The AdWords Death Dance

As you know, I’ve been experimenting lately with sending traffic to sites via AdWords. If you’ve tried this before, you know it’s tricky to do, because it’s easy to fall into the “AdWords Death Dance”.

The AdWords Death Dance is an upwards spiral in ad costs that is triggered primarily by ads with low clickthrough ratios (CTRs). The CTR of an ad is perhaps the most important thing about it, because Google rewards high CTR ads with higher ad positions and lower ad costs. Even if you have a great, relevant landing page, a poor CTR will push you into the death dance and turn your AdWords campaign into a money-sucking black hole.

Most AdWords advertisers spend a lot of time choosing the keywords they’ll target. But that’s a mistake. Spend most of your time on the ad text. If you can’t make an ad that people will click, you’ll find that after about 100 ad impressions your minimum bid prices will start to increase — even though you’ve done nothing to change the situation. I haven’t quite figured out what the CTR threshold is, but certainly anything below a 1% CTR is a fast push into the death dance.

After you’ve got the perfect ad text, deliberately overbid when you first activate your campaign. Compelling ad text is absolutely necessary, but you also need to get the ad up where people will see it. You have to bite the bullet and overpay in order to get high initial ad positions. Then when the ads are clicked and you have a reasonable CTR you can start ratcheting the price down to something more reasonable. Your ad should stay in relatively the same position if you do it slowly and the ad maintains a high CTR.

All of this takes time and (perhaps most importantly) money. You’ve got to approach it seriously. Don’t do the AdWords death dance!

[Note that everything I just said applies to ads on the search network. Ads on the content network aren’t treated in the same way because of the sheer number of content sites out there. Which is good, because you can get cheaper traffic that way. But it doesn’t seem to convert as well, either, so you need more traffic. A high CTR is still important here.]