Using adwords for a new venture!

[sarciszewski]

Hi.... new to the forums here. I am launching an online retail business in the next 2 months or so, and am currently working on the marketing budget. Most of our items are going to be priced under $20 and are in a fairly competitive marketplace, but there seems to be room for our niche.

I am seriously considering using Google Adwords as part of the marketing strategy but I'm somewhat nervous as to how qualified that traffic is. I've read that it matters enormously on how careful I am with my ad description as well as the keywords that I choose. If I do decide to go with Google Adwords, I believe the budget will be no larger than $1000/month.

I would love to hear from other retailers on this board regarding how much success or lack thereof they have had with Google Adwords. Is it worth it? How qualified are the leads? Do Google Adwords leads result in higher than normal conversion rates?

Any input is appreciated.

Sebastian

[jbinbpt]

Hi sarciszewski,
Welcome to Webmaster World.

Adwords is a great tool. One of the great things about adwords is the ability to tune it up or down or even turn it off as you see fit. Monitor the results carefully and you will be pleased with the results.
My experience, I am not a retailer, but a manufacturer. It is a limited market, with highly targeted key words. I set the pricing low to test. The program is one month old and I have a 2.6% CTR. On the fourth day, a company that I couldn’t make any inroads with called me.

Works for me

[dougs]

Works for all our clients....tweak it and play, but we have sites who only use adwords and canīt be bothered with anything else....they make good money for little work.

Itīs called arbitrage, buy a visitor at a price and make alittle more from the visitor than you pay.

Doug

[fenway]

hi sarciszewski....

i've managed adwords for ca. 20 clients(large and small) across numerous verticals for some time now and commonly see between 3 and 10x ROI. When it does not produce results, its primarily due to poor web site usability and architecture.

Definitly try it because it is extremely low risk if you manage it carefully. If your budget is 1K for a month, I would recommend starting out with $33.33(1000/30 days a month) as the daily budget cap on your campaign. Monitor and track your results and see what your ROI is after several days, a week, two weeks etc... Depending upon the seasonality of your services/products, I find a month provides plenty of sample data. After this month, you will have a good sense of what Adwords can potentially do or not do, for you. Then decide how much you want to budget from then on.

To answer your questions, Yes, it's worth trying, and Yes we see a higher than average conversion rate. The quality of the leads depends on which words you choose and how your creative pre-qualifies to filter out irrelevant click charges.

good luck!

[sarciszewski]

Thanks for your input everyone, makes my life a bit easier making the decision. I believe in the end I will give it ago and attempt to monitor the results as closesly as possible.

Cheers,
Sebastian

[lgn]

Adwords is a lot better than Overture.

With 7 slots per page, I find their is a lot less overbidding with Adwords.

I switched from Overture to Adwords, one year ago today. and I saved 68% for the same amount of leads.

[SMXwebcrawler]

It actually depends what industry you are in. YOu can get a massive amount of leads from one and hardly any from the other for one industry and the opposite for another.

It is probably best to set an amount of money aside and play them off of each other than just bail in and stick with one. In the long run you will get a better idea of what is going to work for you.

S