GoogleAds does it work for you?

[Mollified]

I'm just starting up on my own as a one man band. The guy who helped me with my website suggested I use GoogleAds as a promotional tool and following a long chat with the man from Google I think I understand how it works. I'm put off because when I search for a Mollified in my area up pop my competitors from the other side of the country on GoogleAds which is no use to me or my potential clients (its a very local business).
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using GoogleAds that they might want to share?

I have a very local business and google adwords has been great for me.

There is some great advice in old threads on here from some extremely knowledgeable people so worth searching the archives for that.

You can set your adwords to a narrow geographical area- I have mine set to about a 5 km radius of my central point. So if you are seeing ads for companies that are out of your area that is because they haven't set their ads up right and they are wasting money.
Very impressed that you can actually speak to google on the phone. I had never realised that was possible!

OH yes :) his name is Elliot and it was a freephone number and he chatted for hours - it took hours for me to get to grips with the complexity of the system...

I'll search old threads, but I never seem to get what I'm looking for

Is it too cheeky to ask how much you spend? Elliot wants me to spend £300 per month, which for a sole trader is really going to sting.

Hi

My PPC costs c£5-£10 month and that gets me on the front page for most relevant searches. However I have a niche, which helps.

Please do NOT pay £300 a month!!!

Here are some threads that might help. Talkinpeace2 knows what she is doing.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/freelancers/1328588-Steer-Clear-of-Google-AdWords

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/freelancers/1176690-Help-please-Google-Yahoo-search-engine-advertising

Google offer such a great customers service as they want you to keep adding more and more key words which = £ for them.

Your competitor might have bought competitor names/areas.

If you don't want to manage your ppc yourself you can pay a freelancer. I am currently looking for one, using www.peopleperhour.com, I'll let you know if I find one.

Hope that helps & good luck.

WS

Mollified I'm looking at this too and was given a 75 euro voucher from the local chamber of commerce to give it a trial. Can you get a voucher like that?

Ooops! Ignore my last post - I'm just reading the other discussions linked to up there! ;-)

I'm still using my £75 voucher from when I set it up 18 months ago! I found the sales team very helpful, they were in Ireland so all native English speakers, and they were happy to not try to push me to advertise out of my area when I explained I didn't want my adverts to pop up on computers more than ten miles away. I'm not entirely certain if I've had any custom from it though - I always ask new clients where they heard about my business, they usually reply either 'word of mouth' or 'off the internet', but normally can't remember precisely where in the internet they got to me from. I do know I pop up top if you search for 'dogwalker, myhometown' on google, but I think this may be because my website is now several years established.

Right, I have done a shed load of reading of the above posted links this weekend. I now know a lot more about websites and Adwords :)
I'm going to give it a go.

I think that Talkinpeace is basically saying start by putting all the words at 1p and then play with it until it works, then play with it some more! Is this along the right lines?

I'm jealous of all of you with your £75 vouchers where can I get my hand on one of these?

Anyway thank you all

I got mine from the chamber of commerce in an info pack for 'starters'. But the ISP I'm with was also doing them and I picked one up from the council... Check your junkmail! ;)

I advise people on marketing and yes they do work.

Try to use the words your customers would use in their search though and not the industry jargon words for it or abbreviations unless they are well known and the industry standard. Try to keep the list fresh and also start a blog or a customer comments section linked to a Facebook or twitter site and post on it regularly as this will also contribute to raise you up the search engines. Make your site simple and navigable and always post an address or telephone number on it so that customers can contact you for clarification.

If you want a really good website for free or next to nothing speak to your local university and see if they have some free advice or get a student to do it as an assessment. The only issue here would be deciding whether it's an IT based project if comes or a media/communications project if more marketing orientated.

Adwords are great so long as you make them work for YOU not for Google.
Last months bill from google was £4.76
hits through the adwords generated two days bookings - income well over 100 times what I paid out.

do you have traffic stats on your site?
I pay an extra 15 a year to Simon of UK SiteBuilder for mine and they are a treasure trove of information about HOW people use the site

£75 would last me YONKS
but start with a budget of £3 a day absolute tops and play from there

Erm, as a former Software Engineering student can I just say that "designing a website" is not quite what we're about... we're a bit more "writing safety-critical software for your nuclear submarine" than HTML.

Talkin Thank you for your excellent explanations over various threads - I've been having a poke around today getting the analytics up and running. I'll give it a few days to see what it throws up, then take your advice further and start my campaign.

What do you mean "how" they use your site? There seems to be a lot of that type of info on google already on the "Webmaster Tools" section. You need to verify your site with google by either embedding a little code on your site, put a file on the server (unlikely for those of us using hosting services!) or change the CNAME in the DNS settings.

I do not use Google's analytics - Simon at UKSB has his own one that I use.

