Is anyone here advertising on google adwords and / or Overture.

Why kind of return of investment are you getting?

Cheers.

I'm with Google Adwords at the moment but I don't think I'm putting enough effort into setting it up right. I definately need alot more investigations into having good key words etc. I haven't had a good run with it at the moment but if you take the time with it I think the monthly costs it would produce could be justified for your company. I know a couple of companies that push alot of money through Adwords and receive alot of impressions and clicks daily. Sorry I can't be of help with any ROI statistics. Good luck.

Regards.

I was stupid once upon a time and ended up with $4K of google adwords bill because I didn't know what I was doing. Overture doesn't do anything. Google Adwords is powerful stuff if you can figure out how to use it effectively.

Roj

Google performs very poorly for us.
The poor bid control tools means cost per click is higher.
They also have very poor anti frud controls.

I use overture, but in a more creative way.
I laugh at the $10 per click people and have seen two of those companies go bust and sell out for peanuts this year with very heavy losses.

We have created products and services solely because they can be advertised cheaply on Overture.
This has worked very well for us.

Hello. A whle back, HostNetway tried with Google Adwords. It was a horible experience to be honest. After the first week, they billed us for 50.50 and that is not what I was supposed to be billing for. I was supposed to be billed for $23.00 and not sure where they got that amount from. So I filed a dispute and got my money back.

It was horible. But to answer your question, for the time we did do it, we got no clients.

Hi,

I invested $40 in Overture in the past and didn't even get a single customer. I'm not sure how it worked for others, but it certainly didn't work for me. Good luck!

There is an art to google and overture, if you can master it you will make money/ get customers if not you are going to loose a lot and say what the heck did I do wrong. Takes some practice I imagine.

Derrick

Spent quite a bit of time and money to create a nice little Adwords Campaign(well, looked nice on a paper)....Ended up getting 2 customers out of the whole thing, time to find new ways to advertise :/

But you know, some people on HostHideout have had some success with their business and Google Adwords, but I am pretty sure they were just rich enough to do it successfully.

It's just too much, and it's not even likely your ad will appear sometimes!

You have to find niche keywords where you can get listed in the top 10 or so. Below that and you are wasting your money.

Derrick

Or have the budget to die for. I'd love to know how much RackSpace pays per month it appears to come up in just about every keyword possible.

Andrew

I don't like Overture for the simple fact that it does not let you set your daily spending limit like Google adwords do. Which means you can go through whatever you put as a spending limit for a month in one day. We've been putting pretty large chunk of money in adwords every month for the past year and a half, and do get pretty good amount of traffic from them. My guestimate given our average selling price and average churn rate that we get 150%-175% return from Google. From where I am sitting it's not the best ROI but as long as it is in the black I am not complaining. :)

Originally posted by TheNetway
Hello. A whle back, HostNetway tried with Google Adwords. It was a horible experience to be honest. After the first week, they billed us for 50.50 and that is not what I was supposed to be billing for. I was supposed to be billed for $23.00 and not sure where they got that amount from. So I filed a dispute and got my money back.

It was horible. But to answer your question, for the time we did do it, we got no clients.

As much as I like google as a search engine, what this poor guy experianced, I had something similar. google gave out £50 (about $79) vouchers in UK mags, I signed up, it ran 3 days, it cost me £49.00 I got no sales. I had it set to 2p per click, and had a total of 40 referrals from google... where did my money go? I filled in a dispute email, I got a reply them explaining my ads didn't end until a few days later. Not sure why but I didn't fight anymore.

On the other hand, I know a guy that I designed a site for, he does car hire, and makes a tidy sum from the help of googles adsense.

One of our competitors is paying $35 per click on adwords for the #position for one keyword.
You have ot ask yourself if its really worth that.

I'm imagine it would be or he'd not pay it. I can see the point if it's like $1, who cares loosing tha odd dollar here and there, but $35 is a lot to lose. Then again, maybe he's a millionaire. lol

Google is of no use when it comes to hosting for me.....
Better focuses on other strategy :)

You'll need to find a niche where significant click throughs can be generated not by high prices, but by the fact that no one else is advertising there.

If you pay for the word 'hosting', to be in the #1 spot you'll have to pay in the double digit's (and no, decimals are not counted). However if you find a niche market where hosting may be useful, but little advertising is being done, you could get clickthroughs as cheap as 15-30 cents.

This of course involves knowing the niche market, and what you can do to offer.

Guys,

It seems quite amazing to me that a lot of people invest $30-50 into a PPC service and are surprised because they didn't receive a return on their investment.

Google and Overture are the two best PPC search engines currently on the market, in terms of quality and quantity of leads.

However, due to the competition, it takes time, determination, budget to experiment, etc. to actually run a successful PPC campaign. The potential is definitely there, but if you give up after $50 or so, it's very unlikely that you'll get decent results out of it.

Boris

To amplify hvoice-boris's comments, it took us about 2 years to get our overture campaign fine tuned so it delivers the best rate of return we can get.
Its not something that can be done overnight unless you have lots of money to waste.

Gordon,

Out of personal curiosity - we noticed that the campaign must be managed on a regular basis, meaning that you can't just set it up and leave it as is or the results will diminish.

Does that hold true for you too?

Boris

Yes, I am constantly fiddling with it.
I check the bids every 2 days even though they are on auto bid.
I usually check a range of the best performing keyword bids.

Then I review the actual listing wordings every few months and update them.

Sometimes I will change the page an ad links to as sometimes linking to a specific page has better results.