Google Adwords

your getting a lot of good advice on here so dont let horror stories put you off, AdWords can be really great for business.

take the advice above and set a daily limit on your budget, you can always increase or decrease it, but no harm in starting off a little conservativly.

take the advice about using googles keyword tool too, you will need to choose keywords for which you turn up for and there really is no point turning up for things yo dont offer a service or. use phrase or exact match keywords to begin with. you would be surprised how many funny things come up... I run a pub agency PPC and when I took over the account I laughed at how a the word pub brought up pup in the search terms - basically people looking for puppies were being dealt the adverts, and there are a lot more people looking for puppies than there are people searching to buy a pub in my area!

dont be afraid to play around with things, once you have your budget set, stick to it, but try changing the adverts to be more appealing or to match your site better.

remember you can pause the ad campaign at anytime ... change things and start again.

Hi There,

I agree with what nickora has really said there and its vital to stick to very exact key phases that are products and services that you can offer. If you try to be too generic and catch a wide range half the clicks you pay for will be from people not even interested in your products.

I dont know if that realvant but you are also able to narrow down to local areas and also search times.

We use Adwords alot and if you narrow and target your customer right can be very benefical.

Hope that helps

Tom

Recommend you also look at Bing for advertising

No point, Bing makes up about 2-4% of the UK search market, don't be fooled by data from com score or neilson as these are American dominated search-data providers.

Ask any UK webmaster what percentage of their visits come from Bing or Yahoo..

Then our results must be luck then?

Just checked our stats on our UK Directory, combined Bing and Yahoo traffic was 4.54%. Doesn't sound much, but that still a decent amount of visitors, and the Bing version of adwords was very cheap when we tried it a while ago. Didn't really work for us, but it's supposed to better now, and it obviously works for a lot of people.

It's down to cost per conversion or acquisition. If a traffic source only sends you 100 visitors, if you can convert a decent percentage of these a lot cheaper than you can in adwords, then who cares about percentages?