How do I judge what I should be spending on advertising based on the 3 LTV segments (best, average, worst) I have for my customers?

Yes. Use the "Link Text" in your facebook ads to A/B test various domain names. To do this, simply launch a few identical ads, and only change the link text to say the variation of the domain name you are considering. The ad with the highest CTR (not conversion rate or other KPI) will be the one that sparks the most interest in your target audience. Note: one domain may have a high relevance to one audience, but low relevance with another. So this tactic should only be used if you have a very specific demo you are targeting.

I'm the CTO of https://3dagogo.com a marketplace of proven to print 3D designs. We look at the two sides differently. There's not a single customer. In our case you have designers and purchasers ( sometimes the same person can be both ). Cost and methods for acquiring designers are very different than those to attract purchasers. I would clearly separate the sides and come up with separate cost structures. In my opinion when you're looking at the marketplace from the purchaser perspective, the other side's acquisition costs can be seen as fixed marketing costs.

I've done a lot of complex analytics installations, usually cross-domain and including AdWords and manual tagging with conversion tracking of ecommerce transactions. The gclid by default will override the manual UTM values in Analytics so that is what you are looking for. If you are just grabbing the manual tags from the URL for your own purpose, this should be OK. However, if you at some point want to import conversions (say) connected to your manual tag, then you would want to enable UTM overriding the gclid: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033981?hl=en. Do you have AdWords and Analytics accounts linked? Where and how are you tracking commerce conversions, if you are? Do you feel you are getting the insights you need from your current custom reporting? Let me know if I can help with a call about those or further optimization of your analytics capture. Best - Michael

Depending upon what aspect of AdWords you want to automate, you can look at various tools. As Megumi suggested, Marin is a good option for bid management. You can have a look at Optmyzr (optmyzr.com) to automate account management activities. Cyfe is another option to automate reporting and building dashboards.

Source: I founded www.buyads.com and www.isocket.com, which powers the direct ad sales for the web's best sites (like TechCrunch, AOL, Microsoft, etc) We hand invited the publishers that join our market because, as your question suggests, there is some threshold between who should and should not try direct sales. There are no hard rules, just guidelines. The superseding one is this: Do you have inventory (audience) an advertiser would take the time to specifically work with you for? If you open a "store" and starting selling this stuff, do people want to buy it? One measure is traffic, but that's not enough. In general we like to look for sites with 100,000 page views a month or more. But it can depend on the content and vertical. For example, we power a website that gets 25k hits a month but is the only site covering the voice over talent industry in Hollywood - so its super nichey and there is a market for those advertisers. Other examples of small but successful premium properties include some hyperlocal ones (www.queensmamas.com, www.brooklynheightsblog.com, www.brokelyn.com, etc), the largest blog for truckers, largest blog for prison wardens, etc. The conflicting examples are sites with large traffic but bad audiences/verticals. We reject a lot of "tech blog" also-rans that just copy and paste content from TechCrunch but get a lot of SEO traffic from it. Or even if it's a legit site, it can be in a bad brand-advertiser vertical like home finance / mortgages (which is mostly lead gen advertisers)