We are currently running a scientific journal site for which we are trying to advertise, will google adwords work out ? Suggestions are invited, the site is clearly a scientific open access online journals publisher site which will be visited only be researchers and scientists, including academia.
Adwords can work for any site. You just have to make sure your targeting is specific. If your market is very niche (as it seems yours is), just make sure you are very specific with your keyword targeting. You can also choose which content placements you want so as to specifically target the people who will want to engage with you. I woudl not suggest just letting Google choose your content placements for you.
Don't pay for Adwords. It is intended only for big companies that have big money and good profitable products to promote. Search engines love scientific journal sites and you just need a little SEO and Social Media promotions to make it crawled and referred by scientific community and academia. You start by adding good scientific contents, make a facebook page and twitter page for your site and get some backlinks by going to authority forums like DP and Sitepoint. We can also mention your Scientific Journal Site in our own blogs or social media profiles if you share your link here. Or you can comeback later and invite us to mention your site.
@seocracker- Nice comments and suggestions, yes we do agree that for many keywords our journal comes in top position and the clicks we are getting is good as of now. What we are planning is for long term, our journals are just three months old and we are planning to have good traffic always. Are you sure that SEO itself is sufficient and Adwords costly? I am also thinking now about this, for most of the keywords which is used by normal researchers our journals are coming in first three pages. We have created a blog, facebook profile, and all social media possible. Any other ideas?
This is why people use adwords very very few searchers look further than the first page of search results - more than half never scroll down the first page. If you want to maximise the capacity for those keywords on the second and third pages, then adwords may be a solution. However, first do a bit of keyword research and ascertain if there is sufficient search volume for those keywords to make it worth pursuing.
While SEO is important, I strongly disagree with this statement. I run campaigns for a number of small businesses on small budgets and achieve very good results, both in traffic, conversions and profit. It doesn't have to be expensive and in fact, it should be profitable. The whole idea is to make more money with conversions that it costs you to place the ads. If you are not converting paid traffic then you are doing something wrong! SEO itself is not always sufficient and adwords is not always costly. You can run campaigns for under $100 per month. As magda said you will get very very little traffic through search engines unless you are on page one. In fact, unless you are position 1, 2 or 3 you only get a small % of clickthrough in organic searches. Read this article for info on ranking value: http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value IHMO, if you have the budget and business model to utilize adwords, do it. You will get traffic and its up to you to make this traffic valuable. Edit: unless of course you are trying to use adwords to get adsense clicks....Then this is a waste of time and money!!
Of course we are not interested in Adsense or any advertisement programs, ours is a scientific journal, there is no question of showing advertisement. Our business model is different and we are sure that it will fetch more revenue than the Adsense program. We are planning to adwords this month with a small budget and will check the difference it shows in receiving visitors.
Ok, sounds like you're off to a good start. Good luck with your campaign and feel free to post with more questions!