anyone used adwords and is it worth it
cheers

That's a question that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no.

Adwords is dependent on good keyword researh and a well set-up campain (the set-up in the control panel I mean).

Furthermore, it depends what your industry is, cost per click, your budget and of course, how good your wbesite is. You could drive excellent traffic with the potential to convert, only to land on a poor website or web page whcih kills the conversion.

That could be down to several things such as poor design, the key product or service advertised in the Adword not being immediately obvious or accessible, price, or something else that causes the web visitor to leave your website.

Therefore not only does the adwords cost per click shoot up, you appear low down in the list, AND you get no or low sales.

Unless you have a very good set up, you cannot be the judge of whether adwords works, let alone whether it works for your industry. (e.g. adwords for aeroplane parts wont be as good as they are for ipods no matter how good the campaign or how good the website is).

Thank you Indizine :)

I have been (half-heartedly) considering Adwords for a while. I have heard good and bad about it (and one horror story regarding inexperience and a bill running into £1000's).

You have really clarified some points for me, and given me something to think about.

Sheffield Forum at it's best :)

Bills can be expensive if you dont monitor the campaign. One tip I would suggest is when you set up a campaign, pay particular attention to the content sites (under networks). Some of these sites are chosen by Google and will quickly evaporate your budget with absolutely no relevance to your keywords.

In my 1st experience I found some of the content sites, didnt even exist or were parked domain names, but still clicks on my campaign.

Bills can be expensive if you dont monitor the campaign. One tip I would suggest is when you set up a campaign, pay particular attention to the content sites (under networks). Some of these sites are chosen by Google and will quickly evaporate your budget with absolutely no relevance to your keywords.

In my 1st experience I found some of the content sites, didnt even exist or were parked domain names, but still clicks on my campaign.

I wouldn't just pay attention them i would turn the content network off completely in the early stages as it can and often does lead to poor performance. It is passive advertising and isn't reliant on people actively searching for your products/services.

However it shouldn't be totally discredited because it can be excellent brand exposure as you only pay per click your brand name has the potential to be seen hundreds (even thousands) of times a day for free! Always separate content campaigns from search network campaigns.

In terms of keywords always start small and you're probably best sticking to exact and phrase match until you get some data coming in and be sure to integrate your adwords with your analytics!

Also...what indizine said :D

Interesting thread. I'd be interested to know people's views about consumer use of sponsored links. I've certainly started to change my viewing habits re Google.

If I'm looking for information I use natural listings, if I'm looking to buy something, I tend to view the sponsored links; am I the exception or the norm?

I'd say that's normal, steve. The sponsored links, almost by definition, are trying to sell you something. If you want to buy something, those are often more relevant than the natural results.

However, nobody pays to advertise free information, it just doesn't make sense. It's hard to make a profit from placing paid adverts, when your site relies on advertising revenue.

You're right; the point I was trying to convey (badly!) was that consumers are now 'educated' about this i.e. if you are a commercial organisation, is it really worth investing in SEO or should you simply use Google ads?

Ranking well in organic search results is usually preferable, because it's free (except for the time spent on it). Good seo could save you thousands each year on the equivalent exposure from adwords. If you get near the top of the first page for all the keywords relevant to your site, adwords becomes a bit pointless, but that can take a lot of work & isn't realistic for most sites.

You also get more text to describe your website in an organic search result, you aren't limited to just a couple of very short lines.

I think most people click on the search result that looks the most relevant, from the first few results they look at, whether it's a paid ad or a natural search result. People don't only click a paid ad when they want to buy something, it just happens that they're often more relevant.

So a combination of both, along with other forms of marketing (online or offline) works well.

You shouldn't rely on any single method of marketing, especially online. If google takes a dislike to your site & you get all your traffic from google, you're screwed.

I use adwords and spend about £200 a month, which is a lot less than I used to spend advertising in the print media - it works pretty well but I agree that you have to be very careful to limit your spend on the content network.

...and you've highlighted the significant advantage of adwords over trsditional print based media. By far the most important development in marketing is SEO because it connects people with problems to suppliers with solutions AT THE TIME THE PROBLEM OCCURS; it is the timing that is the key to it's importance; something you cannot get from traditional media.

