Advertising through Google Adwords

Fizzbang

Hi,

I have read that a few of you use Adwords for advertising and thought I'd give it a go. I have set up my campaign and searched numerous times throughout the day and different days on my keywords but I never see any of my ads, I checked this morning and apparently one ad had one impression.

Am I right in thinking that the more you are prepared to pay per click the more likely your ad is to be shown and if so what is a good CPC unit price? I think mine is defaulted to £0.35.

Thanks

PAMDILL

I did it for a while as I got some credit through my ISP, my CPC unit price defaulted to £0.42. I got quite a lot of impressions and clicks, however I had to go in depth in the adwords program to set my areas for ad reach and demographics etc before I got impressions.

I did not get any business out of it but I did get my ad up on a lot of screens and a good amount of clicks to the ad.

When you are in your campaign dashboard, there are a lot of help suggestions appear in the left hand side, there is a beginner's guide there, if you read through that and follow the suggestions you get a lot more impressions. That is how I managed it and I was a complete novice.

Fizzbang

Thanks for the reply.

It looked fairly simple to set up, I'll have to look through the guide to see what I've missed.

Suppose it's worth a shot even if it doesn't generate any business, I was emailed a voucher code too so it's not cost me anything :001_smile:

burg

I have around 5 years experience in adwords and it can be very rewarding. I always cover my costs and often achieve up to 10 times ROI.

You need to have a play with things but adverts are placed depending on - the amount per click, your keywords, the ad content, the relevance of the page it links to in relation to the ad and the keyword used.

If you can get everything else right then the cost per click can come down. It depends on what you want to achieve and how many leads you are looking for. My budget is set fairly high and my cost per click is considerably more than yours but this can vary on the area and if you have localised your campaign.

I certainly started off as low as 50p spending around £30 a month but if you up the CPC considerably and your budget then you can try it for a month and see.

Fizzbang

Thanks both,

I have just spent the past hour playing with setting and CPC and I can finally see my ads .... I cant believe how much I have had to put one (main) keyword up to to be seen on the first page but hey you have to speculate to accumulate don't you.

Fireraiser

burg wrote: »

I certainly started off as low as 50p spending around £30 a month but if you up the CPC considerably and your budget then you can try it for a month and see.

I've tried it twice in recent months, loading my account with £30 each time. In both cases my £30 was used up within about a week and I didn't get a single enquiry. What I did get was endless phone calls from companies claiming to have a special deal with Google and for an extortionate fee they could get my website to always how at the top of the first page

PAMDILL

Fizzbang wrote: »

Thanks both,

I have just spent the past hour playing with setting and CPC and I can finally see my ads .... I cant believe how much I have had to put one (main) keyword up to to be seen on the first page but hey you have to speculate to accumulate don't you.

Check out Google Maps, you can place your company on it at the trading address, then if someone does a search for accountants in your area you have a very high chance of being shown on the top right side of the screen. This option does not cost anything.

burg

Fireraiser wrote: »

I've tried it twice in recent months, loading my account with £30 each time. In both cases my £30 was used up within about a week and I didn't get a single enquiry. What I did get was endless phone calls from companies claiming to have a special deal with Google and for an extortionate fee they could get my website to always how at the top of the first page

£30 won't go far. and it needs some tiome to run. Try adding a zero on the end and run it for 2/3 months but the listing must be localised otherwise you are probably wasting money.

Monsoon

Also, it depends on your location. If you were in, say, Manchester, you're going to have lots of competition for "Accountant Manchester" and so a paid campaign like Adwords is going to be worth it, once you suss out how best to do it.

If you are in a small town where there are only, say, 2-3 accountants, you probably don't need Adwords. By virtue of google maps, the fact that there are few accountants in my town, and good keywords on my website, I'm on page 1 for "accountany MyTown" and so a local Adword campaign is probably not necessary - people are already finding me based on a normal keyword search.

Therefore, your location is also worth considering, and indeed improving your website for SEO, not just paying for clicks.

Good luck!

Fizzbang

Thanks all for your replies.

I localised my campaign to within 20 miles, and had plenty of good keywords, upped my budget to £6 a day, not much I know but I wanted to spread it over a number of weeks to see how it worked.

My campaign got over 5000 impressions and 31 clicks which amounted to nothing, I have a tracker on my website where I can see who visited and what keywords they used. 70% of the clicks where a waste of time, i.e searching for Tesco online payroll, I can't understand why my ad was clicked unless it was accidental or some clever "beep" clicking on purpose. Is this something that others have experienced?

My voucher has now run out of credit but I am thinking about giving it another go as a few on here Burg including in is are seeing good results - Any more advise or info would be appreciated :001_smile:

I have also put myself on Google maps.

Many Thanks

burg

negative keywords are about as important as postive keywords - have a look at the keyword help tool for how to do this as you can also create exact searches aswell.

Since the 19th March until today I have had the following:-

3514 Impressions
53 Clicks

As for enquireies I can't tell you as I'm not in the office today but I think about 5.

£6 a day isn't bad and you are getting impressions and clicks it is now just a question of making sure those clicks are more targetted.