Experiences with Google AdWords - Germany

Does anybody have any experience with google adwords (and using it to drive business to an ecommerce site)? Has it paid the costs back in terms of new sales? Any tips and advice?

Yes it works. In fact it is pretty much THE only place to spend online. All the rest are a joke compared.

The "trick" is to bid on thousands of the more obscure terms, rather than the OBVIOUS term.

For instance if you are flogging insurance it will be too competitive and too expensive to bid on "insurance" so you need to think laterally and bid
on words like "household contents" etc.

But google helps you - it has a keyword generator. So you start with the word "insurance", they suggest variations, and they you never actually use
the original word "insurance"!!!

So very important that you spend time trying to find 1,000 words that people might use, rather than being lazy on bidding and the obvious. Obvious = expensive.

For example when I had a lingerie business - we never actually bid on the word "lingerie" directly - far too expensive.

Working out the economics will also massively depend on whether your product produces repeat customers. It might be worth taking an expensive hit at the start to find
that customer - but if they are one-off buyers and unlikely to ever use you again - you need to calculate things differently - i.e. google costs must be built into every sale.

But...

When you calculate typical online conversion rates of 1% (1% of visitors buying) then your google costs can really rack up. So you either need:

1. Product with high margins. (tricky to keep those margins in the real world!!)

2. Product that is very niche, and therefore less direct competitors bidding on your words.

Niche seems to be the way to go these days 'cos if the product is postable you appeal to the whole world. If you are the only guy online selling good quality one-legged tin soldiers - you will corner
the one-legged tin soldier market.

Thanks for the information. I signed up yesterday and am giving it a go (using credit from a promotional voucher first).

Caution with Microsoft’s version! I signed up with them and Google using the promotional codes and Microsoft gave me some BS saying that I couldn’t use my code because I was in Germany. I advertise in the US and pay with a US credit card etc., but they seemed determined to screw me out of my promotional coupon. They even pestered me with customer service calls apologizing for not being able to help me with the promotion, but trying to sell me everything under the sun.

I ran the same campaign on both Microsoft and Google and got something like 90 hits on Google and 4 hits on Microsoft. At that point I stopped the campaign because I had first page results in the natural search. So even if Microsoft didn’t try to scam me, I still couldn’t recommend them.

Google produced results, but the were expensive. I don’t really understand why my clicks cost $0.50 to $0.90 when they were pretty obscure terms and I never saw one other paid result for those terms.

8420PR - tell us what you are selling, and I'll tell you whether I think you will get screwed or not!

Google AdWords can return great ROI on onlne marketing spending, but campaigns need to be setup right and monitored closely during runtime. Here are a few tips that might be useful;

• Keep an eye on your Quality Score; low QS leads to higher required bids.
  
• Relevance is key, so split your most popular keywords in separate Ad groups and use these keywords in your Ads, as well as on your landing pages.
  
• Split campaigns for Google Search and the Google Content Network; their workings are completely different.
  
• Don't measure succes on clicks or CTR, but on Conversion Costs. So install conversion codes on your site.
  
• Link Google Analytics to your AdWords account. Check quality of traffic on bounce rate as a start.
  
• Look at order/lead logs for time trends and experiment with Ad planning to spend your budget more targetted.
  

Just a few loose things, there's really a lot you can get from AdWords if you have tiem to digg into it. Otherwise consider hiring an expert; as long as you know the basics you can calculate yourself if outsourcing is viable. If an expert can decrease costs and raise conversions, his fee may be very well spend.