If you happen to follow me on twitter, you will have seen that I have been on holiday in Kenya.  Whilst I was there, I landed 2 new sales – actually the quotes had been sent out just as I was flying out on holiday, but I got the email confirmation whilst I was out there.  In my business we have a rule – we get a new sale and we do a little dance to celebrate.   As both emails arrived, my wife and I did the ‘new sale boogie’ on the beach with cocktails in hand – nice!

So how did I find these new customers?   Google Adwords!   Let me give you some numbers for the adwords campaign since I started it in early September…

• Adword Campaigns running (groups of search terms) : 9 – see the screen shot of my ad groups
• Total impressions : 9,988 (as at the time I type this now)
• Total Clicks from ads : 60 (again, as of now)
• Cost of the clicks : £163.57
• Enquires from clicks : 23
• Confirmed Sales : 2
• Ongoing conversations : 7
• Value of the 2 sales in total : £34,600!!

Not a bad return – £35,000 of sales value from £163 marketing cost and 6 or 7 hours of time.   So I am here to say, Adwords does work….. if you do it right.

I have posted about Adwords before, saying it can get out of control – and it can.  It’s like a wild animal, you have to keep your eye on it, keep grooming it (refining the styles, ads, words, etc), pull it back when it goes too far, and most of all, get it house broken when you first set it up.

Yesterday I wrote about defining your ideal customer – and this is the most important bit.  Once you have your ideal customer defined, you can then plug this into adwords – for EACH AND EVERY advert group you run, set the restrictions as much as possible on things like view times (mine run Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm), location, language etc.

Other things I recommend when using Adwords are:

• Use Adword rotation – don’t just have one ad per group – have 3 or 4 to rotate, turn off the google optimisation of placement (where it only uses the best), use them all, see which is the worst performing, then change the words to make it more attractive.
• Change the bid amounts to be lower than the suggested average Price Per Click (PPC) – you will still get exposure and clicks, but for less money.
• Turn off (in the settings) under Networks the Search Partners – stick to the main Google Search.  Also, change the Display Network option to Relevant pages only on the locations you manage (so google takes account of your previous location/language settings)
• When you get an enquiry from your call to action on your web page – follow it up as soon as possible.   Whoever tries to contact you, they will also be contacting other companies so you want to be the first to respond.
• If you have never set up Google Adwords before, get a book on how to do it properly (or sub-contract the set up).
• Keep control of your costs.  If you link your Adwords into an online accounting system (such as the fabulous FreeAgent), your costs will be imported for you and will detailed in the accounting analysis.
• If you run Google Analytics, link the Adwords to Analytics (in the Analytics site) – this will then provide further information on which search terms and adverts are working best, bounce rates per advert etc.  All of this can be used to refine your adverts and improve the return on investment.