Google adwords

[Karen]

Hi all
Does anyone use the google adwords scheme?
If yes do you find its generating sales? I'm thinking on trying to get away from ebay so need to get more advertising out there (rather than ebay)

[Dave]

Hi Karen,

We use google adwords and it drives quite a lot of traffic to our site(s) and for us is well worth the money.

Depending on your market, competition and number of adwords it can work out rather expensive. Our market is very competitive and we tend to pay approx 55p per click and set a daily budget. We also pre-pay and that way we can keep control of the costs.

In addition we also use google checkout so our ads get the nice coloured google checkout badge which makes them stand out a little from the competition that don't use it.

Using google adwords can be a very effective way of generating sales until your site gets very good positions in the natural search engines and at that point you may be able to turn adwords off.

[Adva Trading]

My personal take:

Adwords will get you the visits. Your site will (or not) get you the sales.

I used Adwords before and got tones of visitors. Little sales, however: My site looked like S_ _ _ _ _... When visitors came, they found un-profesional site. So they went to my competitors.

I hope that I will be able to produce a good site here with Bluepark. If so, I will use Adwords again.

[petad]

We use Adwords, and agree with everything Dave has said. When we turn off the Adwords (you can do this at any time), we find the number of hits on our site declines significantly.

As Eran said, converting those sales once they reach your site is another matter. You need to think carefully about the structure and wording of your Google Ads, which keywords you use to attract customers. If you use words that do not accurately reflect what you are selling, customers may click through and then leave straight away, and you have then paid for a wasted click.

Google are running a series of Adwords seminars which look useful - I keep missing them for one reason or another, so don't know how useful they are.

Pete

[Karen]

Thanks for the advice, I think I'll give it a go.
Does anyone find it better than avdertising in magazines?:)

[Llynda]

I have used them and they certainly increased traffic to my site but it is easy to just keep topping it up and spending lots of money. Can't say they bought in more than I spent. There are some good courses around on pay per click and I am about to go on an advanced course to see if I can make it work better for me. They have their value but you need to narrow down the words that really work or you just waste so much money. Why are you dissatisfied with ebay as I am thinking about setting up an ebay shop too?

[Karen]

I'm not completely dissatisfied with ebay. It's just that I've had quite alot of my designs copied & ripped off (as you do almost anywhere) but on ebay people just don't seem to have any respect or abide by copyright. Plus the fees do get quite out of hand & to list items is quite time consuming.

[needundies]

We have been using adwords for about 4 years now with a great deal of success, if you get the ads structured correctly and the right PPC bid you can do very well.

I do not want to go into too much detail about our campaign strategy as I know that some of our competitors can and probably do browse these forums, but if anyone would would like to go private I would be more than happy to share my own findings.

Thanks, Andy.

[john]

We use adwords all year round and find it is very good if you keep the keywords tight and very relevant and also constantly monitor and tweak the program. I could spend 8 hours a day refining adwords though, so it's not a simple task (we have over a thousand keywords!)

Our annual spend is approx £30k and this is recouped many times over, the percentage cost is more or less equal to most other ways of getting sales. Also form May 5th you can bid on competitors names, even if trademarked as long as the trademark is only a keyword, not in the text.

So Andy can advertise with the keywords 'Figleaves' 'Knickerbox' 'La Senza' etc and appear alongside their generic listings, got to be a boost for David against Goliath!
By the way the Trademark owner will no doubt contact you and claim that you are 'passing off' by using their trademark as a keyword but the trademark laws only apply to publishing the trademark in a manner likely to confuse the public - as keywords are not seen by the public there is no trademark infringement.

Be careful that you do not claim in your text that you are any way connected to the trademark owner, make the ad text an advert for your site only, then people are given the choice of clicking through to your site for similar products, which is what Google was set up to do, not as a privileged sales channel for Trade Mark holders, it also means more profit for Google of course!

[Jelly]

Hi John

That's very interesting about being able to bid on competitors names in your keywords, I wasn't aware that you will be able to do this.

We had an email from one of our competitors about a month ago accusing us of bidding on their "trademarked" name in our adwords campaign (which we don't). They said that we were one of 8 companies that came up in the paid listings if you type in partypieces. They basically said we should respect their trademark and copywrite etc etc or else!

We obviously bid on the word "party" so I assume that this is why we came up? and anyway could they really stop us bidding on pieces as a seperate word if we wanted to anyway?

I think they must have been trying pre-empt the change on google ?!

I am still trying to get the hang of the adwords setup but haven't had the time to dedicate to it, I am sure we are wasting money on it, so any advice would be greatly received.

Thanks
Karen

[Adva Trading]

Regarding eBay:

I found that the new price structure is better, and my costs are lower.

[john]

Hi John

That's very interesting about being able to bid on competitors names in your keywords, I wasn't aware that you will be able to do this.

We had an email from one of our competitors about a month ago accusing us of bidding on their "trademarked" name in our adwords campaign (which we don't). They said that we were one of 8 companies that came up in the paid listings if you type in partypieces. They basically said we should respect their trademark and copywrite etc etc or else!

We obviously bid on the word "party" so I assume that this is why we came up? and anyway could they really stop us bidding on pieces as a seperate word if we wanted to anyway?

I think they must have been trying pre-empt the change on google ?!

I am still trying to get the hang of the adwords setup but haven't had the time to dedicate to it, I am sure we are wasting money on it, so any advice would be greatly received.

Thanks
Karen
You always could bid on Trademarks unless the Trademark holder had gone through the Google process of supplying documented evidence of holding the Trademark, Google would then block use of that Trademark in keywords.
What Google is now saying is it's their search engine and they will put what keywords they like in to trigger ads, as long as those ads do not fall foul of the laws of 'passing off', so the text has to be an ad for you and not claim to be the Trademark holder.
Partypieces hold the trade mark for "partypieces", they cannot Trademark the two words Party and Pieces (because of common useage) so it would seem their Trademark is a complete waste of time and money, no doubt the Trademark agent told them they now had the rights to both words when they clearly do not.

[Jelly]

Hi John

Thanks for clarifying that, I think that the aforementioned company just doesn't like all the new competition popping up, after having a virtual monolopy on the market place for many years. Reading between the lines of the email I think that is about the size of it. Not that I think we could make that much difference to them, we are small fry in comparison!

We didn't even bother responding, as their accusations were completely unfounded. But the whole google adwords is a minefield and learning about how to use it effectively is on my to do list!

Thanks
Karen