I never use adwords when looking to buy anything.

It's always interesting to see how people get on with internet adverting. It's true SEO is a great way of advertising your business, but it does need time and someone who really knows what they are doing. And if they charge £50 it won't work trusty me!

Adwords is a way of getting there from day 1. And yes there are horror stories out there, but it can really work to an amazing level, people forget that Google make it easy so everyone can use it, but not to use it well. And if you don't use it well it will cost. The biggest tip for using adwords is be specific!

Some great advice on this thread and I agree with just about all of it. Adwords has evolved over the last couple of years, there used to be a lot of internet marketers with ads that sent you to a landing page for digital products or an affiliate link to amazon or the like. Most marketers score low on relevance with Google now (after all it's not their site they are sending traffic to) and a lot of them have had their accounts closed or the cost per click becomes so high that it's no longer viable. Common sense is the best gauge I can advise, think about the keywords/phrase you are targetting and bang it in Google and have a look at jow many competing ads and sites there are, if the right hand ad column is full and has another page it's gonna be expensive if not it may be ok for you. Facebook ppc ads are more targetable to a particular demograph, you may wish to have a look at them, you can target to country/cities age range men/women etc. There are also alternatives to Google adwords which are generally a cheaper cost per click (yahoo, msn) however Google IS the daddy, and the next couple of years will see Google (1) and Bing (2) in terms of popularity, it's already that way in the u.s. Best of luck with whatever you decide.

there are more guarantees with adwords, thats what you pay for, if you pay google enough you'll get some clicks. the trick is to make it profitable.

I think Adwords has its place and its great for bringing in traffic quickly, but around 2 years ago I worked for a company who spent £400+ every week on Adwords and yet their own website was very poorly optimised.

They got virtually no organic traffic from the search engines but just relied on Adwords. I pointed out that spending a bit of that money on the website itself would reduce their Adwords costs. Two years on their Adword costs have reduced to around £100 month and approximatley 70%+ of traffic is is from the search engines themselves.

So whilst Adwords is a good way of driving traffic make sure your website is well optimised too.

I would agree with James on that, it's like most things in life it's a good balance. I sold my last company just because they were are number 1 and 2 on google for it's niche. Yet I made my money on a daily basis from adwords. The truth is having both is good, but everything else needs to be in place as well, like optimisation. And if it is ALL done well Google will charge you less per click that your competitors for the same ad.

I would agree with James on that, it's like most things in life it's a good balance. I sold my last company just because they were are number 1 and 2 on google for it's niche. Yet I made my money on a daily basis from adwords. The truth is having both is good, but everything else needs to be in place as well, like optimisation. And if it is ALL done well Google will charge you less per click that your competitors for the same ad.

I'd agree too, you've got to have a website that generates a high rate of sales, otherwise you could lose money from it.

AdWords works well, but it's also quite costly, so you have to make sure your website is as good as possible before spending a lot on it.

If you end up paying a lot for a lot of clicks from people that aren't very likely to buy from your site, you'll quickly lose a lot of money.

adWords, in my own experience has shown to be costly. £100 spent to gain 3 small hosting customers. To recover the advertising cost those customers will need to stay with the company for 14.3 months before break-even.

As has been mentioned, turn off content network to start with and set realistic budgets. If you're in a highly competitive industry, as we are, you can expect to pay upwards of £4 per click unless you service a niche area.

I am a great adwords fan, we have customers who spend 000's and others that spend a couple of hundred a month on campaigns. But one thing I know for sure is that things are not always what they seem when it comes to cost. Do not be fooled by the belief that it is just a case of putting the highest bid for a keyword to get your company on page 1. Because it's not. Far from it, Google do not just rank you high on page 1 because of what you are willing to pay for your clicks, they look at everything. Your keywords, your landing page, your advert, your website and so on. They want to ensure your advert relates to the initial search just as much as they want to take your money.

Hi Foxydon

In short Adwords is well worth it.

However, for it to work it needs careful preparation and management. The amount of traffic available through Google can mean your costs escalate before you know what is happening, unless you budget properly and target the right keywords for your business.

