I'm looking for people who have tried this system and what their returns were?

How many clients did you gain versus what you spent?

I guess I'm really interested but its those words NOT GARUNTEED that make me twitchy, if I end up spending the cash I plan to allocate to marketing would I be throwing it away using this?

No hard numbers to give you, but we found it to be a waste of advertising funds.

Sean R.
BurstNET

Current number of ads shown: 52.720
Clicks 614
Amount spend: $ 460.-
Click through %: 1.16% (has been at 1.31%, but been dropping lately)

Out of those 614 about 60 signed up.

Hope that helps!

Looks like Pilgrim had better results than I did. I spent about $250 and had about 400 clicks but no sales. Seemed to be a waste of money... :bawling:

Maybe I will try it again based on Pilgrim's results

Thanks for sharing folks.

The clickthroughs versus how much you spent seem to be much lower than I interpreted googles predicted results.

For instance, I target a phrase that costs me $600 for 6 weeks and google predicts 45000 clickthroughs, going on the advertising 1% system thats 450 likely sales, but even that seems ambitious results.

Pilgrim, you seem to have converted about 10% of that 1% if you see what I mean.

Is this comparable with anyone elses results or was it better or worse?

That's hard to predict - and even hard to measure. A person probably will visit your site several times bevore he buys, so visits or a CTR will not tell you exactly a rate.
But I think a 10% conversion rate would be very good.

So a .001% would be very good. That means for what I have in mind would (if everyone went for the cheapest package) only get 2x profit (for a years worth of hosting) what was spent.

Those are not confidence giving figures.

Has no one had better luck?

Originally posted by thenexthot
Looks like Pilgrim had better results than I did. I spent about $250 and had about 400 clicks but no sales. Seemed to be a waste of money... :bawling:


What you'll want to do is put a script on your site that tracks where your visitors come from. So that way you can see what words they searched on.
Google allows you to put in "negative" keywords. Meaning that if anyone uses that word in their search, your ad will not be shown.

Negative keyword #1 to add: FREE ;)
Over time you will ad more and more negative keywords to your list and your ad is shown to a more taregeted audience.

It's kind of a sport to get the click through % as high as possible.

For instance, I target a phrase that costs me $600 for 6 weeks and google predicts 45000 clickthroughs, going on the advertising 1% system thats 450 likely sales, but even that seems ambitious results.

Google is VERY optimistic with their predictions. If their addword predictions were true, I would have $ 4.700.- in advertising cost with Google PER WEEK.

I have good tracking already fortunately, I can backtrack the source of virtually every referrer to the site I've got in mind.

Yeah, I figured out Free is a negative keyword to add, thanks for letting me know though, seemed kinda obvious to me. If someones trawling for free stuff theyre not likely to be well disposed to proper paid hosting!

Going on my earlier figures would 45 signups out of googles predicted 45000 clicks seem ambitious?

Well that's hard to say ofcourse. Google can drive the traffic to your site, but once the visitors are there you will need to offer them something.

It's not googles responsibilty to turn clicks into sales. That's where you come in :)

Things that can help:

Accept creditcards?
Good site (professionality is one thing, a good layout is more important though)
Instant setup?
And don't forget about the Faq! That's where they'll head first.

Price, how fast do you answer their emails with questions? etc etc

Well I decided to give adwords a second chance based on Pilgims results.

Here is what I got after the first day:

Impressions: 8909
Clicks: 59 0.66% (Not Very Impressive)

I did get one signup out of it, although it just cost me about $75. I am going to let it run a little while longer and see what happens.

I will post the final results after I stop the campaign.

nathan

Originally posted by thenexthot
Clicks: 59 0.66% (Not Very Impressive)

Not very impressive?
But also not really bad.

That would be interesting thenexthot.

It'll be interesting to see the results after a little time has passed.

Thanks.

I don't get it (I hardly ever do). Please feel free to shoot me now.

I ran a short ad on google yesterday november 1st.

Cost: $ 9.91 1230 impressions, 18 clicks. Click% 1.48%

Sold 4 domainnames that day and got 3 new hosting customers.

*scratches head* I must be doing something right for a change :D

clue us in on your midas touch... :D

What key words are you using?

what kind of ad are you running?

If you don't mind sharing of course...

If you don't I know I will understand, I cant speak for the read of the people out there;)

Time of Day? = Peak Traffic in any specific region?

Or something else, who knows....

