AdWords - does it really work?

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This was published 12 years ago

AdWords - does it really work?

By Alexandra Cain

Google AdWords has become an important part of many small businesses' arsenal of marketing tools. But do these ads actually lead to an increase in sales?

What do you think? Has AdWords been a hit or a miss for your business? Leave your comment

One small business owner who says online advertising has had a significant impact on sales is Omar Sidaoui, who runs Now We're Cooking, an inner-city Melbourne shop selling exotic spices and ingredients.

Sidaoui wanted to capitalise on the popularity of home cooking shows such as MasterChef and saw an opportunity to market exotic foods and spices to the restaurant industry. So he set up a simple website, started using AdWords and saw a 25 per cent increase in turnover within the first month.

“We don't have sales people on the road and our business traffic was always from the Yellow Pages,” he says. “But since we've started using AdWords we've withdrawn from Yellow Pages and increased our AdWords campaign.”

Sidaoui says when he began using AdWords he asked friends and relatives what they would type into Google if they were looking for a food wholesaler or a nut wholesaler. “From there we developed keywords like nuts, raw nuts, organic nuts, almonds and food wholesaler and targeted names such as tahina,” he says.

Another business owner who has generated sales with Google AdWords is Fiona Carver, who runs the external accounting and bookkeeping business EzyAssist.

She took advantage of a $75 free AdWords offer when she set up a website for her business with Google's free website creation tool, Getting Business Online.

Carver says the ad generated just over 80,000 impressions (the number of times the ad was shown when someone searched Google for her keywords), with 21 direct clicks through to her website.

“I had two phone calls from potential new clients as a result of the campaign and both became regular clients,” she says.

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“Both these clients searched for one or more of my keywords, saw the ad, clicked through to my webpage and liked what they saw enough to phone me.”

Carver says she used Google's keyword tool to help decide which keywords to use in the campaign, and also used names of towns in the local area.

“I'm now planning to run another campaign, using more specific keywords, with the aim of targeting a particular market. I will run this ad in a couple of months, to coincide with the release of a new service my business will be offering”.

But it's likely AdWords will be a waste of money unless you get your keywords right and focus on a niche.

Not everyone is a fan of the campaigns, with one business owner telling MySmallBusiness that they weren't prepared to use AdWords because it looked terrible on their website.

Richard Bartlett, who owns the Eagle Thai Restaurant in Eagle Heights, Queensland, is a Google AdWords fan, but works with an external consultant to get the most out of his money.

“I was doing it myself and getting a poor result but now I've outsourced AdWords management I'm getting 20 clicks on my ad each day versus the two or three clicks I was getting beforehand,” he says.

Bartlett spends $15 a day on his AdWords campaign and has a budget of $1 per click-through, which he says has resulted in a 50 per cent traffic increase to his site.

If you want to get the most out of your AdWords campaign, Henning Dorstewitz, Google's communications and public affairs manager for Australia and New Zealand, says it's important to be scientific about your keywords.

“The more your keywords and ads relate to each other and to your business, the more likely a user is to click on your ad after searching on your keyword phrase,” he says.

Dorstewitz says a click-through rate of one percent or higher is generally a good goal if you're a new user. The click-through rate is the number of clicks the ad receives, divided by the number of times the ad is shown.

“A low click-through rate may point to poor keyword performance, indicating a need to tweak your ad or keywords. You can use the click-through rate to gauge which ads and keywords aren't performing as well for you and drop the keywords and ads that are not working”.

Dorstewitz's advice to businesses just starting out on AdWords is to target ads to a specific market, start off with a small list of strong keywords and a few different ads and limit the web pages your ads are shown on to the ones that are most relevant to your business.

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