Will AdWords Paid Search Work For You?

Most of our clients already have AdWords accounts running, they get in touch with us because they’re either having trouble making it work for them or it works but they don’t have the time to work on it to take it to the next level and in many cases they also don’t want to have to constantly keep up with the changes in the paid search sector.

Some of our clients had never tried AdWords before and go search online or ask friends and colleagues they respect for a recommendation as to who’s good at PPC Management and thus we end up talking and take things from there.

I suspect many potential clients miss out on getting involved with AdWords as they don’t think it will work for them, they think this based on the metrics they currently see from their organic listings, they may have X visitors, Y Sales and Z Profit and assume that AdWords PPC will generate the same results but this isn’t always the case when stats are monitored, but many fail to monitor properly so they just don’t see what’s happening.

So the Million dollar /pound /Yen /Euro question if you don’t have an account or currently have a poorly performing one is will AdWords work for you? Well there is no clear cut yes or no answer here, it depends on factors such as your website and how well it can convert traffic, and where you are positioned in the supply chain for your product or service. An affiliate on 10% commission cannot really compete in terms of marketing spend at low ROI compared to a wholesaler, in turn the wholesaler can’t compete with country distributor, the distributor can’t really compete with the manufacturer, so if all four were advertising on AdWords they’d each have less margin to work with than the next guy/girl above them.

That’s not to say they can’t make AdWords work if the client is an affiliate or wholesaler or just battling with bigger competitors with very deep pockets, we often fight it out with huge brands for our clients and win through experience, skill, expertise and guile by finding new angles to exploit as well as plain and simply doing the hard work that many can’t be bothered to, we sometimes create hundreds of adgroups for a single product or service where competitors may only do a few with bland generic ads.

The main thing that potential AdWords PPC advertisers or those with an AdWords account which they feel may be under-performing is to establish clear metrics, for those who don’t have an account they can roughly use SEO metrics but with the best will in the world these will only be a very rough guide and the only real way to get good meaningful data is to take the plunge and get an account set up.

The one key, fundamental, absolute must is that CONVERSION TRACKING MUST BE INSTALLED !!!

We cannot emphasise this enough, we see many accounts without the slightest shred of conversion tracking, they’re using a cash in v cash out approach and this is where money can be saved in bulk if the conversion tracking is installed and the results acted upon.

The “proof of concept” phase is very important, new advertisers often try AdWords themselves and whilst many succeed in making a go of it, some will set up their accounts poorly, using broad match without any negative keywords, coupled with poor adverts and it will fail them, they’ll write off AdWords as something that just didn’t work for them so we would advise merchants to commit to finding out if AdWords is viable for them by enlisting a specialised PPC Management Agency to do the set up for them.

Obviously we would say that as we are one of the leading PPC Management Agencies but we often tell clients to actually lower their initial budget and concentrate on fewer product for proof of concept, before expanding out the campaign, we look for long term mutually rewarding relationships with client so we treat their money as if it were our money and approach a PPC campaign as we would do it if it were for ourselves.

For those people already getting sales from organic search listings don’t assume that the same results will happen from paid search listings even if a ppc management agency is at the helm, results can be better than organic but also worse.

Below is a screenshot from a client’s Analytics account highlighting the difference between paid and organic E-commerce results :

You can see that AdWords traffic generated 75% more revenue per basket than organic Google traffic, as well as E-commerce basket value being 7% or so higher too, the resulting Per visit value or EPC is a whopping 83% lift in value per visitor however we need to remember that AdWords needs paying for from this extra revenue so whilst the results are vastly improved we need to take the costs into account.

That being said most SEO costs money one way or another for most serious online companies now, some spend far more on SEO than PPC thinking that PPC wouldn’t generate a return, but they figure that on the current SEO metrics so we would advise every company to at least try PPC for themselves, preferably via an experienced and capable ppc management agency so as to get off to the best start.