I'm new to this forum, and I would first like to say thanks for so much great information! This place is amazing!! I was wondering if anyone could give me ideas as to how effective Google AdWords are in comparison to their cost. And, is it more effective to increase keyword search rankings?
AdWords can be as effective as any other marketing tool. The benefit of AdWords is your get a measurable return on your investment. With time, testing, and learning you can turn AdWords into an asset. If you're not careful, you can throw your money away. If you work at it, you can probably get a desirable return. I can't give a more specific answer to your fairly general question.
What's the ROI for marketing? That's essentially what you're asking and it's an impossible question to answer with any degree of accuracy
Through adwords, you are driving traffic to your website based on the keywords and how much you are willing to pay every day. Once you get traffic, if you site has what they want, then they keep coming and it goes on and on till you have very good network of links. As far as I know, it takes a lot of time and patience to get there..
Well, ROI with adwords depends only with your skills, world needs, and a bit luck on start if you research good product + good keywords = you will have great ROI!
Unless you bid too much Every click has a value to you, depending on its conversion rate and conversion value (profit exc. click cost) - bid less than that and you'll make money, bid more than that and you'll lose money...
In my experience, if you are looking at ROI you need to think about your target audience. For example. Google is more tech savvy whereas Yahoo is a lot of less tech savvy people who started with Yahoo and still have it set as their homepage. I found when promoting entertainment type stuff Yahoo was much better at converting, but Google was better with SEO and other Technology related stuff. Hope that helps!
IMO that stopped being true a few years ago. Google has by far the majority of search share - and the majority of people would not be considered "tech savvy".
My wife and I have an online retail business we are trying to promote. We are very new to this, and cost is a huge issue. Money will need to be spent, but we do want to try to target it as much as possible.
Actually asking for ROI why don't you ask for Conversion Rates since that's more of an issue. I'm currently "hardly" managing 5%, but as far as I know this is industry average ... :-( What about you? Cheers, Venetsian
JMHO: Google Pros: - High search volume - Quality traffic - Good interface - Relatively faster in creating ads/campaigns Cons: - Anal Google bot - Punishes lousy landing pages with low QS - Potentially high min. bids - Lots of competition - Once announced "We assure you, that if you incur PPC costs, we will bill you at the end of the month, whether you made money or not." MSN Adcenter Pros: - Underated, therefore less competition - Still quality traffic, though less volume - Cheaper clicks Cons: - Not that good interface, slow to create campaigns/ads - Disable the most relevant of keywords - Allows keyword stuffing on landing pages (you didn't hear this from me! ) - Who likes Microsoft? - Quoted after Google, "Us too!" Yahoo Pros: - Quality traffic - Cheaper click than Google, but more exp. than MSN - Good volume Cons: - Can't import campaigns till you reach 'Gold' level (need to maintain minimum spend of $6k / yr) - Automatic billing once balance low UNLESS you request otherwise (once billed me $5 5 times within 5 minutes) - NO DIRECT LINKING! - Quoted after MSN, "Same here!" Google is getting more and more competitive, as surveys have found that surfers are more likely to scan the page FIRST from the Sponsered Ads, before the natural organic results, as they are often much more relevant. So there's still potential here, if you can corner the right niche with the right keywords, and with the right keyword tracking tools.
Venetsian - We're so new to the game that we barely have the site up and running at this point. I have been reading that conversion rates have as much to do with site design as they do with traffic. A pretty big difference between getting people there & keeping people there. We haven't even gotten anyone there yet! Prosumer86 - Informative breakdown! It seems to be true though that I also look for relevancy in the ads with google more often than the search results. That doesn't seem to be a good indicator of their algorithum.