Saturday, May 28, 2005

AdWords - Time To Get Serious!

I have to admit I've just been playing with AdWords as a way of driving traffic to my websites.

I set my AdWords account about 18 months ago, mainly as an experiment, and so that I could learn more about AdWords to advise my clients.

I selected just one of my products to promote, and set my spend as the minimum of £0.05 per click, and a maximum spend of £1 per day. Not exactly bank-breaking figures!

Just to show how little importance I've been placing on AdWords, it's been about 6 weeks since I went into my account to look at the stats. Then I did a few sums. Now I'm not going to reveal commercially sensitive figures here. All I'll say is:

AdWords Spend = x
Total Sales Value = 13 times x

.. and the sales for this product is into 4 figures over the past 17 months.

So, what have I been doing wrong? Here's a few things:

  • I haven't been tracking the conversion rate from the AdWords clicks. I think that most of the sales have come from this route, but I have done a few other things to promote this product.
  • I haven't experimented enough with different wording with the ads. OK, I've got a variety of ads for this product, but I haven't seriously tweaked the ads continuously to keep on improving the click-through rate.
  • I haven't seriously been using AdWords to promote the raft of other products I have for sale. OK, I tried AdWords advertising on one other product, but dropped the campaign after the sales barely covered the ad costs. Yes, it was in a highly competitive keyword market, but there's plenty of other products where the competition is lower. Heck, if I can achieve a 13:1 sales to ad cost ratio on just five other products, this will have a serious and positive impact on my bottom line.

So now I need to spend some time on using AdWords for at least three other products. I've got some great tools I can use, the main one being Adwords Analyzer You really ought to have a look at this, not just for AdWords campaigns, but as a powerful tool for finding just the right keywords to use.

And I need to be prepare to commit more cash (both a higher daily limit, and a higher cost per click) in the short term.

I also need to use AdWord's conversion tracking script, so that I really know where my sales are coming from.

OK, that's confession time over! Now it's time to get to work.

Oh yes, and if you want to know which product I've been promoting with AdWords, it's a superb headline generator tool. And the headline is the most important part of any communication message!

No comments: