Accounting for Adwords

September 26th, 2006

Most people that have experimented with Online Marketing have, at some time or another put some money into Google AdWords. On the face of things, it sounds like an amazing proposition, delivering targeted traffic to specific pages and only paying when you get the clicks. So what happens if it goes wrong?

The first question I would ask is, how do you define “wrong”? Run of the mill e-commerce platform PPC campaigns are aimed solely at one thing: Return On Investment. Once you delve deep, AdWords is an incredibly detailed science, a science that can change on a daily basis. Even with the best research on offer, a lot of people fail to get a positive return on investment when they start with AdWords. Is this failure? In a lot of cases, no it’s not!

One of the great benefits of marketing on the Internet is the accountability, you can tell who clicked where, what they clicked on, when they did, how they did it – which only really leaves you with the “why?”. As useful as it is, this accountability can work against you. If for instance you start a campaign and within 1 month you have a 95% ROI, so you are losing 5% of what you put in, is this a disaster? Numbers don’t lie, but do you have all of them? Can your company specifically give you the ROI that last year’s 4 week billboard run gave you? How many people saw the board? Did it interest them? Did it motivate them to interact with your brand? A lot of this information is very clouded, if you manage to obtain it in the first place.

It can take a while to get your cost per click down and your click through ratios up. Don’t overlook the value of your brand being visible, not everybody is at the “buying stage” when they land on your website, no matter how hard you try to convert them. If you can get these peoples’ interest while they are conducting their research you may well net them on their return visit (just try and get them to come in organically or directly to save you some money!). Don’t be scared off by the numbers, work with them and understand them.

Pay Per Click purely for brand exposure of course, is a whole different post…