Jim,

Agreed. It was just cheaper before everyone knew about it. That's life and it is still worthwhile. I would say the most important thing with Google Adwords is you much have a nice site. Otherwise your bounce rate will be too high and you are just paying for the click without any site time.

Andy,

I manage adwords for fabricators and yes the costs have gone up but here is the trick. by diversifying the spend across other keywords that are more specific, you are able to reduce the over all Click through rate. Add to that some good Organic SEO and your cost to drive a visit to your site drops significantly.

Thanks largely to Andy and his enthusiasm, I have just stared my first ad words campaign. I set a budget limit, but I know I should tweak the search terms.

Right now I'm going with the obvious terms, but not as high a bid point as others. I still seem to be getting hits, though.

As long as I am getting its, should I be happy with the setting and terms?

no... you should not be happy..

visitors need to be experiencing your site..

I design sites that drive the user over 3-6 pages with a clear call to action on every page. this 3-6 page process should reflect your sales process your competitive advantage and your companies values.

if you are pushing the traffic across these pages then you are able to gauge success.

one last thought..

You can't measure what you do not track..

Do you have call tracking number to track the number of phone calls form your website?

Do you have a short form to collect contact info on off hours?

The idea here is if you can attribute sales directly to you adwords buy you can justify the budget you will spend to maintain it.


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on the other side.. the adwords account .. you need to maintain a click through rate to keep first page or your cost will sky rocket..

Thanks for the advice, Paul.

I do not track every page. I have a boatload of "for more info" style pages and I would go crazy with all that. How should I judge which pages and how many levels deep should I track, in your opinion?

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".. you need to maintain a click through rate to keep first page or your cost will sky rocket.. "
I'm sorry, I don't understand this. I am an absolute noob on this.

if you use google analytics it tracks every page for you..

then you look at your visits from google Paid ... this you should see (dependent on your sites setup) 3+ page views on average average time on site should be over 2:30 and your bounce rate should be below 50% if you have those you are driving the right visitors to your site and increasing the opportunity for the sale. these are general numbers and can vary but in my experience this indicates that you have driven the right visitors to your website.

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Click through rate is the number of times your ad is displayed to the number of times it is clicked on. This is how google judges you for quality and how much money you pay for your ads and the placement on the page. this is what Andy was originally referring too as that the costs have gone up.

To maintain a level that is going to drive business the costs have gone up!

You will be around 1.50 on high traffic keywords to maintain top 3 position if your ads convert.. You will be much higher if they don't... if you are paying less than this you are not getting priority placement.

I will be happy to help you more if you like... contact me directly.. this is not a solicitation just trying to help

-pg

Hmm, I thought the only pages that were tracked were the ones I pasted the code in. Those are the only ones I can single out while on the analytics site.

I may take you up on your offer, Paul, but as Andy knows, I get some knowledge put to me and I chew on it for awhile till it sinks into my very tiny brain.

well yes.. you want that tracking code on all pages that the user could go... that's what tells you the whole story.

Add the tracking code to every page Tom. That way you can see which pages are important. Mine is the Home page and then the gallery.

I think you will find that a picture gallery, FAQS and contact are the most popular so it's important that those look the best.