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A few months ago I received a coupon card in the mail from Google to test AdWords campaign and I was given a $100 credit for signing up. I decided to take Google Adwords through its initial paces and see what it does for my traffic.  I want to let everyone know that other than logging into AdWords and building campaigns and doing some keyword research, I have not done any reading or tuning with AdWords. I am not an AdWords master and there are better ways to sculpt campaigns to make them more successful, this was just a basic trial run that I did for my DragonBlogger.com site.
This campaign netted me almost 800,000 impressions for my advertisements but less than a tenth of a percent click through. Though this was still 18 cents CPC and totaled about 630 clicks in the span of about three months. I ran several campaigns and my most successful was the one promoting my NBC Heroes Reviews, then I ran a campaign specifically promoting my review of SponsoredTweets hoping to get some conversions and referrals, (I have no evidence I earned a single referral from an AdWord click through), and one for my Dragon Blogger Technology and Entertainment portal homepage. Though I can see from Analytics that my site has received traffic from Google Ad Clicks, it showed only 228 visits from “Googleads” which means that most of the traffic isn’t reflected in analytics, or is coming from other sources which I haven’t been able to figure out yet.
I myself don’t think that the $100 would have been well spent based on such little traffic to just get that few visits and readers to my blog, now if I had a product to actually sell and 1% of those visits turned into sales, and your product sold for $20 you would have paid $100 in advertising and have netted about$120 in sales. In this case I probably would have continued it and tweaked the keywords to capitalize value, but in my opinion AdWords works best if you are promoting a product or affiliate and doesn’t appear to be ideal to bring in regular readers to a blog.
I could be wrong, but my RSS subscribers, comments and blog visits all remain relatively unchanged since prior to running my AdWords campaign, and Analytics still shows the same 71% of my traffic coming from organic Google Searches.
-Dragon Blogger
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January 3rd, 2010 at 7:52 am
Thanks DB, this info is helpful. I seen a show on the tube a couple nights ago about google and one business swears by adwords. Though I’m sure there is more because this is where google claimed most of their billions comes from. So I think your right in the “if I was selling something”. I received the coupon and get other smaller ones still on occasion but never have used them. Thanks for sharing this.
read cadilacjax´s article about Wanna Be a Geek Girl Go to Geek Girl Camp
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January 3rd, 2010 at 9:20 am
Thanks for the review Justin. I have not yet tried adwords for my blog and I do not think I will based on your review and my assumptions. I have used it very successfully for my resume writing business, but I am selling a $200 service so I only need on conversion to make it worthwhile and profitable.
read Tycoon Blogger´s article about Getting To First Page Of Google
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January 3rd, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Any amount of money, be it $100 or even $10 is never well spent if there are no returns.
I am not sure what your goal was in the first place.. was it to send traffic to your blog or to sell something on your blog.
If your adwords advertising goal was to sell something specific, you would need to send targeted traffic to a landing page that specifically talks about what you are selling, and not send them to a blog where their attention can get diverted and the farther away they are from doing what you wanted them to do in the first place, which is to buy the item you want them to.
CTR is very low on your stats which is likely due to your advertising on the content network. This might also be due to you having a ton of non related keywords cramped into one ad group, making your ad non relevant for a lot of them, so people are not clicking on the ad.
If you have a lot impressions and low clicks it could also mean, your ad is not working, you would need to replace it. Always good to split test ads to see which is working better and then improve.
Incidentally, I have a free course on PPC optimization that you can sign up for on http://www.ppc-conversion-tracking.com.
Oh, yes analytics tracking of adwords traffic is weak, that is why it is always best to track adwords traffic using different software.
Happy New Year!
read Roy Sencio´s article about Why Test Advertising Messages?
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January 3rd, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Thanks, I don’t specifically sell a product on my site at all. Which is why I created 3 different AdWords campaigns, one was very specific to NBC Heroes Reviews, other was for SponsoredTweets, and another was for my blog in general. If I had a specific affiliate site/service to sell, I would have AdWords promoted it and may try that in the future to compare difference.
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January 5th, 2010 at 5:51 am
“I probably would have continued it and tweaked the keywords to capitalize value” – I believe, that this is the right way in this case.
I wonder how much money you should spend to start getting more, than you put in..
Btw.. writing about Google AdWords is a good idea, it’s still so rare to see anyone blogging about their experience in this sphere.
read iWoodpecker´s article about Getting Website Traffic in 2010
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January 5th, 2010 at 7:08 am
That is true, Google handles capitalized words differently and treats each search separate. But most people don’t capitalize words when they search for them.
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February 3rd, 2010 at 11:06 am
Thanks for the information, I’ve been considering what to do, whether to use Google Adwords or not, and too be honest I’m leaning away from it at the moment.
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