ADWORDS: Finally not just a waste of money

After my spectacular Adwords Failure last month, I still have not given-up at trying to get rich from PPC. Over the last few weeks I’ve tried a few different Adwords campaigns and even tried AdCenter. After about a week I finally did give up on AdCenter due to it’s difficult user interface, high-priced keywords (I thought they were LESS than AdWords?!), and of course let’s not forget about the Terms Of Service that you can’t read if you use Firefox.

I first started seeing success (almost broke-even) with an Azoogle campaign for a free sign-up to win a trip to the American Idol tryouts. I chose this campaign because it was ‘free’ to the buyer, and it had a payout of $12 per conversion. I was averaging one conversion per day for several days when suddenly the offer expired. My total net-loss for this campaign was only about $25.

Last week I started a new campaign based on an eBay-related Azoogle offer. This offer is also free, but the buyer must pay postage (less than $4) - The payout is $25 per conversion. I set my AdWords budget at $50/day and wrote a few ads, and added about 1,000 keywords - most of the keywords were misspellings and variations so only approx. 25 were ‘real’ keywords. I started the campaign on a Friday night, and throughout the weekend the campaign broke even each day, and even had a profit one day. Monday morning however I awoke to unapproved ads and about 500 keywords that were disabled because their CPC went thru the roof.

After some “optimization” my ads are running again, and by raising my minimum CPC from .20 to $1.00, most of my keywords are now re-activated. Even though $1.00 is way higher that I’d like to pay, I’ve still managed to break even for the last two days. I’m going to hang in there for another two or three weeks to see if time really does help improve my quality score and reduce my CPC. If the CPC gets back down to the .20 - . 40 range, I can see the potential for some real profits. While I’m waiting I think I’ll brush up on my blogging skills..

http://success.grownupgeek.com