Quick Question - Google Adwords experiences, worth it or not?

[Clarkie]

Hey,

This is a very simple question so I won't extend the thread.


Has anyone run a google adwords campaign?

Did you find it to be useful?

How much did you have to spend to get any noticeable results?


Cheers,
Jack

[Fish]

Adwords will give you very quick results, it's still the best paid advertising I know of (even though they've banned me). It's also expensive though, and you really need to study up on how to reduce your cost per click. Your landing page has to meet their vague but demanding requirements, to start with. You should also know what each click is worth to you, so you'll know whether it's all worth it. Adwords is very unfriendly to newbies.

There may be better courses now, but Perry Marshall wrote a good guide to adwords. It's worth reading before you jump in.

[JJMcClure]

It's the most flexible marketing tool I've ever come across, in the limited context of Google of course. I got started after reading the Perry Marshall guide too.

Results vary according to circumstance.

[grynge]

It all depends on what are your goals. Gaining traffic from adwords is a very expensive excercise and there is much cheaper ways of doing that. Are you looking for members? depending on the niche there can also be other much cheaper ways of gaining members. Are you looking to profit from affil links? Are you looking to sell a product? Are you looking to make money out of arbitrage? It still works in some niches I am told but you really need to know what you are doing to make it work.

Your goals and marketplace really dictates the way you should run your adwords campaign each of the above goals have completely different ad setups and goal methods.

It can be extremely profitable if run wisely. I have a couple of very lucrative campaigns myself. I sell a group of products which I make anywhere from $60 - $300 per sale, I purchase a low volume of clicks usually around 50 - 80 per month, I pay around $1.00 per click, and I have a conversion rate of about 60% You do need to keep an eye on every click basically and I have never had much luck with the content network so I turn that off.

The trick to sales is finding the right keyphrase that pays. You have to think like your target audience and work out the keyphrase that they are going to type when they want to either buy an item, join a program, click on affil link or click on an ad.

You could say to me why not expand my keyphrase list, well I have tried that and the conversions just tumble, I think in this niche and marketplace I have about the perfect mix, I don't believe that for this particular group of products there are any more buyers in my marketplace per month.

Buying traffic for the hope that it will convert is useless, buy your traffic because it converts.

[Clinton]

Jack, Adwords is huge. A lot of people not just run campaigns but their entire business is built on Adwords campaigns. And you do know that Google earns most of its hundreds of billions of dollars from what businesses spend on Adwords, right?

I do have some campaigns, but I find Adwords very complicated.

[JJMcClure]

I definitely recommend using Adwords, done properly it's cheap and easy to to calculate the ROI for. Perhaps this is useful for you, it's something I posted ages ago, some short and simple PPC suggestions:


1. Unless there's any urgency for traffic, go in at the minimum bid price (and use manual price setting) then as you find out where the Ad will appear for that price gradually bump it up to the price you need to pay to be on page 1.

2. Unless you have a need to establish branding, aim for Ad positions 3-7, you'll get less clicks but people who work down the list are more serious about spending money and your conversion rate will be better. Position one gets lots of clicks but not as many conversions, it's referred to as a 'vanity' placement.

3. Targeting is everything with PPC. The more targeted your Ad copy and keywords are, the better your traffic will convert so split your keyword list up into groups that are based around a specific keyword phrase and use it in the Ad copy lines. (It's better to have 20 Ad groups with 5 closely related keywords each than 1 Ad group using all 100 diverse keyword phrases)

4. Use the campaign 'oportunities' tool once the campaign has been running long enough for Google to collect some data.

5. Make sure that you have conversion tracking code on the right pages otherwise you won't know what keyword phrases have converted and you won't know what your ROI is.

6. Make sure that your landing page is relevant to the Ad, and vice versa, lack of relevance or a spammy landing page will kill your quality score and your Ads will stop showing.

7. Start off with a smallish daily budget and work up to a larger budget as you get results.

[Kay]

I also went back to using AdWords for a small campaign recently having not used it since the year dot. I used to know what I was doing but now it's all got a bit too complicated for me, so I shut down that campaign after spending only a few dollars. And now AdWords are writing to me every week offering a personal consultation to help me get some new campaigns going. I haven't taken them up on it and I doubt if I will.

Anyway, the main reason for this post is that I wanted to pick up on this point:

...and you really need to study up on how to reduce your cost per click

I was reading some MMO stuff the other day and one of the recommended ways to make money was to be aware that most small businesses don't know how to use AdWords properly and will most likely be paying too much per click. The recommendation was that you should use this knowledge to exploit that fact so you can make more money from their lack of knowledge and experience. It doesn't seem to be a very ethical way to go about doing business but no doubt there will be plenty of people flocking to cash in on this lucrative niche. Don't let yourself become yet another juicy bit of prey for them.

[JJMcClure]

most small businesses don't know how to use AdWords properly and will most likely be paying too much per click. .

I've often found this with PPC clients who had previously been running their own campaigns.

In one case I reduced a client's expenditure by 86% for a 270% increase in clicks, and the clicks were better targeted too. They also hadn't been tracking conversions and so had no idea whether they were actually generating revenue from their expenditure.

They also tend to have only one or two Ad groups with a handful of keywords, they don't split test Ads and they don't optimise the campaign once they have results.

The greatest concern clients always have is that of costs spiralling out of control but once I've explained that you can set a daily or monthly budget, that reassures them.

[eddiebooth]

My concern with Adwords is that if most of your site traffic comes in via ppc it becomes too easy to ignore/miss the factors that could help you progress in the natural searches simply because you are too busy. I also read that ppc/adwords has a 2% conversion rate, so you need to consider this when looking at the costs per click

[JJMcClure]

My concern with Adwords is that if most of your site traffic comes in via ppc it becomes too easy to ignore/miss the factors that could help you progress in the natural searches simply because you are too busy. I also read that ppc/adwords has a 2% conversion rate, so you need to consider this when looking at the costs per click

I'd lov to have the problem of so much PPC traffic that I was too busy to do anything else...

As for the 2%, sounds about right, I tend to think 3% is average but the point is that as long as you're spending less than you're making, it's profitable, and PPC is very easy to track that way which is one of the things that makes it such an effective tool.