I am a total Adwords newbie. I just signed up last night, in fact. I have a men's haircutting salon that I want to try to drive customers to using AdWords. I've got the location narrowed down to a 7-mile radius around our store. Usually the effective trade area for a salon is around a 3-5 mile radius, so I've got some buffer area. I've got a $250 per month budget. In this case, I don't have an online store, so I don't care so much about click-thru rates, but I do want to get as many impressions as possible. What's the best way to drive up my number of impressions? Put in a large number for CPC? Is there a general strategy for something like this?
Adwords is not an advertising medium like a bill board. It provides "sponsored links" which is the clue. You say that you do not have an online store and are not concerned about click through. The question is do you have a web site? If not then Adwords is not for you as you have to have something to link to. If you do have a web site then it has to be of use to the people that you are targeting or it will serve no purpose. The person searching Google is looking for a web site to help them out, either to provide a service or information. The sponsored link that you will be bidding for is not an advert in itself and will not be seen as such. If you were to just make an ad that had a headline of say "Gents hair salon" and use the address as the ad text you will find that anyone clicking on it will be disappointed if they don't find themselves directed to a relevant site. By the time they are there the address in your ad text will have been long forgotten and you will have wasted the money spent on the click. In order to make it work you will need a web site that provides some relevant information - where are you located, how do you get there, what services do you offer etc. etc. Adwords is a complex animal that is designed to assist searchers in finding products, services and information on the internet. It is not an advert in itself - approach with caution. In short the web site must be your ad, the google ad is just a paid link to it. This means that you will need to be concerned about the content and quality of your site and also your click through rate. Impressions must be viewed as links that have been discarded by the viewer not as a successful advert. Additionally Google will disable your ad if there are no clicks for being irrelevant. Sounds like you need to research the medium a lot more before you dive in.
I just ordered an Adwords book from Amazon. We have a pretty strong website already, and it has information on our services and store locators and hours, and stuff like that. So Adwords points to that. The actual ad is something like: Sport Clips Haircuts We Cut Hair, You watch Sports No appointment necessary www.sportclips.com What I'm trying to target is the local office worker who goes to Google or google maps to locate a nearby place to get a haircut. I absolutely want them to click through, because that means, hopefully, that there is a high probability of them coming in. So, because I'm limiting the geographical area so much, I'm not going to get a lot of impressions, and I'm going to get even fewer click-thru's, but I'm willing to pay a lot since each click-thru has a high probability of resulting in a sale of $17 or higher. If you take into account repeat business and our customer retention rates, etc, each new customer is worth around $100 in repeat business. So I'm willing to try reasonably high CPC bids ($5, even $10 per click-thru) to get onto every search that happens in my 7-mile radius. Because I'm limiting my geographical area so much, I'm not going to get as many impression opportunities, and I want to figure out how to be on every opportunity. Right now, I'm setting my average bid to $2, but my actual bids for the different keywords are down in the 15-50 cent range. How do I get it to bid high enough that I get every possible impression? Right now, I'm only getting about 100 impressions a day (over 2 days) with no click-thrus. I guess the larger question is, is this the "right" way to use Adwords, or am I trying to fit a round peg into a square hole?