Google Adwords Introduction

If you’ve got a half-decent website, and your prices are okay, then some of the people that visit your website will go on to buy something. And that’s all that you need, in order to virtually guarantee that you can make money with Adwords.

Dubious? It sounds like the sort of claim a lot of ‘experts’ make, just before selling you their latest e-book. But it’s actually true. As long as some of your traffic turns into sales, you can make money on Adwords!

Think about it. If a sale has an average value, and you know what percentage of visitors buy something, then you have an average visitor value. For example, if a sale generates a profit of £30, and you have a 1% conversion rate (i.e. one out of every hundred visitors buys something), then each click is worth £0.30 to you. So as long as you pay less than £0.30 per visitor, then you will make money. Since PPC (by definition) means that you decide how much you are willing to pay for each visitor to your site, then as long as you bid less than that, you are going to make money. The only question is how much. You’ll have noticed that I only virtually guaranteed that you will make money.

That’s because Adwords calculates a minimum that you are allowed to pay for your keyword, based on how relevant it thinks your site is to the person searching. If your clicks are worth less than that, then you can’t make money (but at least you’ll know, so you won’t waste your money trying).

There are two ’secrets’ to being successful on Adwords, maximising your conversion rate and convincing Google that your site is really, really relevant. Master those, and you should make lots and lots of money!

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:06 pm.

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12 Responses to “Google Adwords Introduction”

  1. Amit

    As always your content on adwords is the best quality I’ve ever seen. I really enjoy the guides but it’d be super duper great if you can make a PDF version so I can read it offline!

  2. Steve Baker

    We’re just getting it finished at the moment (Cover Art etc), and are hoping to get it live by the end of the month.

    There’s also a paper version of the book in the works, but that’ll probably take a little longer…

    Thanks,

    Steve

  3. Michael Wall

    I’ve had about 4 hours sleep )-: been reading yourr ppc adwords resource late last night and early this morning. All very good material!

  4. Owen Sampson

    Hi,

    Do you manage Google Adwords campaigns?

    I haven’t got a large budget to start with but I am prepared to reinvest the vast majority of any profits to enable me to create a bigger campaign and be in a position to generously pay for your services .

    The affiliate program I am promoting means I only need to get visitors to my site to sign up and I will receive £15 per genuine completed application form.

    The marketplace is substantial and I feel that Adwords is the perfect marketing tool to drive traffic to the site and convert hundreds of prospects per month.

    As a newbie, I set up a Google Adwords this week but so far no activity, (but then again, I am simply just guessing on most of what I’ve read!)

    Let me know if you are interested in considering my proposal and I look forward to your response.

    Kind Regards

    Owen Sampson

  5. Steve Baker

    To be honest Owen, leads in a highly competitive area like loans are going to be quite a lot more expensive than that - typically, clicks will cost £3 or more, just to appear on page 1, so we’d require a conversion rate of 20%, just to break even.

    This isn’t going to happen, so we’ll have to decline.

    Thanks anyway,

    Steve

  6. Franklin

    Hi Steve,

    I can’t believe that you published this guide for free! This is absolutely amazing. More please, more! =)

    Franklin.

  7. John

    Really informative site, as a newbie this site seems to be very useful to start with google adwords. i go through some of the pages and eager to read whole site.thanks for sharing

  8. Steve Baker

    Hi John,

    Glad you enjoyed it.

    Steve

  9. Annabel Youens

    Thank You - Thank You - Thank You. I’ve finally found a well written, easy to read intro to Adwords. I will certainly be using this as a resource over the next two months as I launch our first of many Adwords campaigns. Nice one Steve!

  10. Steve Baker

    Not a problem Annabel.

    Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions,

    Steve

  11. kemengr

    Adwords is quite helpful but needs regular monitoring. Sometimes the click rate jumps up - in one of my campaigns it goes up even above 10% without any conversion in Adsense! I had reported this sudden surge to Google’s team but there was no response. At that time i am forced to pause the campaign a day or two. So please be watchful.

  12. Steve Baker

    The traffic can certainly vary a lot, particularly if you’re in an industry where seasonality (or even the weather) is a factor.

    I’d strongly recommend that everyone monitors their campaigns on a daily basis anyway - it only takes 5 minutes per day to make sure that everything is as it should be.

    One possible reason for your problem could be Broad Matching. If you bid on a keyword on broad match, it may be that it suddenly starts appearing on a not-very-relevant search via Expanded Matching, which generates a lot of impressions and clicks, but few conversions.

    You may want to check whether the additional traffic came through a single keyword - if so, then pause that, rather than the whole campaign…

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