Does it work?

Just a really quick question, does Adwords actually work?

 

Yes it does work.

 

well... i hope it does... i just signed up for adwords.. but i'm cheap.. only spending $1.00 a day... LOL What's the average you all spend per day on Adwords??

 

Wait I know the answer to this one. Yes! Wait...No! Wait, gosh dernit...I forgot the question

 

$1 a day? What's that, like... 2 clicks?

 

If you could buy a dollar for $0.70 how many would you buy, and how often?

Thats adsense!

 

50 cents per click? sheesh.. I knew I was cheap but I didn't think I was THAT cheap.... I"m doing 10 cents a click... is that no good?

 

Depends on your words. If 10 cents is the bid, its the bid. I have lots of words at 10 cents. Don't worry about bid amount - worry about conversion rate and traffic. Bid what works for you.

 

Can you even bid 10 cents? every time I try something like that I get slammed with a red note saying that all my keywords are disabled and I need to bid 5 bucks to activate them, even if my keyword is "blue iguana with acne"

 

that's weird; ive never seen the red note like that. i thought 10 is the new minimum bid on there, just like overture

 

Some of my most profitable keyphrases are >$7.00/click.

 

I have a ton of 5 cent keywords, my highest keyword right now is 8 cents.
It takes a combo of the right niche, right keyword and a small budget

But back to the original question, just a really quick answer, yes.

 

Hmm well I am going for broke .30 per click.

Oh ya I think works just started it.

 

Am I not correct in thinking that the recent changes Google has made to the AdWords program mean that keywords will no longer be disabled?
If so, this surely means that you can set your bids and daily maximums to whatever you choose.
You are, of course, going to "suffer the consequences" if your "authorized amounts" don't jive with actuality. But then Google will suggest what action you need to take (and are probably well advised to do so) to make your results what they deserve to be.
Admittedly, you're faced with the question of what profit there is in any click, but this is central to the whole AdWord creation exercise.
It's no mean trick to get AdWords campaigns to do what they're capable of doing. However, enough of the gurus reckon that you won't find any better way of achieving an acceptable ROI.

Duncan

 

Some of my keywords are running at £10.00 per click! It's all about ROI - you can afford that amount per click if your products are sold for £1000+. It's all relative.

From my experience - allowing adwords to show on adsense can have drawbacks.

1. People with I.P masks and other black hat methods trying to buck the system and trying to click their own ads and such crap - getting their mates to do it from school...

2. People are not activley searching for your "product" and you get "lazy" clicks - not what you want if you are paying dearly for your keywords.

My goal is to rank well for my targeted keywords and then drop Adwords like a hot brick. If you are spending a lot then I would argue it's better to get a slight reduction in traffic and keep your cash rather than pay dearly for it. Adwords is for the period between site creation and site optimization or for those who don't have the knowledge to do SEO or foresight to hire someone to do it.

My keywords are extremely competitive and I'm up against people who are a damnsight more skillful than I am when it comes to SEO. I'm working hard on it and my patience and persistance and hunger for knowledge and improving my skills will win through in the end but until it does - it's £10 per click. lol

 

To Duncan Pollock: They did get rid of the "disabled," but they replaced it with "inactive." In order to make the keyword active, you need to change your ad or increase your bid to the minimum that Google specifies.

Regarding the amount of the minimum bid, in my opinion, it depends on what you are selling. For my $700 air purifiers, I can bid $1 per click. For my $20 animal figurines, I am trying to keep the bids under $0.10, but Google keeps making the ads inactive until I bid higher. Or, maybe they don't like my ads.

 

Well it has for me - I got £20 free as a Google offer and put it towards my sons site www bamzooki.org.uk - We were getting about 85 unique visitors a day - when it ran out the numbers went right down to single figures - you do the math!

 

... as others have said, it all comes back to ROI at the end of the day. How much you spend isn't the most important thing. What's important is that you get a decent return on what you spend.

If you haven't already done so, you should certainly put the google conversion tracker code on your order confirmation (or sign-up, whatever your trying to track) page. The code is provided free by google and will tell you what your cost per conversion is per word.

You can then optimise for the keywords that generate the business, not the ones that just generate visitors. Before adding this script, I was spending a lot getting loads of visitors to our site. Once added, I could see that some of our most popular terms weren't pulling in customers, just visitors. You can then target the keywords that generate customers, not just visitors.

 

you guys really have 4 and 5 thousand posts.

 

Yes, the inactive notation has replaced the disabled one, but both reflect a less than desirable click through rate. Thus, although you can now keep a campaign going by increasing your bid, you're much better advised to fine tune your ad so you improve its CTR.
As has been well said, the key to the successful use of AdWords is the R.O.I. You need to keep working on an ad until it gives you a profit when you make a sale. And if your objective is something else (e.g. sign up for a newsletter) you need to keep refining the ad until your Cost Per Acquistion is reduced to what you can consider to be an acceptable figure.
On the whole, the higher the value of your unit sale, the easier (i.e. more affordable) it is to use AdWords to generate business.
Thus, AdWords do work but only if your figures are -- or can be made to be --- the right ones.

Duncan