The key to a good adwords account is having a little knowledge of the platform and how it works. This way you can be well versed in how Google's algorithms work and plan your account accordingly. It is no longer a matter of paying the highest per click to get to number 1. A whole host of other factors all related to "quality" are taken into account. Further to this, position 1 in Adwords is not always the best position to be in (regardless of what anyone says), it is your profit margins and costs which determine the best position for you.

Before jumping in to adwords, spend some time reading around the area and focus on "quality score" and "match types". Too many people get the match types completely wrong and it can cost them thousands of pounds.

Last of all, Good luck with it.

For products? Yes. For services? No.

You only have two lines and a title to capture your customers attention so you have to be very specific what you put in your text.

I often put what I do on the first line and what I dont do on the second line. This saves lots of unwanted clicks as well as using specific long tailed keywords in [square brackets].

For products? Yes. For services? No.


I totally disagree with this!
I have been running AdWords campaigns for many years and have great success with service and product sites but the quality of the site and landing page plays a big part. For example I am running a AdWords account for an email design agency and currently the ROI is running at 8400%, yes 8400%! Agree this is not a normal ROI but due the structure of the campaigns, the structure of the Adgroups, the targeting of the keywords, the style of the adtext AND the quality of the website. It is working fantastically.........and this is a service site!

My advice to anyone looking to run or improve their AdWords account is:
1) Keep it tight and targeted (not hundreds of keywords in one Adgroup)
2) Follow your site structure
3) Don't mix search and display in the same campaigns - separate them for greater control
4) Make sure you are sending the clicks to the right landing page - deep link into your site not to homepage
5) Make sure your website/landing page is full of the information the visitor needs to see and read to turn them in to a valuable lead or purchaser! This page is your sales person so make it sell!
6) Use your analytic data to find any issues with your site before spending 1p on any paid for marketing. Check the bounce rate of your website/landing pages and if it's high, iron this issue out. High bounce rates = non relevance = high marketing spend = low ROI

Ah but come on, you are an expert at Adwords!

I agree though, it works for most businesses (there will be exceptions like rocket sales for example!) and it needs to be done right, honed, honed some more, and again some more, and keep on perfecting it even when successful, keep perfecting it. Your customers don't stand still so neither should your marketing efforts.

I totally disagree with this!
I have been running AdWords campaigns for many years and have great success with service and product sites but the quality of the site and landing page plays a big part. For example I am running a AdWords account for an email design agency and currently the ROI is running at 8400%, yes 8400%! Agree this is not a normal ROI but due the structure of the campaigns, the structure of the Adgroups, the targeting of the keywords, the style of the adtext AND the quality of the website. It is working fantastically.........and this is a service site!

My advice to anyone looking to run or improve their AdWords account is:
1) Keep it tight and targeted (not hundreds of keywords in one Adgroup)
2) Follow your site structure
3) Don't mix search and display in the same campaigns - separate them for greater control
4) Make sure you are sending the clicks to the right landing page - deep link into your site not to homepage
5) Make sure your website/landing page is full of the information the visitor needs to see and read to turn them in to a valuable lead or purchaser! This page is your sales person so make it sell!
6) Use your analytic data to find any issues with your site before spending 1p on any paid for marketing. Check the bounce rate of your website/landing pages and if it's high, iron this issue out. High bounce rates = non relevance = high marketing spend = low ROI

What a great post...you've got me thinking about running Google ads again!

Ah but come on, you are an expert at Adwords!

I agree though, it works for most businesses (there will be exceptions like rocket sales for example!) and it needs to be done right, honed, honed some more, and again some more, and keep on perfecting it even when successful, keep perfecting it. Your customers don't stand still so neither should your marketing efforts.

Yes, I am an expert I suppose, :) but you don't have to be an expert with years under your belt to get good results from PPC marketing. What you say above is very true........test, test, test and test some more! Ever 10th of a percent increase in CTR, conversion and subsequent ROI makes a different.

What a great post...you've got me thinking about running Google ads again!

Go on Steve, give it a go! Just because you didn't get the return before doesn't mean it won't be a fab marketing tool this time around!
Test, test, test ;)