Hello STM! Today has been my first day in STM and, as an IMer that's focused on SEO for years and is now experimenting with PPC, needless to say it's been a full day of eyes glued to my laptop screen.
I've been eyeballing a market that I'm pretty excited about, but I wanted to ask a question: The keywords I'm looking at on Google's Display Network have large impression volumes (500M-1BN+) but show an eCPC of $0.00-$1.00. When I drill into the placements specifically, that number goes up for some of the highly relevant placements (obviously) but remains largely the same.
I've had a decent amount of experience on the organic side developing free courses, adding value/building credibility through email marketing, and optimizing subscriber LTV. I expect a great deal of testing as usual, but for those of you far more experienced with PPC and GDN than I am (admittedly a noob on this front) can I reasonably expect to get some clicks for $0.20-$0.30 with these campaigns if Google is showing large weekly impression levels ranging from $0.00-$1.00 CPC? Or would it likely end up being a waste of time to build out a campaign that would need to bid mostly $1.00 per click, which would make it much more difficult for me to turn a profit with the offers I'm looking at?
Thank you all so much! Side note: If anyone knows of great GDN case studies or follow-alongs here at STM I'd really love to see them. I spent a decent amount of time searching today and although I found a lot of useful info for other sources and networks, I couldn't find much on that front regarding GDN. Thanks again!
They can vary enormously.
Google's network is a lot more susceptible to supply and demand, also you'll notice pricing can fluctuate wildly as advertisers who have been there a while come in and out of the auction. There's a lot of variables at play across the GDN/search network. It's both an art and science running there as an affiliate.
There's some threads here that discuss how some have learnt the GDN that will be useful for you. I think it was redrummr who posted a tutorial and some educational material.
It's still possible to get really cheap traffic but it isn't a source you can tackle on the cheap.
Thanks for the reply GTP! Do you think it would be best to just launch with a simple lander/thank you page for a couple of days to see if I can get the traffic for $0.20-$0.30 per click, then if I'm getting traffic launch into full-on testing mode? Or is it something that varies so widely that I probably shouldn't even consider it if I'm looking at $0.00-$1.00 CPC estimates and I want to pay $0.20-$0.30/click?
I'm not specifically a GDN expert, but if you're thinking to base your product on this traffic I'd definitely recommend doing a quick dry test as you suggest. Get people who click on the lander to sign up to an email list so you have a pre-launch list to promote to (and get some value from your cash) - this is definitely a solid due dilligence step.
(Obviously if GDN experts come back and say "don't do that!" listen to them not me - this is definitely general advice!)
Perfect, thank you for confirming Caurmen. I think that's the best way to go about it, that way I don't waste too much time or effort if I can't acquire traffic at a profitable rate (at least from GDN). Probably the only way to find out for sure.
just use this data to compare it with each other so you get relationships