Ask HN: Does AdWords work for you? I've talked to a few businesses (mostly Saas) who run AdWords campaigns that don't "work". The campaigns drive some traffic, but they're not seeing a good positive ROI. Have you made Adwords work for you? Can it be made to work for smaller businesses? |
My biggest three recommendations are: -Keep cost low. I saw that some people were paying like $10 for a Justin Beiber click. Maybe if you are trying to sell some hair-gel to make you look like justin beiber buying a $.25 hair-gel keyword could be better from a cost perspective. -Target location. My clickrate went up a bunch for a few months but didn't see an influx of users. I checked analytics and found a bunch of clicks were coming from some weird Japanese website. Some kind of fraud. It was using like 90% of my click payments. I disabled Japan and had no problems since. -Be very careful accepting their auto-recommendations. I did all their recommendations and I think it would be bad for a serious company. It adds creepy shit like "watch grandma peeing" and my keywords aren't related to that at all. It also isn't accurate. It says "we estimate you'll get 150 new clicks every day from now for x dollars." and I'll get none or one.
1. Keyword research: understand the search volume and competition level for each target keyword before you start your campaigns. Having an estimate of CPC before you start is critical to right planning. If you operate in an industry where search volumes are less and/or competition is high, you should perhaps not depend on search engine are your primary traffic source.
2. Contextual relevancy of keywords: the more relevant the keyword is, the lesser price you pay as you drive more CTR. Google charges lower CPC for higher CTR ads. SEO directly helps SEM.
3. Catchy headlines, good description: ad making is an art. Even text ads. Test multiple copies for each keyword group and see which one does best. See if having FREE in the heading helps, try adding phone number, etc. Again higher CTR implies lower CPC.