AdWords Effectiveness.

[Pippy]

Hi all. I just registered with this forum. I am considering a website and researching all the different areas that need to be addressed. I am going to be selling brand name perfume and I was wondering if Google Adwords really do work. I was thinking of a $500 a month campaign. Any advice is greatly appreciated. I have a friend that is savvy in business that thinks I would have to spend $5000 a month to see any real traffic due to an adword. Please tell me he is wrong! Thanks

[buckworks]

You can get visitors for as little as 5¢ each, so $500 could buy some good traffic as long as you avoid the trap of overbidding.

Do the math to figure out your profit on your average sale and how many visitors it takes to close a sale, on average. Once you know those, you can figure out how much you can afford to bid for traffic and still turn a profit.

The task of identifying relevant search phrases to bid on is worth careful research. You'll likely be adding to your list for weeks as you think of new searches.

[Tropical Island]

Good reply buckworks.

Try to find niches that people may be looking for that are not heavily advertised to extend the usefulness of your budget. Also make sure that your site is user friendly so that potential clients can order easily. Good luck.

We use AdWords extensively and it pays for itself over and over.

[Azcona]

I do not know how I have done it but I paused one of my campaigns in google adwords I have been looking all through the site and I can activate it again, how can I do it silly silly I know

[Azcona]

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[anallawalla]

Pippy,

Open the Adwords account and see how much you need to bid to have your ad on the first page for the appropriate brand name and related terms. That will tell you how much you need to spend.

[bingymon]

Track your sales by keyword. Make use of googles or another tracking tool to measure your ROI. Eliminate the poor performing keywords as you go and adjust your spend. You'll never know unless you try it.

[integramed]

I've been using AdWords since it first started. I spend a LOT of money on AdWords and it works, no doubt about that. But, will it work for you and for $500 per month? Almost impossible to say without you opening an account and testing things. My gut reaction from thousand of hours on the system -- $5,000 would be much more realistic. But, start small, don't make any nasty mistakes, be prepared to put in significant time daily, and IF you can build sales and profits then you can work up to $5,000 per month or even more. Remember - these little ads look easy, but they're not. Good luck!

[eWhisper]

I think that the amount spend is relative to the website being promotion.

I've seen sites that can't spend more than 1k a month because thats all the relative searches for that product, if they spent more, it'd be wasted money.

If you can make money spending 5k a month, then you can still make money spending $500, just a bit less. Your conversion rate doesn't change by how much you spend, it changes on the bid KW and your site's ability to convert.

[hudson]

Remember - these little ads look easy, but they're not.

agreed!

[buckworks]

Open the Adwords account and see how much you need to bid to have your ad on the first page for the appropriate brand name and related terms.

This will give a useful benchmark, but don't let the desire to be on the front page seduce you into bidding too much. Overbidding can drain your wallet in a hurry.

What matters most is to keep your bids within the limit that will turn a profit for you. Set your bids accordingly, and let your ads deliver whatever they can deliver. If that puts you on the front page, great, but if not, take what you can get and leave it at that.

It's possible to get more mileage from your Adwords campaigns without spending more money, if you learn what tweaks will improve your overall clickthrough rates. CTR matters because Adwords gives better exposure to ads with better CTR, sometimes even to the point of ranking your ad ahead of a competitor who is bidding more. You don't always have to outspend your competitor to get ahead of her!

[hudson]

Bringing on an adword campaign slowly is a good idea. If you throw a ton of keywords into your account you are sure to be disappointed.

Work on getting a nice set of high CTR Ad Groups, then it is easier to bring on more keywords.

[lukasz]

It is a very good start and you can use AdWords as purely planning exercise. You can start immediately and you can learn - how many visitors you can get (you can extrapolate adwords ctr to general search), what exactly your visitors are looking for, what your conversion rate is (much higher on adwords than in SERPS) and so on. Start slowly.

[hudson]

Another good idea if you are putting live a whole bunch of keywords, or very popular keywords, just let them run for 30 mins or an hour and then pause the campaign until the results roll in. This is since there is a lag in the stats and it could cause your account to be slowed if you get a low CTR.

[wheel]

Pippy, welcome to the forum. The short answer is yes. Google adwords let you only pay for people who have a)actively expressed an interest in your type of product (by searching for it) and b) visited your home page. It's a fabulous way to get traffic. If you're brand new, here's the overview:
- you will need to read. A lot. But if you do, you can get traffic cheap.
- research your keywords thoroughly, be creative. Then spend some more time and do it again.
- develop your ads to work with the keywords. Read up on ad copy.
- don't drive traffic to your home page. Groups of keywords should have ads. These various ads should drive traffic to different, custom made web pages for those ads. Be specific and tell your traffic what you expect them to do on the site. (if they clicked through on 'old spice', they might get taken to a web page that directly shows them how to buy olds spice, not 500 kinds of french parfume :) ).
- look into the google conversion tracker. This is the final piece in the puzzle, as it tells you how many people end up buying. Then you can take your click through costs and your conversion rate (% of people that buy) to figure out how much each sale costs. Now you know how effective it is. Beats the heck out of direct mail.

This is a dynamic process. Once it's running, you'll need to use your results to tweak your keywords, then your ads, then your landing pages. and so one. You have to keep doing this because in many cases it's the bizarre little things you stumble across that work.

That's the overview of the steps you need to follow. Each step is huge in itself, but you may still be able to do OK as an independent playing around after hours. This is definitely an advertising arena that allows you to put some work into it yourself and see results.