How can AdWords can be used to reach a niche community of site owners?

Let's take the example of a single keyword, which we aren't sure how it'll perform. We'll need to make a few more assumptions to get started. Hopefully, you can produce these based on similar activity in the account, or on your site. You'll need an Average Order Value assumption first. If you're targeting a specific product, that product's price is a reasonable place to start. We'll assume $150. You'll also need a Conversion Rate. You can either use data from a similar campaign, or your site's average. Don't worry--it can be a ballpark, as this will correct course quickly enough. We'll assume 3%. You'll need to know how much you're willing to pay for advertising, as a percent of revenue. Too high, and your margin erodes. Too low, and you give up market share. This figure is called your Cost Of Sale (COS), and is just the reciprocal of your ROI target. Let's assume you're looking to spend no more than 15% of revenue for these ads. Now, with the COS and the AOV, you can arrive at a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) target. This is how many dollars you can spend per conversion. In our case, it's $150 * 15% = $22.50. That's how much we can spend to generate the clicks it takes to produce a conversion. If we have the Conversion Rate, then we know how many clicks (on average) that takes. At 3% conversion rate, we average an order for every ~33 clicks, so the $22.50 is all we can pay for them and still hit our goal. That's $0.68 per click, and that makes for a GREAT starting point. But how do you know when to give up? You can use Wolfram|Alpha to find out how many clicks it would take to get to 95% probability of a conversion: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+-+.03%29%5Ex+%3D+%281+-+.95%29 The .03 is our conversion rate, and the .95 is the certainty we'd like to hit. This solves to ~98 clicks, so we'll run our test to at least that many. If you get a conversion sooner than that (with some sort of upper bound), you can bid based on the real conversion rate. For example, if you got a conversion after 25 clicks, you can bid using that 4% number. If that's actually too high, you'll have collected the additional clicks to know that fairly quickly, so it turns itself back down before it spends very much. If you aren't getting a conversion, you can also bid as if you had only one. If you are at 90 clicks, for example, and still haven't seen a conversion, you could bid as if you had one, bid using the 1.11% rate, and your bid will be cautious, skeptical even, and your spend will be controlled. Now, this was all for a single biddable entity, perhaps a keyword. What I'd recommend is to keep your long-tail keywords separate from your higher-action keywords, in different AdGroups. As you sift out higher-performers, move them to the main group. Slower-action keywords can stay in the long-tail. You may not even need to bid at the keyword level, if you use this strategy, as you can apply exactly the same logic to the AdGroup level. If the entire Group is a new test, then this will accumulate clicks more rapidly, and reduce costs. Now, how ever broad you go will set how much risk you're taking on. If you have one keyword, like this example, you're probably only going to spend about $50. If you do that thousands of times, then that number goes up with it. If you'd like to talk through this, I'd be happy to do so. My VIP link is: https://clarity.fm/roysteves/statbid

I have worked with a client with a similar issue. Their competitor was bidding on the brand name of my client. You will have to donate some Adwords spent and create “branded campaign” where you focus on bidding on your client’s business name. Your client should have a high quality score for their brand keywords since their website should but an authority on the brand name. As far as stopping a competitor from bidding on the name the most you can do is send a cease and desist letter and I would only recommend this if the brand name has a registered trademark.

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

It all depends on whether they are all selling the same thing to the same persona. If yes, then combine all the campaigns into one adwords account, which feeds into one analytics account. That way they can get feedback on the effectiveness of different keywords, ads, etc. more quickly (because there will be more data, from all the different websites, all in one place, for a particular keyword). If they are each selling different things, or to different personas, then don't combine their accounts, because it will just make things confusing and not useful from an analysis perspective.

Make sure you've setup advanced analytics. You'll get a better picture of which conversions were direct, and which ones were assisted by another channel. Use tags and make sure your urls include all the detailed parameters - note that savvy users might truncate that link, so use a link shortener (like bit.ly) to mask it.