I work a lot with small business owners in the UK and more and more people are telling me they're finding Google Adwords too expensive for their chosen keywords. This prompted me to write this blog post: are you wasting money on PPC? I would be interested to hear what other people think, particularly small business owners. Thanks Jamie
Yes i do think Adwords has become expensive enough for the small business owners - also the clicks are consumed with not so productive result.
It has and it hasnt. Yes, it has gone up in price, but if your Quality Score raises, you pay a cheap price for clicks. Its just a matter of know how with the platform in order to raise that QS. Microsoft adcenter is NOT worth it in my opinion, their systems just too clumsy and buggy.
I wonder how much of this is the expense of the keywords, and how much of this is poor keyword choice. It's possible to get cheap keywords if you don't go for the large-volume generic traffic (which doesn't convert as well anyway); small businesses should really be targeting their ads and tailoring their keywords very selectively. That said, in general Adwords is more expensive - it's made up for by the much higher volume of search traffic.
Ad word has more costly for small business owners but when Quality Score raises, you pay a less price for clicks.
I ate up all my free £50 vouchers in a few days but I put this down to poor keyword choice. However I will not put any of my own money into adwords until i'm confident that i'll get something out of it.
I'm with Eschatonic on this. Having seen countless ads when doing searches and managing over 100 client accounts, one of the main problems is not understanding the system and poor keyword choice. I don't know how many times I've seen an account trying to sell printers and the client using "computer" as a keyword. Even "printer" is a poor choice. It starts with the keywords, using the correct ones. Ad quality (read higher CTR) is the backbone of QS and thus the costs but what competitors are bidding too. If you have a good landing page with a high conversion rate, putting it all together and Adwords can be very profitable.
Hi Lucid, i know you usually charge for these questions, but what would be "good" keywords for "printer" for example? Just trying to get my head around this.
it pulls traffic to the website no doubt but you must use it together with other seo techniques in order to make it really useful and give good value
Come on, its not exactly rocket science, is it? Web page you are directing to has to be revelent for the customer. Which each person that goes through to your page is measured how long they stay on your site, by Google. If they stay 5 secs, then your in big trouble. But, if they stay say 5 minutes, then thats really good. Also, peoples keyword research needs to be a lot better. For example, if someone is looking for just "printers", then your going to be more expensive than someone going for "lexmark Platinum Pro905". Time they stay and keywords selection, means the difference between rich or broke.
Why expensive? If you could research your keywords correctly, it could be cheaper than your competitors did.
I suppose it increasingly expensive Google AdWords. But that would be comparable to what we get if we are able to provide the right advertising. We must learn in our account and place ads.
Well that's nothing new Yes, you can actually say with confidence and no mistake that Adwords is the most expensive PPC/Ad network out there. If it's expensive for you or just unprofitable try running your ads on other places like Bing or Yahoo if what you want is PPC ads on places that don't harass you as much about quality and content and all that stuff.
It all depends on the popularity of the keywords that are being used. Also depends on thoughts on the ROI of adwords. Lets say you get 10 clicks costing you 2 dollars, but it closes a 100 dollar deal. You made 80 dollars on a potential client that could become a long term and refer their friends / business friends to your website / services. Tell you one thing I get a lot more traffic to my site from Google adwords than I do any other ppc network such as yahoo, msn, facebook, linkedin.
Great blog post. I find it insanely expensive as well. I had recently used up a $75 credit voucher from them. It did not go too far at all.
Google Adwords is not kind to those unprepared; the more unprepared you are, the more money you risk to lose. On the other hand, it can sometimes feel like a race to zero-profits in some niches, with aggressive competitors. If you must pay $1 a click, you need to ensure you have at least a $1 a click business ;-)
on the other hand, one of the very good things about adwords is that it's easily measurable and easy to alter your bids and set spending limits. it's not hard to use analytics in combination with adwords to work out your ROI and determine whether it's working for you or not.