A pal of mine has a site with over 300,000 hits a month, and how they react to stuff suprises even him sometimes, (we both agree it would be a bad idea to try to get into the heads of some of his visitors :) )

Who knows, his pages have a certain look that comes about because of his color blindness, but seems to be very effective.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I started this post trying to get help quantifying something but we all know how the internet has a habit of defying that philosophy :)

Lets keep on with this, I'm certainly very interested in all your results..

Haha, I think the pool o'fish is big enough. I'm not that worried about competition.

My ads run on two keywords. hosting and webhosting
webhosting gets the best clickthrough% by far! However searches on this word are limited. $ 25.- will usually last me a whole week.
Hosting can easily run up to $ 50.- to $ 75.- per day. Depending on the day of the week.

I am not in the "we host everything you want" business. I'm targeting a specific market. Negative keywords:

cart
shoppingcart
anonymous
windows
ecommerce
free
e-commerce
commerce
adult
shop
MySql
dedicated
windowsNT
NT
commission
shopping
afiliate
reseller
gambling
casino

Well, now you also know what I am NOT selling ;)

No windows servers, no e-commerce and most importantly..no mysql databases.

Only standard 13 per dozen websites. And I do very well thank you very much :)

Day of week is important. Running your ads on a monday is a waste of money. Lots of clickers, not many buyers.

Sunday is the day to go for. Sold 14 domainnames and got 25 new customers on last sunday

Let me get this right :

webhosting or web hosting

I looked at "web hosting" as a phrase match and thats wayyy out of the budget I've got in mind for a month!

even using "hosting" by itself looked awfully expensive.

Like I said in a previous post...Google tends to be a little too enthusiastic when it gets to predictions.

And let's just say that is the understatement of the year!

Fascinating info about day of the week!

We are extremely pleased with our Google Adwords performance. We specialize in PHP hosting, and our Google advertising is second only to word-of-mouth in terms of new customers.

What kind of results are you getting John?

Hello
We get CTR's of 2 - 6% (sometimes more) on Google adwords.
We have been doing this for 6 months or more.

This is how we do it:

Bid on specific key phrase searches like:
"windows web hosting"
"cheap domain names"
(we do not bid on general search terms like web hosting or on searches "containing" our key phrases)

Limit the audience to countries who speak English.

Have seperate campaigns for our UK and US businesses delivered to visitors from those countris only.

All of this targetting means our ads are shown less frequently than those using general search terms, but the CTR's and direct sales are much higher.
I am always fine tuning the ads and dropping key phrases that don't work.
The result of this is that our spend is decreasing but the results are staying about the same.

Gordon

Well folks I said I would post my end results so here they are...

I gave up at $200

Total impressions 24041
Total Click throughs 182
Click Through percentage 0.76%


I got one sale out of it. I don't know maybe my site s*cks!!!

I can't complain :)
my current campaign has a CTR of 1.7%, quite good for these days...

I would be interested in what peoples ads look like and how it affects their CTR

It affects the CTR substantially.
If you do two ads and run them you can compare them.

I think the reason we do better than some of the others who have given their stats is that we treat it like goto.com and have seperate campaigns and ads for each keyword we bid on.

If you put an ad on the phrase "french bananas" and al the other ads say "bananas" but yours says "french bananas" its more likely to be clicked on regardless of position.

I have tried various ad designs, and the factual ones have proven to be the best


Here is one of my ads:

RESELLERS - Click Here
Reseller plans from $2.95 per month
Trust us - we started as resellers!
Hostroute.com
Interest:

Shown: US and Canada


Exact query matching on:

hosting reseller
hosting reseller site
nt hosting reseller
nt reseller
reseller hosting
reseller hosting account
reseller hosting cheap
reseller hosting low cost
reseller hosting program
reseller hosting site
reseller web hosting
reseller web hosting business domain hosting
web hosting reseller
web hosting reseller asp
web hosting reseller program
web site hosting reseller


Impressions: 7831
Clicks: 572

CTR: 7.3%



Gordon



Jusrt realised I have posted an ad in the non ad section, but its relevant to the discussion and as everyone else in the thread has existing suppliers I am not likely to benefit.........

It seems its all down to practice dosent it. I've been trying to work out a sort of worst case scenario for the lowest sale rate relative to impressions and clickthroughs but it just dosent seem to work that way does it?

Things can be good one week it seems and rotten the next.

I have learned a bit from this though and thanks to you guys for being so open with your info.