We finally got a click. 3 of them actually!
Nearly 6,000 impressions netted us 3 clicks. The cost per click (CPC) was about $0.15 so we owe Google $0.45. Our Click through Rate (CTR) is a meager 0.05%. That is very low. Should we be concerned? Yes and No. You CTR does not affect your quality score on the Adwords content network. It does however affect things on Google’s search network. We don’t have any impressions on the search network yet so don’t have to worry about that yet.
So what happened with these clicks?
Well, we can find out with our Azoogle sub report. Do that by logging into your Azoogle account and clicking “Statistics” then “Sub Report”.
Next, make sure you can view the search criteria, click “Show Search Criteria” if you can’t. Select your dates and enter your offer id number in the search box. You should see the offer pop up. Click on it and then click “Get Report”.
I won’t have screenshots for this part because my screen looks a little different than most (because I have soooooo many sub ids Azoogle makes me come back for the results).
Eventually you’ll get this information. Note: Mine comes from Excel. Your screen will look different.
The first line is jaygeiger1 and has 2 clicks. This is from a link that I put on the first page. This was clicked on by people like you looking at the offer. We can disregard that one.
Next look at the lines with “kw_t1_S” in them. We got no clicks for search. What are these? Well, Google likes to send out its bot to your page. The page may change per variable so Google caches each one to assign it a quality score. We can disregard these ones as well. So basically all that we are interested in for now is the following.
I will go to “Text to Columns” in Excel and split the sub field by “_”. I then ad some quick labels and only look at the valuable columns.
So why 5 clicks and not 3? 2 came from ps3.ign.com so maybe they were really the same person. Perhaps 2 of the clicks had some sort of error. You click count will NEVER match exactly.
So we are dealing with 4 keywords and 4 websites. We can take a look at these websites and see if they suit our needs.
Well, the first one “gamehousegames.com” is a MFA site (Made for Adsense). It only has garbage on it. We don’t want our ads showing on it. So we want to exclude this from our Adwords campaign. To do this we open our campaign in AdWords and click “add” by the excluded sites.
We then just add in gamehousegames.com to the next page and click “Exclude Sites”. Make sure you click “Save All Exclusions” to have the exclusion list saved.
Good. Now off to the next site. playkidsgame.com. WTF?! Another MFA site? Well, we’ll exclude them too!
So now we are down to 3 clicks that we can look at. Maybe Google figured that part out for us before however those 2 sites are excluded for life from our campaign.
The next 3 clicks came from about.com and ign.com. These are 2 very reputable sites. Also note that the keywords are for “PSP”, “PS3″ and “XBOX”. Now those sound like groups! We need to do some re-arranging and create a different ad group for each of them.
Now here is the part that gets boring. I am going to create the following 8 ad groups.
Nintendo Game Rentals Exact
PS Game Rentals Exact
PS2 Game Rentals Exact
PS3 Game Rentals Exact
PSP Game Rentals Exact
Wii Game Rentals Exact
XBOX 360 Game Rentals Exact
XBOX Game Rentals Exact
Each ad group will have keywords just for itself. I’ll export the keywords and ads at the end of setting them up. I will also post an example of the ad. I do have to change the URLs for each though. I am leaving the video game rentals campaign as it is but changing the link to be…
The one for XBOX will be …
http://x.azjmp.com/02JGH?sub=xbox_kw_t1_{ifContent:C}{ifSearch:S}_{creative}_{placement}_{keyword}
That way I can track which group the click is coming from.
Here’s the campaign as it stands right now.
