Google Adwords - Some Lessons
I've been using Google Adwords for my Texas merchandise sites since the beginning of the year and started using it on my hurricane t-shirt site last week. The ads have been the primary way that customers have found my sites. Without this service, or one like it, I would have to rely on customers finding my sites through search engines or links from other sites, and that wouldn't work so well. I can't name a site that I would even approach to list one of my commercial sites as a link. And my sites haven't always had the highest rankings on search engines, although hopefully some recent changes will fix that. A couple years ago you needed a big multi-thousand dollar advertising budget to advertise online. Adwords, Overture and others now offer advertising on big name sites at a cost of 5 cents and up per click. This is all very good for small sites. Since starting to use these service I've learned a couple lessons and thought I would share them here.

- About 20% of the clicks I pay for are clicks that the advertising systems accidentally counted twice. This sucks, but there's not much I can do about.
- Increasing my advertising budget (on a per day basis) hasn't lead to an increase in sales. I tried $5 a day (at about 10 cents a click), and got the same number of sales as when I set my budget to $2 a day.
- For regionally focused products, like my "I survived hurricane Charley" t-shirts, I set my ads to only display in Florida.
- These advertising services allow your ads to be displayed on search engines as well as on many other type of sites that have content that is relevant to your ads. I've found it best to disable showing of your ads anywhere but on search engines. I only want to display ads to someone searching for "Texas tshirts", rather than someone reading an article about the beers of Texas. I don't think a $18 t-shirt (plus shipping) is going to work as an impulse buy.
- Use a lot of negative keywords. I look through my server logs primarily because it shows me what page someone was on when they clicked on a link to one of my sites. This referring page can often tell me what search terms they were looking for when they found my site (or saw the ad for my site). I use this information to either confirm that my ads are targeting the right people, or to determine that my ads are displaying to someone who's looking for something that I don't have, yet my ad shows on their search. For example, someone searching for "Texas boots" might see my ad on their search results and click on it. Yet I don't sell boots. In this case I would add a negative keyword for "boots". This will prevent my ads from showing when someone includes the word "boots" in their search.
- posted by Drew @ 4:35 AM