Gavin’s adventures in AdLand…

I’ve been getting a few junk telephone calls trying to persuade me to sign up for managed Google AdWord accounts recently. It’s very expensive too. Most of them are coming in at over £100 per month with the claims that they will “actively manage my account to ensure that I am on the first page of Google.” Firstly, that is way, way too expensive for me and secondly, I simply don’t believe it. The benefit to me, I was told, is that I won’t need to spend an hour and a half each week managing my adwords account. I don’t know about you, but I certainly believe that £100 for 6 hours work is a little pricey. I’d been planning to make use of Google’s AdWord service as part of my overall marketing strategy so I thought I’d do some research to find out what all the fuss is about. This post is about my investigation and the results I have obtained within jus the first week.

DISCLAIMER

1. This post represents my findings only and is not intended to be used for advice or deciding whether or not to use the service. It is neither an endorsement of Google AdWords nor a recommendation.
   
2. If you decide to use or not to use the service after reading this it is your decision and yours alone.
   
3. If you are looking for advice, I would urge you to seek it elsewhere and not read this post.
   
4. The figures quoted in the exmaples below are for illustrative purposes only and should not be used for making decisions.

I signed up for Google AdWords 1 week ago and loaded the account with a pre-paid sum of £30 plus the voucher I received from GoDaddy from my hosting account. This I deemed to be a reasonable budget to get me started and is all I am prepared to spend for the remainder of 2009. In that time I should be able to understand how much the service is costing me and its effectiveness.

Advertising Campaigns

My strategy is very simple: I have two websites I want to advertise, http://qtportraits.com and http://qtweddings.co.uk. Although they are similar in nature they are targetting slightly different audiences. They also have differing catchment areas and differing advertising costs. This naturally meant that I needed to create two separate advertising campaigns. Each campaign would have its own geographical area, based around Guildford and Surrey. Each would also have different maximum daily allowances and different costs per click through to the target site.

The reason for this is very straightforward. Using the analysis tools, the competition for wedding photographer related keywords is greater than for portrait photographer keywords. Therefore the cost per click (CPC) bids need to be higher for the weddings so it follows that the daily budget needs to be higher too. Let me explain…

QTPortraits.com

Setting a CPC of 10p and a daily limit of £1 means that the service will allow a minimum of 10 visitors to click through

QTWeddings.co.uk

To bid for the wedding keywords, the CPC needs to be higher, typically 75p so a daily limit of £1 is too low and will result in the ad being shown fewer times, leading to fewer visitors.

The service fixes the CPC and daily budget by campaign, not by advert meaning that for this scenario I need two campaigns. One workaround would be to keep a single campaign with high enough values to cover both sites but this would lead to an increase in costs for QTPortraits. It also means that if QTWeddings consumes the daily allowance, QTPortraits won’t get its fair share of voice.

Separating the campaigns by brand in this fashion will also help me in the future. I will easily be able to analyse the results and costs and performance on a brand by brand basis. Further, if I also choose to include QTImages and QTDesigns, giving them their own unique campaigns will ensure I don’t upset the balance of my legacy advertising.

Adverts

Each campaign contains one or more adverts. Each advert in the campaign will share the same daily allowance and maximum CPC. This means that if I were to have two adverts in a campaign, the more effective one will get a greater share of the daily budget than the other. The service allows me to view this very easily so I can make an informed decision as to whether or not to continue with the less effective advert. It also allows me to test one adver against another without any detrimental effects that I can see. Simply put, if the experiment doesn’t work, the advert will not generate any clicks and it won’t cost me anything. Meanwhile, the other adverts will continue to run as normal.

From my perspective this is just what I want.I know virtually nothing about advertising and this gives me the tools I need to test different styles and approaches to see which works best. The trick is to not tamper with things too frequently but rather allow each advert time to run before drawing any conclusions.

Results so far

So, the big question is: where am I today???

I’ve literally just checked the statistics and so far my adverts have generated 604 impressions and no clicks.

In plain English this means that over the course of the last 7 days my adverts have been displayed 604 times as a result of searches on Google. So far nobody has clicked on one of these adverts and come through to my websites so the service hasn’t actually cost me anything (apart from the £5 set up fee).

I’m also told that one of my adverts now has an average search rank of 7 and is generating 55% of my impressions so far. I’m really excited about this because it means that my brand and website URL are being shown very frequently to potential customers. The fact they haven’t clicked isn’t a worry yet – its still early days. The important thing for me is to get the brand name out there and visible. I want to leave this ad (and indeed all my ads) to run a little longer before making any changes to it.

Summary

In summary, the results so far have actually been better than I expected but I need to allow the adverts to run longer and generate traffic from them to ascertain how effective they really are. So far, particularly for my portrait site they are getting my brand seen. The weddings adverts aren’t featuring as high in the Google rankings so I may need to up the CPC a bit there.

I can certainly see how a managed service can make money. A lot of money in fact. There is nothing wrong with that so it you are thinking of outsourcing then good luck to you, but for me I’d rather run it all myself. It isn’t difficult or time consuming and playing around with it is actually a bit of a hoot.

Best regards
Gavin