Ask YC: your google adwords experience?

Definitely. There are a few things to bear in mind...

1. Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords. If it is not, Google will give it a bad score, and your minimum bid will be raised, and you'll get less traffic. So make sure keywords appear on the landing page as you would for SEO.

2. Make sure your ad-copy is good. You can create loads of differently worded adverts, and Google will work out which one gets the best CTR, and show that one the most. So spend a long time experimenting with different wording. It's sometimes surprising what changing a single word can sometimes make. (If your CTR is too low google will also reduce your quality score, and so increase your minimum bids).

If you pick popular keywords you can have traffic coming within about 30 minutes I've found. Spend a while using the keyword tool, and adding your own variations - as many as you can think of.

When you start getting traffic on some keywords, expand that avenue - use the keyword tool to find other similar keywords.

How many keywords do you have and what sort of sector are we talking here? $5 is quite a lot unless you're doing finance/law etc

In the past I've run campaigns with budgets as small as $60 per month. $2 a day is perfectly reasonable if you just want to get some test users to your site. Of course, I had to pick the right keywords to make this work.

Order this today (it's a damn bargain!) and thank me later: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321496590/

PS: I do not know the author and I do not own Amazon stock.

google has jacked minimum bids through the roof over the last 6 - 12 months. i'm guessing all of your ads are actually inactive right now because your minimum bid is too low and you have a bad "quality score". Their UI is sort of a pain.

login -> click into your campaign -> click into your ad group -> on the set of tabs to the right, click "keywords". here i'm guessing you'll see that your campaigns are inactive and you have to bid between $5 and $10 per click...which I'm guessing will be prohibitive. 9 months ago you just had to bid the minimum and you would end up paying <$1 per click, but now you will actually pay $5 - $10 per click.

the crazy thing is that there is zero transparency into this market. funds try to bet every quarter on google's earnings based on comscore, etc. but they have no idea what the average CPC is doing. it's like betting on Exxon based on car usage w/o knowing the price per gallon.

On Google I narrowed down to 4 keywords that work best where I get a good conversion rate and I spend no more then .35c per click.

Turn off Google's "Advertising Network" and only advertise on Google search results. I found there "network" just drums up a lot of hits but few conversions.

Use www.adbrite.com. I get better results on AdBrite then I do on Google and I spend less money for more hits and the hits are good quality, it did take more time to narrow down the right sites to advertise on.

Google organic hits are important don't forget SEO.

Try www.reviewme.com to get a blog writer to write about you (don't spend more then $100).

Try Pubmatic. They look at more than one ad-network to increase your revenue.

http://www.pubmatic.com/

Yeah, the interface really really sucks. We actually thought of making an adwords campaign manager for our YC idea (making buying adwords mindless and simple) but if you drill down into the TOS for all the major networks they are anti-competitive to the level of being ridiculous. It took me a few hours to actually figure out the adwords interface and I still don't fully understand it.

We're doing Adwords, plus a couple of other pay-per-click services. We spend about $500/month with Adwords, and haven't had trouble finding keywords to sit on for about $2-$3 (we avoid competing with our customers for keyword placement, which rules out a large pile of really expensive hosting-related terms)...keywords are expensive and getting moreso from adwords, so I'm putting most new spending on other options.

AdBrite is pretty good. You can buy full-time placement on quite a few sites, which is probably better for long-term effectiveness and brand awareness than per-click...I'm experimenting with that now. Sometimes it turns out really expensive though--I picked a few design-related sites, thinking web designers are also often webmasters, but so far, I've paid like $23 per click from one of them (from about 100k impressions)...I still have some time left on the ad, so it could drop a bit more as the ad has time to work, but I'm thinking I'll pick the best performers from the CPC ad list to buy full-time placement on in the future, rather than guessing about what fits.

TextLinkAds are too expensive and are kind of iffy on the "don't irritate your potential customers" scale, so I've signed up, but haven't bought any links yet.

Our best marketing tools are our various informational websites--we get 50% of our clicks from our Open Source project website, and another 10% from our documentation wiki (which contains our two published books on the topic of our Open Source project and gets quite a lot of traffic).

One interesting thing to note: Adwords clicks are stickier than any of the other types. Folks stick around for nearly 5 pages after finding us through Google Adwords, while Adbrite clicks stay an average of 2 pages (though some are better--very closely related pages tend to produce much better stickiness), and the other sources are somewhere in between. So, I suspect Adwords clicks are better qualified than those from the other sources, and thus worth more.

Of course, if you can't find keywords that you can competitively spend on, then you can't really make good use of Adwords. But, I'm surprised. I've used Adwords in two fields that were pretty competitive (in my previous business I was butting heads on one side with CDNs, and on the other with various types of server appliance vendors and proxy software vendors...while my current business sits along-side the highly competitive hosting industry, which has some of the highest per-click rates that I'm aware of), and never had trouble finding some less trodden territory to live in. Are you sure you're not going overly broad or trying to buy ads that would better serve your business partners or your customers? You obviously want to sit on the same spots as your competitors, if you can afford it, plus if you can come up with some alternatives (like for people who don't know what your product is normally called but know what they want to accomplish) that's a good way to capture customers that no one else has first access to.

So, it really depends on your industry, how wide a range of keywords would be useful to you, and whether you've got to fight with a dozen other companies or just one or two.

And, of course, Adwords is not the only kind of marketing that exists. It's just the easiest. You can advertise in all sorts of strange places--just figure out where your customers go, what they read, etc. and get your ads into those places via whatever means necessary.

BTW-Google's syndication network is a huge ripoff, in general. Do not let them run your ads on the whole network (it's enabled by default). It was eating our budget in a few hours each day for worthless clicks, and leaving no money for far higher quality clicks from the search engine results.

We just launched PayScroll ( http://www.payscroll.com ) and I've been trying out various ads system. Adword, Yahoo Search Marketing, Text-Link-Ads and almost PPP (payperpost). Here's what I have been seeing so far. And bare in mind, this is with a $200 budget.

Adword - Expensive. we are bidding around $0.15 - $0.25 CPC. Clicks comes from search and sites. And also you got charge for impressions. We had to pay $$ for impression from a campaign that brought in zero clicks. Remember, Google is stock is at $600 for a reason. If you have a huge budget and can place high bids, it might work for you.

Yahoo Search Marketing - Slightly less expensive and lower CPC with more click through. We signed up through Yahoo SB account and you get $50 sign up promotional credit but the catch is you have to deposit min $30 so you get $80 to burn. So a plus if you have a small budget. No cost per impression just pure CPC.

Text-link-ads - So far not a whole lot of clicks with $125 worth of links. Total links we bought - 5. Main purpose is increasing your pagerank (wishful thinking?). Promotional $100 so overall we paid $25 out of pocket.

PayPerPost - Pay per post sounds interesting at first. And we submited an opportunity through PPP direct. Basically PPP direct is you make an offer to the blog owner and the blog owner will decide to accept your offer to review your site, etc. We did not go through because the offer was pending for days for some reason. So no deal there.

Again this is what we are at with $200 and might not hold true if you have a huge budget of 4 digits to burn.