Just wondering what everyone thinks of Google Adwords? Worth it? Why or why not? Does anyone have a better similar tool that will get more results for the same price or cheaper?

Bruce

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Bruce McClellan
Faster Digital
www.FasterDigital.com
Bruce@FasterDigital.com

Bruce,

I think Adwords can work if you do it right. If you are new, I would reccommend reading Chris Carpenter's "Google Cash". You can find a review of it at http://marketing-tools.online-tradin...news020304.htm

I have not tried other PPC engines so far. But what I have tried with Adwords has produced some results.

-Hock
Webmaster
http://marketing-tools.online-trading-info.com

We've done pretty extensive advertising on Google Adwords for some of our clients with small budgets, so I have some info here that might be of help.

Just to make the point up front, these clients requested that we do Adwords advertising for them and wanted to spend the minimum feasible amount to test if it would work -- we didn't suggest they advertise there :)

Over the past 6 months we've had 8 clients with daily budgets of $2 - $3 per day running adwords campaigns.

All of these clients went for low CPC rates to maximize the number of visitors they would get for their (decidely low) budgets at the expense of higher positioning.

This strategy seemed to work in terms of driving traffic as each site used consistenly used up most or all of their daily budget each day regardless of how low we dropped their CPCs

The best performing site averaged just under 500 click throughs per month (at about .12 CPC). The worst performing site averaged just under 220 click throughs per month (at about .25 CPC).

Although this was fairly reasonable traffic for the amount of money spent, only one of the eight sites saw any verifiable increase in sales, leads (or whatever they wanted) due to Adwords traffic.

The successful site is a company that sells power supplies and keys on very specific manufacturer names and industry terms. Also every lead who finds them and converts to a sale is generally a professional buyer out on the web looking for a supplier for a factory or plant -- so they are serious buyers, not "window shoppers".

The worst performing site was a Leather Apparel retailer -- 3000+ adwords click throughs in 6 months and not a single product sale. Very very strange that...

Its possible that many of the clicks per day were wasted on non-buyers (window shoppers, competitors checking out the competition or sabotaging these websites by artificially "clicking out" their ads), but it seems far more likely that small budget campaigns simply don't drive the volume necessary to generate any visible effect in terms of conversion to sales/leads.

As a result, we have begun to discourage our small budget clients from using Google Adwords based on these results.

Hope this is useful.

David

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David Etheredge
SavvyDog Design
http://www.savvydog.com

Thanks for the info. THat is helpful.

Since you don't recomend small budgets use Adwords, is there something that you DO recommend?

Bruce

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Bruce McClellan
Faster Digital
www.FasterDigital.com
Bruce@FasterDigital.com

Most of my clients are not big Internet advertisers: a CPA firm, short-term rentals, and bricks-and-mortar stores. However, they do get a surprising number of leads and inquiries from the Internet. Their combined Adwords effort is a few hundred dollars a month -- not huge, but meaningful.

The same sites combined have a hard time meeting the minimum Overture monthly clicks. I bid high on Overture, and we get a reasonable percentage of click-throughs. However, the ad impressions on sites served by Overture just is much lower than the Google traffic.

My clients generally don’t sell on-line, and we don’t do a good job of tracking organically found Internet inquires vs. PPC leads. However, the percentage of conversions from all Internet sources for most of my clients is reasonably high.

So, Adwords seems to be our best PPC source of leads, and, in general, the Internet leads are good ones.

We have just withdrawn from this programme:
Reasons- 1. In our field cpc was exhorbitant to get visible ads.
2. Their reporting facts never ever co-incided with our page monitoring over anydate or time range.
3. They suspended wordgroups without any indication of impending trouble - suspending words rated as "moderate or good!"

4. To mollify they offered cash credit and prepared an adgroup for us. It never obtained a single clip - so they suspended again whilst our own
selections were still rated moderate.

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laundryboys are happy to meet you.

I really like them.

I am an affiliate partner and use a small monthly budget about $30-50.

Thanks to Google Adwords I get a highly TARGETED traffic which also converts to sign ups and profit for me.

But it is important that you MUST learn how to use them properly, it is also depending on your ads and so on.

With my low budget I decided that they would be my only investment to PPC.

I tried Overture, but they are slow, everything must be reviewed and approved, Adwords are fast, flexible and best of all I get results.

But it wasn't always like that..I simply had to learn how to use them.

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Supercars for $30! /Euro Millions / Secret .. Tell everyone!

Adwords is a killer app. It's been a minor to a major success for every client I've tried it on, except one for whom it did not work.

The only problem is that Adwords is much more complicated than it looks. Yes, the average webmaster can usually put together an okay campaign, but creating really good campaigns takes a lot of skill.

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Aderit Internet Marketing Consulting

123 testing (sorry guys)

I have had good success using AdWords although it di take a while to figure out how to make the most of it.

If you are going to spend the money you should be prepared to monitor your results on an ongoig basis and continually make changes to the ads, keywords budgets etc.

I cannot say that I have had the same success with Overture. I found them to be hard to work with and that they seem to have even more arbitrary application of their rules relating to the keyword v content relationship. In the three months that I used them they were unable to deliver even 1/4 (impressions- forget click throughs) of the traffic that they predicted.

They do have a really cool tool for checking the search frequency of key terms and phrases, it can be very helpful in setting up you AdWords programs.