Adwords good or bad?

By : Forum Regular
Published 12th July 2011 |
Read latest comment - 3rd July 2013

Ok, I have played with google adwords for about 8 weeks now, at some cost I might add. Had some good traffic and high CTR's, but my question is: Do people feel that this method is cost effective or does it just underpin a poorly designed website by forcing traffic to you? Could I achieve simmilar results by "paying" a lump sum to an SEO? Just a thought

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Thanks,
Ray Priestley
Comments
Could I achieve similar results by "paying" a lump sum to an SEO?

Ahh the age old question We haven't had an adwords post for a while, and it normally sparks a good debate.

Personally, I love adwords. Said it before, no where else will you get instant marketing and see instant results. It's a powerful tool, but one you need to closely monitor and analyze results, otherwise you just end up wasting money.

Adwords is great for those keywords you would like to have, or are not sure how they will convert.

Organic SEO is a longwinded time consuming affair, so you only want to spend valuable time optimising keywords you know will convert for you. With adwords you can put a toe in the water, and try different things without all the hardwork. You could then shortlist which ones to optimise for organically.

Or, if you have narrowed down to a good set of performing keywords in adwords, and they are converting well, then you may want to leave them running, which is what we have done.

But never use adwords just to generate traffic. Every click costs, so make it count. If a keyword doesn't convert, dump it. That said, if you can't get a keyword to convert, but it is generating traffic, then that maybe pointing to an issue on your site, eg sign up process, something not grabbing the user etc. So maybe try a new page, and then try the campaign again.

As marketing tools go, and the amount of data you can pull from your google analytics, adwords takes a lot of beating imho.

Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

I find Adwords very expensive - up to

highlandspring

It really depends the motive behind the PPC.

diggersjohn33

forum avatarTheBlogshop
17th July 2011 7:10 PM
Ahh the age old question We haven't had an adwords post for a while, and it normally sparks a good debate.

Personally, I love adwords. Said it before, no where else will you get instant marketing and see instant results. It's a powerful tool, but one you need to closely monitor and analyze results, otherwise you just end up wasting money.

Adwords is great for those keywords you would like to have, or are not sure how they will convert.

Organic SEO is a longwinded time consuming affair, so you only want to spend valuable time optimising keywords you know will convert for you. With adwords you can put a toe in the water, and try different things without all the hardwork. You could then shortlist which ones to optimise for organically.

Or, if you have narrowed down to a good set of performing keywords in adwords, and they are converting well, then you may want to leave them running, which is what we have done.

But never use adwords just to generate traffic. Every click costs, so make it count. If a keyword doesn't convert, dump it. That said, if you can't get a keyword to convert, but it is generating traffic, then that maybe pointing to an issue on your site, eg sign up process, something not grabbing the user etc. So maybe try a new page, and then try the campaign again.

As marketing tools go, and the amount of data you can pull from your google analytics, adwords takes a lot of beating imho.

This piece of highlighted red text is arguably the best piece of advice anyone wanting to work with Adwords can receive.

As great as Adwords is, it's not a magic tool and it needs to be realised that you'll only get out of it what you put in - if you set a quick campaign up without much knowledge of the resource, you might get a lot of impressions, but only the occasional click.

Spend some time researching how to put together a good Adwords campaign and although your impressions might me considerably lower, it's highly likely that not only will your click-through's be higher, but they'll be more targeted, too.

It should also go without saying that your website needs to be up to scratch - Adwords will only send visitors to the website you've told it to and it can't make the visitors stay, so be certain that your website is of a high quality.

forum avatarQMSInternational
13th September 2011 4:20 PM
We have been running an AdWords campaign for some years now alongside a SEO strategy. As we rank higher for our core terms - ISO 9001, ISO 14001 etc - we remove these exact match keywords. However, phrase match keywords are great for getting in front of people searching for things you hadn't predicted.

Adwords is great if your campaign is well built and your ads are well written!

Melanie

forum avatark925 Pet Services
27th September 2011 10:57 PM
This is really interesting as going to give adwords a go soon, I just got a


Steve Richardson
Gaffer of My Local Services
My Local Services | Me on LinkedIn

forum avatardealmaker
22nd October 2011 10:44 AM
Just my 2p. Adwords can be a good marketing tool but only once the profit from conversions is greater than than the ppc spend - sounds mega obvious and it is but its amazing how many people I've met who blindly spend money on ppc but don't actually know what its doing for them. Monitoring and analysis is the key here.

The other thing to note is this - goes for both seo and ppc - sometimes you can become so focussed on bringing traffic to the site you can forget to really look and evaluate the effectiveness of the site itself. So basically if the site looks crap and doesn't work properly it doesn't matter how much traffic you have, you still won't have any customers.

Best thing is to start with a small budget, say a few hundred

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