Google Adwords and other hangers on

I was given a £50 voucher by Google to try their adwords system. You may know that this is how Google makes their money and I can tell you how. I did a campaign based on getting people who would be interested in making their computer go faster, and who would not want that? This was a pay-per-click campaign, so basically they put your ad on a web page when someone searches Google. This is called an impression. You pay when someone clicks on the link to your website.

Google is very good at giving statistics about what clicks have occured and how much they cost. They allow you to limit your daily spend and limit your maximum charge per click which is a good thing otherwise you can easily spend alot of money. In the six weeks it has been in operation I have had 71 clicks with a minimum spend of 34p and a maximum of £1 a click. Kerching!

Clicks dont relate to sales, just that someone looked at your site. The trouble is that its clearly not customers clicking, its other advertisers. I have has a least three of these companies phone me to try to get them to do campaigns through them on Google, and that accounts for alot of wasted clicks in my opinion.

I have been in publishing for many years and have seen many tricks. This is analogous to a practice in advertising where a paper gets rival papers and canvases the advertisers in those rival papers to put adverts in their paper. They give you the blurb either way. If the advert was good they say go with us and expand your coverage, or if the advert was bad, they suggest that you might do better with their paper.

I have a customer who does sign writing, and Google has certainly expanded his business, but I feel that this type of advertising only really works in a niche market. I suppose you have to speculate to accumulate but in my business their are losts of players and the only way for me to get any results in advertsing is to stand out from the crowd and have a niche service. Frankly I have had a better response from the Yellow Pages because people who have a broken computer or do not have access to the internet wont find me from that type of adverstising.