PlusOne – Marketing Musings

Its three weeks now since I started using Google Adwords. They had a slight policy shift in that time, but I won’t go into that.

What I have done is placed bid amounts on some keywords and written a variety of ads. The click-through rates on these ranges from 1.8% down to 0.9%. I have also limited my spend to A$7 per day, because it does not take too long to rack up a bill.

One thing that is obvious for a site that started off from scratch – Google Adwords can deliver traffic. They might not be looking at buying my product, but traffic is flowing.

I guess one of the issues is that there are a lot of people out there looking for free caricatures of celebs etc. We don’t have those. So I have had to ensure this fact is obvious in my ads. i don’t want to be paying for clicks from people who are looking for what I don’t have.

With the initial spurt of interest I have also increased the prices of the caricatures – from US$10 per head, to US$14.99 per head. This is still amazingly cheap compared to what else is available. Another point of differentiation is the fact that we provide 100% digital caricatures – most others do paper-based then post and/or scan. Not saying anyone’s is better – just different, which is a good thing.

The whole Google Adwords thing is another area where someone could happily specialise – there are quite a few tricks and traps to be learned. If you are into traffic metrics, Adwords would be like a gift.

• Does being higher up the rankings bring increased clickthroughs?
• Is it worth paying more to be higher?
• Can I write a better ad that gets more clicks and therefore rank higher than someone who is paying more?
• Have I got the keywords in the right spot in the ad?

Told you there was a lot – and that is just touching the surface….

So I am getting traffic (the site is also ranking well on MSN) the next thing is to improve on conversion rates….and look forward to getting out of the sandbox.

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