blonde poker forum

Just wondering if any of the techy/webby people on here have had experience of running an adwords campaign?

Yes, I have (and still do).

SEO (search engine optimisation is better value for money though in most cases).

We use Adwords for our work and it's running well.   Until I get all our key words sorted for SEO then we'll have to continue to use it too.  I expect even then we'll carry on, just have more of a presence

You need to sort the site out Graham.  You're haemorraghing money by not getting it sorted.

Adwords work well for my business.

lol I'm trying, but we're too busy at the moment.  I've managed to get to 4th in the natural listings for one particular word (engraving) but other terms I'm working on (but engraving is a big word for us)  We've also a new version of our site in the pipeline that should have been installed by now and I was sort of waiting for that.  I will get there, I was dead pleased with what I've managed to do so far so it's crazy to stop now, I just need 34 hours in every day!

Would be great to save the money but it's hard you know ;)

Do you have any stats or something to gauge the proportion of people that use the adwords to access sites rather than the natural listings?    I was sort of tempted to drop our adwords for a bit and see how we get on with our natural listings but I'm reluctant to do so as we are getting a lot of hits from it.   Also after reviewing my account today, we really need to get all the other terms sorted before we drop it, but I was wondering if you type in say "engraving" and we get 100 hits, how many would be from adwords and how many from the natural list.   I suppose my stats may give me a rough idea, but is it possible to say approx XX % use the adwords and XX % the natural list?

Cant you tell from google analytics to find out how your customers got to your site or your log files?

Im just in the process of setting up an online site for my wifes shop, and as its a new domain we will be using adwords, infact we wil proably allways use adwords until we can get good se positioning.
Do you spend a lot on adwords graham, if you dont know how many conversions you get via adwords i dont suppose you know your roi?
Any advice mucho appreciated, i dont want to blow a fortune on adwords when its not my money :)

Here's an example (and a shameless brag).  I work on a site that attracts 25,000 unique daily visitors - almost all of this is through natural listings.

We have calculated how much this traffic would cost if we were paying for it on Adwords.  Somewhere between £3-4 Million is a conservative estimate.

We're not spending anywhere close to that on SEO.  Maybe I should ask for a pay rise...

You only need to make a few of the small changes I recommended and it would make a significant difference.

Our stats show what referals we get from Google so I guess if we have 100 hits from Google and we've had 45 according to our Adwords account, you could say that we get 55 naturally, I was just wondering if there was a general feel on what links people use to access the sites

We spend a lot on adwords, well I think it's a lot anyway, but we get a decent return on it.  Google themselves think anything over 1% click through rate is good, we get about 3% which Google think is superb, but we're fortunate that there aren't many people that do what we do so our click rate is also probably cheap compared to a lot of businesses.    Our conversion rate from adwords is difficult for us to gauge as a lot of our work involves people calling and ordering on the phone rather than on the online shop so it's not a figure we pay much attention to, although we obviously know the value of the work we get from the internet.  We just don't use the Google figure

The tools Google provide are excellent and if you use them properly, you'll get a well concentrated account.    When setting up your keywords, it's important to use the different styles, including negative keywords, you really need to make it as specific as you can so you don't waste money.

If you've not set your account up yet, you can get vouchers that give you some free credit, but you have to be a new account for them to work I beleive.

Happy to help or answer questions as you have them, feel free to ask, as I'm sure Kin is :)

The info you gave me has helped a lot, it's got the engraving word on the front page for one thing :)  I've started on the other stuff, but have been so short on time to do that much to it.  I've also identified some potential link swaps for similar sites to ours outside the UK and have a fair mix of ones that I think will be of benefit, I just need to mail them and sort it.

I'll get on it :D

Our business is quite niche and ive tested the keywords in there tester program and it wasnt as much as i was  expecting, i think we can set a budget of around £30 a day to start and see how it goes from there.
I will probably back with a few questions near the time when we are ready to go.
Thanks for the replies guys.

Have you thought about doing any SEO?  £30 a day is £900 a month, or about £10K a year.  For far less you can do a lot with SEO.  Not saying you don't do any PPC, but if you can half the amount you spend, then that's £5K in your pocket, rather than in Google's.

