4 replies to this topic

[LibbyLu]

My boss is thinking of buying a site and has had me do a test campaign on the site. He has restricted me to a very small budget. I have been getting traffic to the site. Now he wants me to tell him if it would be possible to get about 20 times the traffic that I have been getting. I said that I think so, that in my tests so far the budget gets used up no matter what I do and some of the keywords have a high number of searches.

This is a very niche type of site. I can always do more adgroups though and try new things. My problem is that I am basically being asked to look predict the future. I told him to up the budget and see what happens, but he wants a prediction before any more money is spent. Is there any way of predicting this? Thanks so much.

[Jill]

I'm no PPC expert, but I believe you have to open up the budget for a certain period of time (days or weeks or months) to see what happens, or else you'll never know.

[Michael Martinez]

If he is not willing to increase the budget then you need to be looking at the Return on Investment (number of sales for advertising money spent) and not traffic.

Improving your ROI should convince him to spend more money because the advertising will pay for itself.

[CheekyGuy]

If you're realy really right with budget.. You can always run the campaign for an hour or so as Jill suggested. If you're already in the market and know the footdfall well it could be easier though. There are consumer related markets that have high traffic after work. OTOH there are b2b type markets that virtually shut down after hours and weekends.

Just run the adwords campaign for one hour at peak time. Then fire up anlytics for a similar campaign you're running e.g. say the website you're intending to buy is printers, and you have a campaign going already for fax machines. These will be very similar in timing of traffic. So it will be possible to use one hours worth of traffic and use your avilable data to estimate what the traffic would be had you run it for the full day. It's by no means perfect but it's good enough.

[LucidWebMarketing]

It's simple really. Go to the Google Keyword Tool. Enter your keywords. The results will show you how many impressions per month there is on your keywords. Note that is for the geographical area you are targeting and a monthly average. You've run a test already so you can compare the figures if you wish. But most important, you know the CTR you've had. Multiply the CTR by the number of impressions reported and you got approximately the number of clicks you're going to get.

As you also know what position and costs you are getting for a certain bid, you can estimate your total costs as well.

Of course, you'll want to improve so that CTR may increase. This is good because not only will you get more traffic, your Quality Score should go up and this will a) help get better positioning and thus more traffic as higher in the rankings get better click rates and reduce your costs.