Will people with experience in doing a reasonable adwords campaign describe your results... did you increase your hits/sales, basically, is it worth the time and money, and is overture or another option better?
thanks
mojo
I intended to try to sell an e-book for $29 using AdWords but gave up. The e-book is on the topic of 'how to retire in X country.'
Problem here is there no appropriate keyphrases to use.
The keyphrase 'X country" gets 56 hits per day, a lot of traffic but totally untargetted.
On the other hand the keyphrase 'retire in X country' and all the variations and similar keyphrases thereof, get 0.3 hits per day - virtually nothing.
I haven't been able to come up with any keyphrases that represent a happy medium - either tons of untargetted traffic, or dribbles of targetted traffic.
With the sale price of my e-book at $29, it doesn't work in either scenario.
If I tried to pay for the untargetted clicks, the monthly click cost would be well over a reasonable expectation of ROI, and if I just paid for the targetted clicks, I'd earn barely enough to live on one peanut a day.
So I think it very much depends on
1) the sale price of your product, and
2) if you can find keyphrases that are both targetted and get a reasonable amount of traffic.
I figure I'm just SOL with my product when it comes to Adwords.
HTH
Your question is very broad and depends on many parameters. Does it work; sure otherwise 100.000's of advertisers would not put in money. Does it work for you?
That depends on your product or services, its margin, your proposition the online competition and how well targetted your keywords and ads are.
Although the previous post could not make money on a 29$ book, we make lots of money on 29$ software. As said it depends, just give it a try. I advice many of my clients to start with a small scale pilot to see if it works for them, in mst cases it does (but this may be a matter of experience :) )
Personally, I have seen great results from using AdWords :)
Obviosly, your right it does depend on each individual business model... thanks for your input...
But i simply want to hear all the praise or mud slinging about this program i can muster...
so Lets hear them...
love mojo
Looking for praise is more difficult to find as most people love to complain. IMO Adwords has its drawbacks but it is the best thing available at this time beating Overture easily.
My 2cts
In the case of the e-book, I would look into organic search engine optimization as it would probably bring in the best results.
IMO Adwords, you mean google or is this another program i'm not aware of... I would like to research all programs before choosing one even for testing purposes...
Thx...
mojo
It is VERY important that you track which sales come from AdWords. You will know after about 1000 clicks (or less) if it will work for your business, so the risk is very low.
Have also made (and still do make) a nice chunk of change from running AdWords straight to affiliate programs in selected industries. The affiliate gig takes a ton of work and refinement over months but pays off if you put your mind to it.
From a traffic perspective, as skibum said, Google has the best volume. Overture is a good second and the 2nd and 3 tier players are to small to be interesting for any major campaigns (they can increase your coverage somewhat).
We typically start with adwords and expand into other players (like overture) once we know what works.
The retirement example can be used to show how you have to work hard to find relevant search terms. "country X" could be used by people looking to vacation there, travel on business, research a school assignment etc. But by placing yourself in the mind of the searcher, you might find you are a 50-something person. You can experiment with advertising in different niches that might interest this age group, e.g. cruises, - something that people of that age group might be interested in. You might even find very cheap terms if you are lucky.
Sometimes, we get a little worried about how tightly our business model relies on PPC.