I find it interesting which pages people visit in which order - it affects how the menus are laid out
and surreal things like watermarking images meant that having them poached by posters on an obscure forum for their sigs actually became more free advertising !!

PS I first wrote "code" for my brand new ZX spectrum. Its all been downhill from there.

Alpine. I agree in general but it really dies depend upon what you want your website to do and what you want it to link to both internally and externally.

Again thank you all for your help and input on this

My website is not sales based - it is purely a marketing and educational tool but I am providing a service and I need people to buy into that service.

I will look more into how people (if any do find it) actually use my site. But I was wondering, at the moment there is just a lovely picture and my contact details on the home page then some very simple tabs that open up pages with more info. Most sites seem to try to put as much info as possible onto the home page which I, personally find over confusing, am I wrong to go for such a simple approach, do people prefer all the info all at once?

I have meta words built in which I probably need to rewrite and jig about with but I'm so new at this it is taking me ages to get to grips with it.

Go for simple and clear and then build up from there
holding pages are PERFECTLY acceptable so long as they are clear and accurate

mollified My "home" page is quite simple too. A very brief explanation of "what we do" and then a twitter button, a linkedin button and a "subscribe to our mailing list" box. I then have links from there (about us, services, workshops, news, contact) for those that wish to find out more - but enough on my home page that if they just click one of those buttons I'm in their face anyway even if they leave the site immediately!

From the advice I've read here I created a Google webmaster account and I've started pointing my site to specific territories - e.g., I've got a .com which was pointing at US visitors - and whilst I'm happy to go to the US to deliver my service I doubt I'm going to get too much call for it! So I've now directed that to my country of residence. A co.uk site is automatically offered to the UK market. I didn't even stop to think about the implications of this until I read this thread.

Thats a good point AlpinePony, I hadn't thought about the implications of dot com verses .co.uk but it makes sence

If I'm reading webmaster right I have had less than 10 hits in the last month :(

What a kick up the bum! just as well most of my business is word of mouth or I'd be down the tube by now

Right time to start following some of your good advice

Mollified How are you getting on?

I've just set up my Adsense account today using a 50 euro voucher I had. Implementing Talkin's ideas I've put it on a 6 cent CPC with a 1 euro a day limit and I'm very interested to see what's going to happen!

Hi Alpinepony,

I now have google adsence, adwords and analytics (all since Thursday so still fairly new) and apparently 2 people clicked on my site yesterday, it came up three times on the first page in searches. I did get my first phone call from someone who found me on the internet on Friday too. I set the limit at £3 per day and most of the keywords are very low cpc but I have bid a little higher on some words.

I have learnt a lot in the last few weeks about online advertising and website optimisation but I'm still not too sure what adsence is..I only added it as the guy who helped me with my site suggested it (a family member who did it for free).

Its very low key but as I'm a one man band with a toddler in tow I'm quite happy with things growing fairly organically. And I'm loving messing around with adwords too :)

I'm still hoping to get a voucher so that I can have a play on someone elses budget for a week or two

That's great news that you already found a client that way! please me too very quickly

I also took talkin's advice and have turned the ads off between midnight and 5am - 5am being the time people are going to start logging on and thinking "wtf am I going to do?".

I've just checked my account and it says it's displayed an ad twice but no clicks yet - fair enough, it's more a mon-fri thing so I'm waiting in eager anticipation now!

So now I'm going to be keeping a close eye on it and tweaking it to figure out what gets the best response.

As far as SEO goes, that was turned on its head a few weeks ago with Google's penguin update - and it now seems rather than just using a splatter-gun approach with keywords, Google would prefer you simply develop your site to be quality and deliver on what you do. Which tbh I'd imagine you do anyway. They're trying to deter niche marketing - not genuine businesses! You know, they were trying to get rid of those websites which do "false advertising" - you know, you click on it and it's full of ads for Viagra or something like that.

I've been commenting on industry blogs and the like and getting some referrals that way - and whilst it's a good way to make me more visible and get a good reputation - at the same time, people will only go looking for my work once they've already started investigating me iyswim. They (probably) won't stumble across my words until they know they have a problem. Otoh, all advertising is good advertising right and it helps hone my though processes on the job in hand.

woohoo! 19 impressions! only two of my key words are actually doing anything though. No actual clicks either.

Got a £30 pound voucher emailed by google today so I have activated that.

I could waste some serious time this way.

I think I need to look at linkedin too, so far I haven't even put up a facebook page - I hate that site. I'm amazed though at what a shameless self promoter I have become, I booked someone into my diary for a consultation after chatting to them in the street today!

I have heard the saying that no publicity is bad publicity and I hope that is true at the moment as my industry is currently taking some flack in the press.

Adwords and SEO are VERY addictive
you HAVE to remember that they only drive traffic to the site, not make the site earn money for you ....

Hi
Just a quick question -

In your opinion is an average position of 5.1 sufficient or should I be trying to improve on this?