Adwords - Does it Work?

Many customers come to me asking for more traffic and more importantly, more traffic that will buytheir products. Quite often, especially for new businesses, I suggest Adwords. But then they start on the horror stories they have heard:

- your competitors can click on your adverts
- anyone can display your adverts and click on them to earn money
- the people clicking don't turn into customer
- it's highly expensive

And many more reasons. But what other advertising allows you to be in full control and set up for only a small amount?

I try to reassure my customers that yes, the first 2 points can happen, but I've seen plenty of times when I've had refunds for those very reasons. And if the last 2 excuses are true - is it the system, or your advert?

An important point to note here is affiliate selling. And here I'm not talking about the bulk of affiliates earning small amounts, I'm referring to the super affiliates who are selling their ideas. Have you ever read their stories to find out how they are making the money? Quite often they are running massive Google Adwords campaigns. These campaigns can run into thousands of hits per day generating loads of commissions.

So if they can get it to work - shouldn't we all be able to?

A new customer took up my advice and created an adwords advert. A week later he came back asking what I though of a conversion rate of under 1% (less than 1 in 100 people clicking on the advert bought from him). I told him the truth - it was poor.

So I looked through the server logs to see what keywords he was getting most traffic from and the answer was clear. He was buying expensive generic keywords. Yet his catalogue was tiny. Most of the items people were probably searching for weren't available from him. Over the next few weeks I coached him into using some more specific keywords. These were cheaper to buy and led to a reduction in traffic. But at the same time his conversion rate increased to over 3% (and he was still using some generic keywords). Hopefully these generic keywords will soon be removed as he relies more on those that generate his income.

And that, I think, is the essential element of adwords. Don't go for as much traffic as possible - pick carefully the traffic you want and buy just that. If your products carefully match the advert and the keywords the person is searching for, you will quickly be paying less for your marketing whilst getting more sales. Wouldn't that be wonderful!