Google Ad words

[AndyC]

This may have been covered in the past but things change over ths passage of time and I would greatly appreciate your thoughts,

I have been looking at this and was wondering does anybody use this, how much do you spend, what sort of return do you get from it and most of all do you think it is worth it!

I look forward to your replies

[teenypops]

I do use it and it dies a fab job for me, especially as you can set it so that only people in your radius will pick up the ad.

I do think that some people do skip the ads and only use the organic searches.

For me as my website is still quite new and needs a bit of SEO work doing on it, I find it does the trick and nearly all my bookings come from Google searches.

I do have a budget limit set on it and my plan is to work on the organic searching of my website and when I am able to command a page 1 search result then I will likely drop google.

[ukpartydj]

I use it from time to time but it can work out expensive normally I get one booking per £20 spent ... may not sound like a lot but that certainly takes a chunk out of my fee as an agent.

[CRAZY K]

This may have been covered in the past but things change over ths passage of time and I would greatly appreciate your thoughts,

I have been looking at this and was wondering does anybody use this, how much do you spend, what sort of return do you get from it and most of all do you think it is worth it!

I look forward to your replies

My son has used this for Rodeo Bull work and it can be cost effective.

He spends about £30 a month and probably gets one or two jobs from that---according to many factors which keep moving---time of year--number of others advertising--etc.

One of the problems is there are scummers ( not scammers) out there who are competition and they keep clicking on your advert to use up your daily allowance.

Google SHOULD pick those clicks up---but in our experience dont always.

You can design some pretty sophisticated ad campaigns so its worth a go im sure--

At least you dont have to lock into a big budget.

[CRAZY K]

My son has used this for Rodeo Bull work and it can be cost effective.

He spends about £30 a month and probably gets one or two jobs from that---according to many factors which keep moving---time of year--number of others advertising--etc.

One of the problems is there are scummers ( not scammers) out there who are competition and they keep clicking on your advert to use up your daily allowance.

Google SHOULD pick those clicks up---but in our experience dont always.

You can design some pretty sophisticated ad campaigns so its worth a go im sure--

At least you dont have to lock into a big budget.

Just to mention there is a Company that rang us and offered us a month for £100 with 24/7 exposure--- ie guaranteed on Google Ads all the time.

What we realised later (due to our inexperience at the time) was they seem to approach you to advertise when the market for our enquiries is dead--between high season (Summer) and Xmas--- in our Rodeo business thats right now.

They rang again a few weeks ago (one year on) so I think we now understand how it works.

We paid £100 got no bookings and I think one whole enquiry which was a tyre kicking waster.

You dont need to be Albert Einstein to work out the profit margin.

Apart from the risk of being clicked on by competition scummers I think its better to go direct with Google Ads.

Overall for us its worked reasonably ok and of course you can offset as a business expense.

Choosing your key words is something to look at very carefully and as time passes you will get better at making it work for you.

You must be prepared for a lot of clicks however without any enquiries--

[ukpartydj]

We paid £100 got no bookings and I think one whole enquiry which was a tyre kicking waster.

I had someone call me a couple of days ago with a similar offer, I'm very witty about google ads now and as I was on the phone I brought up the keyword tool so I can see how effective each keyword is.

He was promising I would be on the top page for 2 keywords.

I fancied winding this guy up a bit so I said can I have "Mobile Disco" and "DJ" please. Both have lots of searches so It would be a really good deal to have 24 hour exposure for these.

"No you can't have that as It's a worldwide keyphrase, you'll get enquiry from all over the world - you need something location specific like - Mobile disco Dorset".

I quickly looked up in my keyword tool "mobile disco dorset" - 47 searches per month = Rubbish! I don't think so he then goes on to say I can have any keywords I want so we loop on this topic for ages then I get fed up and hang up... he rang me 5 times in a row after I hung up ...

These people are NUTS! I would go as far to say they are conning people.

[CRAZY K]

.. he rang me 5 times in a row after I hung up ...

Its called high pressure selling--which RARELY means its in YOUR interest to buy

[Mark Wild]

In my first year trading full time I spent around £1500 on Adwords and it worked great. Don't pay someone to do it for you, YOU know your business better than anyone else and you can mould your campaign around the type of clients you're after. Don't go mad with search terms/keywords, be very specific, put yourself in your potential customers shoes, what would you type into Google to find what you're selling? Make a pre-paid account otherwise your inexperience with your campaign could spiral out of control money wise.

Make sure you put the analytic code into your site so you can check it daily and become familiar with what's working best. Make sure your site is up to scratch otherwise it's a pointless exercise, as people will just keep bouncing away, meaning you're paying for nothing. I see loads of campaigns running that are just wasting money hand over fist as they have no clue what they're doing.

Your competition can only click and cost you once, the point made in this thread that they keep clicking everyday to cost you money is rubbish.

Buy a book, watch youtube tutorials and don't go live until you know what you're doing, it's not rocket science tbh and a well run campaign is extremely beneficial if your sites SEO is non-existent.

Hope this helps

[CRAZY K]

Your competition can only click and cost you once, the point made in this thread that they keep clicking everyday to cost you money is rubbish.

Not sure on what basis you make that comment Mark?

Ours is made from looking closely at stats from Analytics relating to our Rodeo Bull site.

It may of course be more of a problem in our market which is not the same as DJs.

[Mark Wild]

Not sure on what basis you make that comment Mark?

Ours is made from looking closely at stats from Analytics relating to our Rodeo Bull site.

It may of course be more of a problem in our market which is not the same as DJs.

Through research Alan, you won't be charged by Google for excessive irregular clicks, they can hppen for different reasons including yours the 'scummers'

If you thought by looking closely at your analytic report, the same i.p kept showing and Google were missing it, which I doubt, why didn't you block it?

http://hubshout.com/?What-if-my-comp...-my-ads&TID=70