google adwords

[GregC]

Anyoen use this? Can you give your experience of it?


I registered today with a max daily budget of £7 and a price per click of £2 to put me ranking number one.

The ad was gone in an hour!! crazy


i think competitors just click on yoru ad to get rid of it? Is this possible?

[Ian J]

Competitors may click on the link but you should be able to see the IP addresses from your site stats to see if this is happening constantly.

The other problem with Adwords is that sales companies will know that you have an advertising budget of some sorts and will click on your site to get your telephone number to telephone yoy to try and flog their products to you.

Try a smaller amount to try and get a ranking at three or four instead of one and see what difference that makes.

[GregC]

good idea, thanks

[sharp]

The thing about Google Adwords is that it's not as simple as simply 'how much do i pay to guarantee being number 1'. Getting Adwords to work for you depends on lots of things...especially important is the value of the average sale on your site.....given that you are paying £2 per click and that from your clickthroughs you might only expect between 2-8% of people to actually buy from you. So to get 1 sale on your site, you'd need at least 50 clickthroughs, so you'd have spent £100 to get there. Is that worth it? If your a small retailer, highly unlikely. Unless your brand-building or selling something massively high-value, your Adwords bid doesn't really make sense as it stands.

Better to build up a complete campaign of dozens of ads which are very very carefully targetted and specific and for which you pay pennies. This strategy enables my company to use Adwords really profitably - for every £1 spent on Adwords, we're getting £25+ in actual revenue now....which I am pretty happy with...but our campaigns have taken a long time to refine and get to that level...it's not a quick way to get easy sales if you really want to get the most out of it.

By the way, setting your daily limit to that low will have a detrimental effect on your CTR even if you were only bidding pennies....we always set our daily budgets to way higher than we actually aim to spend (and we've not been stung with this tactic yet) and make sure our ads are so tight they won't go mad with clickthroughs and reach that budget.


Annette

[GregC]

Hi Sharp

Can you give an example of how you have refined your ads for different search words?

Adwords is weird. I started of with their recommended rate per click on £2.51. I was top of the list. My budget was gone within an hour every day.

I dropped it to .30p and i was placed 4.5 on the list and the traffic to my site increased dramatically.

[sharp]

well, here goes....

we sell products, so almost all of our adwords ads are each driven to one specific product at a time, and go straight to a product detail page.

We hardly have any adwords ads that are generalised and which link just to our home page.

We also hardly ever bid higher than .10 per click - usually we bid .04 per click or thereabouts.

We never get sucked into trying to get to the top for heavily over-subscribed very general keywords like 'gifts' as that is really a mugs game. We'll instead build up a keyword list of absolutely specific keywords like 'luxury writing paper' or 'wizard of oz gifts' etc. - that's the hard part - getting a sizeable list of these keywords per product.

In our ads, we almost always make sure we state exactly what we're advertising and quite often we include the price too. This enables customers to sort the wheat from the chaff....so for example if you google on 'wizard of oz gifts' you can rule out almost all of the adwords advertisers as being irrelevant - they are bidding wildly on 'gifts' but are really not relevant...so we get high click-through even though we aren't paying to be in top spot.

That's not perhaps the best example I could give but you get the picture....be as specific as you can be - in both the wording of your ads and in your keyword list.

We also add our keywords in broad match, phrase match and exact match options, and we work hard on negative keywords. We use the adwords wrapper to help with this - google 'adwords wrapper' to find it. We also use overture keyword assistant, googles keyword tool, Google Suggest search engine, and a myriad of other tools to build up keyword lists....remember it doesn't cost anything to have a big list! Most of our ads have keyword lists in the hundreds of words/phrases...and even though some of these get very low impression rates, it seems to pay off as a strategy.


We've also implemented Googles Conversion rate tracking so we can see specifically which clicks result in purchases - this helps galvanise the mind!


I see you sell massage tables and a quick Google shows that this is quite heavily subscribed which is why Google wants you to pay so much to get a good position in the adword listings. But for example, there is no-one bidding on 'portalite 006' which is one of the products you sell. That's got to be worth a punt....even if the volumes are much lower than simply for 'massage tables' - I'd also add every relevant keywords to your list you can think of....even if you don't see the point because others are bidding higher - at some point, they may use their budget, pull their ads, or just not be what the customer is looking for....so you'd then be waiting in the wings ready to get your ad shown for pennies....add everything you can find through rersearch, everything you can think up yourself and all manner of variations, eg

portalite massage table
massage table portable
portalite massage products
portalite stockist
portalite uk
professional massage resources (I see this has only 2 ads showing in google!)

and so on ad nauseum.
really an exercise in persistence and thinking outside the box sometimes. And keeping going.


Are you planning to add more products to your site? That would give you more opportunities for adwords ads...

I could go on but should probably stop now - hope that gives you food for thought!

Annette

[peterjhale]

This is excellent advice - especially the google tracking script - an absolute must

I do a small adwords campaign and

a: always put the price in
b: use negative KW "free"
c: take the ads to specific landing pages

I am also out of the generic game as these just do not convert and all the government agencies are all top and spend a *lot* of money to get and keep themselves there *sigh* power to the SME owner I suppose

[GregC]

Thanks Sharp

Was an interesting read and in the past i didnt generate a lot of keywords because i thought it would be more expensive but now I can see its not.

I just used "massage table". I ended my adwords yesterday as we have no stock left!!!

[clickprofits]

Some great advice there Annette - one more tip I would add is to split test your ads, create 2 (or more) ads for each campaign then uncheck the option to automatically optimize your ads by click through. Once you have about 50 clicks on each ad, edit the one with the lowest CTR (clickthrough rate) and try something else. Only change one thing at a time so that you know what the effect is. Lots of things to try: eg: Headline, punctuation, different words, try capitalizing your url eg: www.MySite.com vs www.mysite.com

If you keep doing this you will gradually find out which ads have the highest click through rate for you.

Google also has some tips on their site:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html

[Iluvebay]

Google adwords has changed quite alot recently. Has anyone noticed the keywords that I used to get for 0.08p are now £2.54.

Whats happened?