This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Main Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Google Ads
When people ask me about Google Ads and whether it’s a good idea, you might be surprised at the answer:Â ‘yes’ and….’no’.
The fact is that for some business types, Google Ads just don’t work. Either an applicable keyword is just too obscure to get any hits, or the market is so competitive that the return on investment just is’t worth it. Take IT services - everybody wants a piece of the action and therefore the cost per click is too high for a small business to justify.
However, for some businesses, it’s just right. One of our clients, Island Divers in Tenerife, has seen a slow decline in business coming from the web, in line with a slow drop down the organic Google rankings. Their site has been optimised as much as possible, so short of a new site (which will be in the pipeline) there’s little we can do to get them back up to the top of the rankings. We’ve just started to manage a Google ad campaing for them. This has proved quite interesting as you can tweak both the keyword phrases and prices you pay for them daily (hourly if you need to). After a week of teaking various aspects of their campaign we’re starting to see quality click-throughs.
I feel you have to go through this learning process for each campaign. You can’t just get it right first time as every business is different. As we found with Island Divers, removing adwords for content produced a significant improvement in quality at the expense of quantity - in my view, this indicates that some site owners are abusing their adsense agreements and making a healthy living off of advertisers who are desperate enough to pay for non-existant click-throughs. So, now we’re only using adwords for search. For other business types, it could well be the other way round.
The moral of this story. If you’re going to have someone else run your ad campaign for you, make sure they’re prepaired to put the time in to ‘optimise’ it. Avoid those who say the get it ‘right first time’ - what they mean is ‘we only want to make the effort once’.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
