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I joined “PPC Classroom” on the day it launched - September 25, 2007. I can easily remember that date because it’s my dad’s birthday, but anyway, I was sitting in front of my PC refreshing the sales page in order to qualify for the “fast action bonus”.

I’ve waited until now to write up a full review of PPCC in order to let all of the dust settle. And there has been quite a bit of dust to be settling.

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One of my goals for 2007 was to get off the stick when it comes to tracking. Any kind of tracking really, since I wasn’t doing much if any prior to last year. The tracking that I did do consisted mainly of looking at my site stats in Webalizer. It was a start and I at least got a feel for my traffic numbers, referrers, search terms, and countries where my visitors originated from, but I was doing next to nothing when it came to tracking conversions.

And that’s a key piece of business data needed by anyone doing business online.

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I received a question concerning a previous post, “Adwords Sticker Shock“, asking if I had found a solution to the ever increasing cost of advertising on Google Adwords.

The short answer is yes.

Now for the longer explanation, or is it a qualification? Actually, the answer can be found in the title of this post — only pay what the click is worth.

I’ve found that some campaigns that were profitable just a year ago advertising on Adwords are no longer profitable this time around. In one case, it’s not so much that the Adwords CPC is that much higher, but that the conversion rate has plummeted for the merchant. I emailed the affiliate manager and she confirmed that sales are down.

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There’s been a lot of buzz recently about Adwords Placement Targeting and the impressive results that many are experiencing with it. Ever since the release of “Adwords180“, interest in what was until recently called “Site Targeting” by Google, has only gained in attention.

The latest version of this Adwords Content Network advertising model now supports both CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and CPC (cost per click) bidding models. In effect, you can specify the sites where you Content Network ads will be shown. Even right down to a specific page on a particular site. Of course these sites and pages need to have Adsense on them.

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So, I’ve got a few campaigns currently running on Adwords for merchants that I had some success with this same time last year. These are campaigns in relatively competitive consumer product niches. Not hyper-competitive like the financial niches, but last year I could get on the first page of Google results for a bid price of between .15 to .20.

This time around I was disappointed to find that I was getting virtually no impressions several hours after putting up my Adwords campaigns for these products. Google’s diagnostics were telling me that my ad was not being shown on the first page of results for all of my keywords even though most of them had a “Great” quality score with a minimum bid price of .04.

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