focus on one search engine, and one strategy. Not search & content together.

Last point: You may be better off starting your campaigns @ Yahoo/Bing. Yes, they are not a lot cheaper, but the audience tend to be "less savvy" (there are exceptions, but your niche may work).