Dec
Since I found out that my last campaign was actually against the Ebay TOS I cut it short a few days (I was going to leave it running through christmas). With that campaign dead, I had nothing running, and with nothing running, there will be no money coming in so it was time to get started on a new campaign.
First Landing Page
I finally got around to setting up my first landing page! Its not great, but it’s a start…I guess. I decided to take an extremely targeted approach on this one, probably a little too targeted, but this is a learning experience, so we will see how it works.
The product I decided to promote is again in line with my Honda tuning hobby, and is a product that I actually purchased and used on my old Honda Accord, so I have a lot of personal experience with it. The product is a specific exhaust for the Honda Accord called the “Apexi World Sport 2″. I used to loooove this exhaust when I had it because it was nice and quite while still allowing the exhaust to flow, and I would recommend it to anyone.
To create my landing page I started with a nice blank BANS page and did some research online for some content. I went to the apexi site and found a nice little blurb about the World sport 2 exhaust that I kind of reworked and put on my landing page. I got a picture of the exhaust from Google images and put it on the page (probably copyright infringement, but screw it), and did a very specific search filter for the page to only display that model of exhaust for the Honda Accord. Here is a screenshot of the landing page, or you can visit the real deal at http://digmyhonda.com/store/accord/Store/Honda-Accord-apexi-Exhaust
Keywords and optimization
I will first admit that the landing page is not fully optimized and I will probably end up reworking it a little more tomorrow, but I needed a foundation to build on. My target keyword for this campaign is going to be “Honda Accord Apexi Exhaust“. Its a pretty long tail keyword, and honestly doesn’t show much traffic on wordtracker, but i know for a fact that this is a very popular exhaust in the Honda community and people are always looking for it, so I decided to take a chance on it.
The first thing I did to try and optimize for this keyword is to set my HTML title tag to the exact keyword. Along with the title tag, I also put the keyword between my first <H1> tag as well. I went through the little article I had and plugged in a few keywords like “Honda Accord” and “Apexi Exhaust”, and even bolded some of the keywords because apparently google really looks at the formating of the text within the landing page.
Luckily the Ebay auctions for these exhausts are already extremely keyword rich, so that adds a lot of keyword content automagically!
The adwords campaign.
With my landing page ready to go, it was time to setup my Google adwords campaign. For now, I have decided to leave the campaign running on both the Search and Content networks, but that may change. I will keep you updated.
I setup my first ad group and called it “accord apexi” because I plan on expanding this campaign to the civic and prelude very soon, so I wanted to distinguish it. Next was setting up the ad copies, which I actually have a bit of trouble with, so if anyone has any pointers let me know! I setup three ad copies for now, but I may add more in the future depending on what the CTR on these is. here is a screen shot:
Keywords
The last thing to do to setup my campaign was to enter in my keywords. Like i said above, wordtracker wasn’t much help in this area, so I had to resort to thinking of keywords myself. In the past I have used a pretty large number of keywords, so this time I wanted to try my hand at a “laser targeted” keyword list. In fact, my keyword list is so short, I can include them all right here in this blog entry:
Thats it! only 10 keywords for now, but I will almost definitely need to increase the number in order to get any impressions at all. I am hoping that because this campaign is running on the content network that this will cause my ad to appear in exactly the right places. I have also heard that adding as many negative keywords as possible can really help, so I will be doing that tomorrow as well.
As you can see, my quality score is pretty bad. This is the first time I have delt with quality score, so I am really pretty lost. Reading about it on other peoples blogs doesn’t give you a sense of just how difficult it is to please google! They have be set at$0.30 to $0.50 minimum bid, which really sucks! I ended up setting my minimum bid to $0.30 cents for now because I remember reading on www.uberaffiliate.com that setting your bids higher at first will allow you to test out your CTR and conversion rates while at the same time letting Google figure out if your campaign is worthy (or not worthy!)
More tomorrow
Thats about it for now, the campaign is up and running, so now all I can do is wait! What better way to pass the time than to catch a movie with old highschool friends who are in town for christmas? We are going to go check out “Sweeney Todd”, which is the new Johnny Depp movie. Im a huge fan of both Johnny Depp and and Tim Burton, so im hoping this movie wont dissapoint!
I will have an update on how the campaign did tomorrow, and start to test and tweak it. You guys can follow along and maybe even give me some pointers along the way! My biggest concern for this campaign right now is that im not going to get much traffic because its so narrowly targeted. Time will tell!
