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Open Ads - Open Source Ad Inventory Management
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There is one campaign I was running on AdWords that was hardly making any profit. But once I moved it to Yahoo, I started seeing an average ROI of 40%. The moral of the story is that you have to test all your traffic sources. Overall, the volume of impressions and clicks may be lower on Yahoo and MSN but the conversion rates can be a lot better than AdWords. You won’t know how it will perform for a particular niche until you test it.

The other important thing to remember for PPC is to ALWAYS have a way to track what you’re doing. At first, you may be tracking at the ad group level to see which groupings of keywords are converting for you. This is still in the testing stage. Once you get a few conversions, you can start investing more time and track at the keyword level. There are a number of ways to do this.

The easy way is to have your AM place the pixel for you. This doesn’t always work 100% of the time. I’ve seen conversions which are not reported all the time. The other way is to use the subid field and create your own unique subid’s for each keyword in your campaign. One of the ways to do this is to create a spreadsheet with your keywords and assign a subid to each keyword. Then you can concatenate the URL and subid in a format that can be imported to your ad campaign. Once you do this a few times, it becomes quite routine.

By having tracking in place, I was able to save a lot of ad dollars which would otherwise be wasted on non-performing keywords. Another caveat is that you have to leave enough time to have a valid test, that is don’t give up too soon. What this means is that you need to have enough of an advertising budget set aside for testing. PPC is not for the faint of heart!

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