@Dash Yeah i suppose you could look at like that, but when it comes to ppc its all about cutting down your costs and increasing your revenue (sounds obvious!), so I would rather not receive a click from someone searching for “tescos” when im promoting a product at amazon, imho I reckon the user has included tescos in their search term for a reason, most likely because they want to buy in store! However, you might be right and maybe it would be worth having that keyword included, but for me, I wouldnt risk it. I’d rather pay 40p on a click for someone that i KNOW isnt specifically looking for the product from tescos.

@Steven I use a mixture of approaches… i have an amazon associates account setup for PPC direct to amazon and I also have an account for standard websites. If I’m doing direct PPC I tend to get a huge CTR and a very nice conversion rate. Its a little harder with a mini site, but still worthwhile. When I started PPC i set myself a budget of £5k (I was only able to do this because I’d done particularly well at the end of 2008) and this was primarily to allow me to learn PPC. Many people wont try ppc because they are afraid of losing money, so I figured I’d allow myself a pot of cash that if I lost I wouldnt’ be *too* bothered and at least I’d known I’d given it a bash. Well, it turned out it worked out well and I’ve learnt a lot about PPC and now really known my way around Adwords and take on £xxxxx a month campaigns without stressing! If I can recommend one thing… it would be to try Adwords, give it a bash, you wont look back!

@Graham nope no trademark issues. Adwords lets you know if you have a trademark they are not happy with before the ad goes live, so basically if the ad goes live you’re all good. There is always brand bidding issues, but I always put the keywords (the keywords specified by the merchant that I cannot target) as negative keywords in my campaigns so as not to get caught up in all that.

Cheers,

Mark

I have recently run a PPC campaign. Please feel free to check out the results at http://www.succeedandinspire.com

I think I will have to look closley at my negative keywords in future. Great post.

David

Great post, this is something that can be easily over looked when doing PPC. But negative keywords are very powerful!

Wow, selling over £90,000 within the first month. You must have grew your spending pretty damn quickly and had quite a hefty float to begin with to pull of that figure so quickly.

Do you send users directly to amazon, or do you have a landing page / micro site? Also, if you have a Landing Page/site, do you tend to review the product or just have a big call to action to tell people to buy it from amazon to get them there asap?

Would be interesting to hear which methods you use.

Cheers!

Steven

You make a point of adding ‘tesco’, ‘currys’ and ‘dixons’ to your negative addwords. However, i would have thought that if i was searching for say Boyd 1234, and my friend had told me it was a good price in dixons for example, i would google this – saves me searching the site. THEN your add would pop up at the top, and i would see (assuming amazon has the lowest price) that it is cheaper at amazon. On the balance of probabilities, i would skoot off to amazon and buy from them.

so would it not be a good idea to take these off the negative key words?

I suppose my question is, as i am completely unexperienced, does your analytics specifically tell you that when people googled dixons boyd 1234 or whatever they didnt click on your link? or they did click and you didnt get a sale?

Just looking for some info!

Cheers,

Dash.

I used to do loads of ppc in finance – never done much retail. I was having a think just though and heres some more negs that might be good for Tv’s:

used
second hand
update
warranty
instalation
help
customer service
refurbished
download
remote
scart
speakers

Are you doing phrase or broad match – I made a big mistake on broad once that cost me loads so I never do it now!

Cheers

Russ