Yeah sure seo is top of the list but we would like instant targeted traffic which adwords will hopefully deliver, im expecting seo to take some time unless you have any fastrack ideas ;)

It does take time.  Is it a new site on a new domain, or has it been live for a while now.

You're talking a few months to see any significant SEO traffic, and so PPC is ideal during the time you're waiting for it to kick in.

PM me a link to the site if it's live, and I'll give you some quick pointers if you're interested.

£30 per day is far too much imo

For April to date - I have spent £45.22 at an average cpc of 0.24p (26400 impr)

I am also on page one of google for most of the services/products offered

Its a figure ive plucked out of thin air, £30 a day is fine if it converts to actual sales.
the way i look at it is like a real shop persons wages, if we sell a 1or more (preferable more) pairs of shoes from the £30 a day we would be more than happy.
We would be happy spending more if the sales increased at the same % , as i said being new to this it will be a learning curve.
Once im up and running I will post back and let people know how its going.

That's not really a fair statement to make as it depends on so many variables, the most important being what product you are selling.  It also depends on what exposure you want and the competition for you keywords.  £30 wouldn't even get us to lunchtime, but we're top of the list for about 50 different search terms, all day Monday to Friday during working hours.  Anything less than the first page is generally a waste of money. 

For April to date, we have over 55,000 impressions, but our average CPC is higher than £0.24.  The amount you spend on Adwords is to some point, irrelevant as it should directly bring in sales if the campaign is set up correctly, but you don't want to go crazy to start with, keep it affordable so if you have a few days without a sale it's not going to break the bank.

If you're spending £1,000 a day on adwords, and you're making a return on investment - then it's fine, maybe you should be spending £2,000!  Some of our competitors are.

However, like I said about SEO, you can achieve the same targeted quality traffic for a lot less, as long as you're willing to wait for the SEO to 'kick in' - and this can take a few months.  PPC is often an ideal interim solution in the meantime, as long as you have the cash to fund it.

My brother runs a company called saletrack that specialises in tracking your hits and sales. It shows your natural hits and campaigns. They help you manage your adwords too. They also sell (well rent really) e-commerce sites that are keyword optimised. Give them a call for a free demo. Whole package is worth it, but demo is free.

I suppose, PM for details, but it's not that much to do with me tbh.

Just to clarify.

Hits is the wrong term (it's been used a few times on this thread).  A hit is a request to the server.  So for example, when someone goes to this page, the server receives a hit for every file that needs to be downloaded - that's the HTML, each graphic, etc.  So everytime someone goes to this page it would be 50+ hits.  If a site gets 1 million 'hits', that is pretty meaningless really.

As you can see, that's a useless metric.

Page views/impressions and unique visitors are the important statistics.  People usually mean these when they say hits, but they're wrong.

Should this be in the whinge thread?

We use saletrack for our parcel delivery - part of the same group?  I think they do something to do with the web too,

Now that would be a dream come true :)

when did the terminlolgy change? I used to work trafficking internet ad campaigns and 'hit' and 'page impression' were always interchangable terms

It never changed, it was always thus.  It has always been misused.

saletrack parcels, same business. They are the web :P parcels came afterwards.

Are you inferring that at me cos I should know better ;)?

Not aiming it at anyone, I just hear it on a daily basis and I thought I'd clarify what it meant to everyone.

Most people used hits instead of page impressions as it's always bigger, so sounds more impressive.

...and means absolutely nothing.

Most analytic packages don't even bother mentioning hits anymore.

I know chap :P

but that's not what I was talking about. we used hits and page impressions interchangeably to refer to the same figures, not to boost numbers. I'm not surprised that we did it wrong as our business model seemed to revolve around seeing how quickly we could spend £10 million, however some real internet that I dealt with a lot (lycos,  doubleclick and others)  did exactly the same.
I'm talking about 10 years ago.

A lot of people still do.  Some use hits to refer to page impressions, some for visitor numbers.  They're both incorrect though.  Like the way I play poker.

think we used to refer to what I now know should've been hits as requests.

BTW Dan, you met my bro the other week at DTD. I assume the two of you didn't get on to CPC and conversion ratios?

No, we avoided the subject as it's obviously fairly dull.  ;D

He's a nice fella, except for when his AQ outdrew my AK all-in pre.... ;grr;

Small world.  I know where to come now when my parcel arrives late :D

(actually they are very good)