Making Adwords Make Sense

I recently had an inquiry from a friendly lady who was interested in using Adwords to help sell her husband’s book The Ethical Executive. I thought it might be a good time for an ethics check before accepting this proposition.

Do you think I did the right thing?

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Friendly Lady,

(REALITY CHECK BEGIN)

Let’s take some time to consider your motivations for choosing Adwords as an advertising platform. Adwords of course is a very agile and inexpensive vehicle for serving ads and generating interest in a product. It is also very responsive and can begin to return results immediately as opposed to other types of advertising that have a long term cumulative effect.

As with any type of advertising, the revenue generated by selling a product must be considered when determining whether it would be worthwhile. In this case, with a book that may cost $25, after overhead the profit from selling one book might be $5 or less. The cost per click to get someone to your website in Adwords might range from 50 cents to $5. That is just to get someone to your website with no guarantee that they will make a purchase.

With a conservative estimate of an average $2 per click you could achieve 150 visits to your website per month from Adwords. With no historical data and no time to test and experiment to find the best conversion rate, it is hard to guess how many of those visits would be likely to actually purchase a book. Almost certainly less than 25%. Therefore based on that guess (25%) it would cost you $500 to sell 37 books per month. This is clearly not a profitable equation (unless you happen to profit $15 per book).

THE OPTIMISTIC POTENTIAL

That being said, there are other objectives to consider. As we discussed it would be tremendously profitable if Adwords could aid this book to make the best seller list. If this were possible, the momentum of being on that list would result huge number of sales.

While the number of books which must be sold in order for a book to be a candidate for the best seller list is unknown, it is also most likely more than 37 per month.

In addition to the specific trackable sales resulting from Adwords referrals,
there is the added benefit of interest and buzz which can be generated. It is possible to achieve a great number of ad impressions using Google Adwords which means that the name of the book could be put in front of a lot of people’s eyeballs. This could result in additional word of mouth and more purchases which would not be directly attributable to Google Adwords. Obviously with a larger budget this ancillary effect can be increased.

There is also the benefit of the vast amount of data that can be collected by using Adwords coupled with Google Analytics to track user behavior. In the case of a long term project this data can become the basis for findings which can help you to effectively develop your messaging, drive design changes in your website, as well as predict outcomes of other potential initiatives.

If you are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization you can apply for a Google Grant. Google provides grants that range from $10,000 per month to $40,000 per month in free advertising for qualifying organizations.

Perhaps there are good reasons why you would need that functionality…

I thought that for this post it would be handy to describe my impressions of the usefulness of the program before and after this Adwords Editor Webinar which promises to provide advanced tactics for using the Google Adwords Account Management Tool. If you are interested in registering I am pretty sure that it is free to all.

Advanced AdWords Editor webinar: June 10th
The Google AdWords Editor Team will be holding an advanced training geared towards users who have some experience with AdWords Editor. Please register here to join us on Tuesday, June 10th from 10:30 to 11:30am PDT to find out more about the features and new developments of the account management tool.

Probably the first thing that you should make sure you’re clear on is that whenever you get in to the editor you have to hit the Get Recent Changes button in the upper left hand corner to update the editor. For a while I thought that this button was just for if you made changes in Adwords web based interface while you had the editor open. This isn’t the case. Always click it when you open an account in the editor.

You can keep multiple accounts in editor as well as draft accounts.

If you click export for archiving when you first log into an account before you make any changes then you won’t have to worry about losing data or making an irreparable error.

One thing that is really useful is to use the Adwords Editor to find Duplicate Keywords. (As pictured below)

You can also use the editor to Export your entire account (or sections of the account) in a variety of formats.

You can then make bulk changes and then Import the account back into the editor. For those of you who are getting sick of the slow interfaces this will be an indispensable tool for when you have a lot of changes to make. Some of you may remember the same type of functionality in Yahoo’s older version of their web based interface. This can save you a lot of time.

Some of you may remember an advanced keyword filter that used to be in the web based interface for Adwords. Anyone? Well it was really useful until one day it just vanished. Well it turns out that it was mostly integrated into the Adwords Editor in the Advanced Search option (Pictured Below). You can search the keywords based on a variety of filters such as click thru, conversion rate, cost per click etc.

One area that I wouldn’t mind seeing in Advanced Search would be a filter by placements.

These are just some of the features that I find useful. I will post again after the webinar to keep you abreast of any of the other ways that this tool is fantastically useful.

Please share if there is a way that this tool is particularly useful for you.