Drunken Bungle Whore

Anyone ever used them as an advertiser?

Any thoughts? Are they worth it? Value for money?

Considering them atm.

If not them, then what else works on the net?

Thanks for any thoughts/ suggestions!

PeteBrant

Affliating with forums etc spreads word of mouth (as opposed to foot and mouth). That always seems to work well.

As for thoughts/suggestions. I think you should make me some cake, and I suggest it be this afternoon.

Ghetto Dude2

Depends what you are using them for, some people dont get much back from them, some do...

Drunken Bungle Whore

I did make more cakes at the weekend - different recipe, more moist, didn't rise too badly - just not enough mix for the size of tin. May have another go later......

Am doing the WOM stuff too - have written an article for a trade rag with massive circulation, it's been accepted (first attempt, well chuffed) - but not published till start of Oct.....

pwhittle

I've just signed up, but not checked the results yet. Theres a few free listing sites, like freeindex.co.uk, which get you up the rankings

Spoon

Use them all the time but more than off-set the cost with Adsense.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Thanks - will give Freeindex a go!

Scooby Soon!

Google ads will cost you a lot of money unless you know what you are doing... My cheapest google ad campaign with my smallest website costs me around £1500 a month, if i didnt know what i was doing it would easily cost £5000!!!

Drunken Bungle Whore

How on earth did it cost that much? I thought you could set your own budget at a much more modest level....?

Scooby Soon!

What is it you are advertising?

You can set your budget at what ever you want, say you set it at £25 per day, depending on the keywords you use and the amount you want to pay per click (giving you your postion ranking) at a conservative 25p per click you will get 100 clicks a day or 3000 clicks per month.

BUT these clicks could be worth nothing to you if your keywords are slightly wrong you use adsense or your advert is not written well. There are many many factors in google ads, you need a sensible budget to use with it it took me 6 months to figure out how to use ot properly. Then you have Yahoo search marketing that covers MSN, hotmail, Orange etc etc completly different setup and operating structure!

Drunken Bungle Whore

Thanks for that - will look into it some more.

Will check out Yahoo too.....

Thank you!

Spoon

DBW,

If it's just extra traffic you want and you're not selling anything then a £1 day or less will suffice in the hope those visitors add your site to their favourites and return. You can then even stop your campaign and rely on word of mouth from the visitors you generated. See that as a simple expense on top of the website build to get your site known.

If you are selling anything then it can get so much more serious if you want it to. Lets face it, if you spend £1,500/month on advertising then it's nothing if that is leading directly to £3,000 of sales plus maybe £500 of clicks on your Adsense onsite adverts.

It really does depend on how you want to play it but as a rule of thumb, the more money you spend the more visitors you'll get and the more sales/Adsense clicks you'll make/get.

Then there's the other things like location targetting and time specific campaigns. Plus picking the best keywords and deciding on what you think you want to pay per keyword which ultimately decides your advert position.

Personally I deal in dollars to get even more value for my money but then my campaign is also worldwide and not solely UK.

Scooby Soon!

Hello Spoonster!

I hope your not spending anywhere near £1500 to get £3000 in sales otherwise I may faint!

Do you not think the adsense takes people away from the site they are looking at?

Drunken Bungle Whore

Have been scouring the web for all the hints and tips I can find - and picked up some VERY useful pointers.

So, have taken the plunge with a very modest monthly amount (not even in the same ball park as £1500....) to see what happens.

I need to find the balance between driving too much business through so that I couldn't cope and would end up p1ssing people off, with driving through enough for the size of business right now with a view to modest growth. So start small, work hard on learning the system and refining the key words, and build from there.

As I mentioned earlier, it's not my only advertising/ marketing iron in the fire...

ex-webby

I would just like to commend everyone in this thread for openly discussing commercial issues about their own businesses, without feeling the need to attempt to spam the boards.

Thanks guys, and I really hope this thread leads to some great info for you, as this kind of sharing of information and ideas is what a community is all about

Spoon

SS,

No, it was purely an example to highlight the fact no matter what you spend on advertising it isn't an issue if it brings more back in. Maybe profit would have been better than sales.

Adsense can take people away from your site but that's where you need to captivate your audience with a great landing page and at least keep them for a while, browsing. If they don't buy there and then they always tend to come back. However in some cases where sites don't actually sell anything, Adsense clicks makes the site worth owning. I know sites that can survive and more, from Adsense.

Plus if you choose your keywords correctly and implement the use of negative keywords you shouldn't have people land on your page that have no real intention of being there. Bad keywords can encourage wasted clicks/cost.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Aha - getting the right keywords - a true black art! Am at least 100% wiser on the issue than I was this time yesterday (maths pedants - back off! )

Am experimenting hard with "Broad", "Phrase" and "Exact" keywords today. I'm keeping it small until I can start to see what's really working - then I can focus the budget in those areas.

I'm in a medium - high value, relatively low volume business with a lot of competition. They key is to be smarter/ more creative with some of the ads - I need to stand out against a bunch of really boring looking ads, but still remain credible.

I'll be spending large chunks of today pumping in 100's of phrases into Google to see what comes up each time to help me refine things further.

Thanks Webby - spamming the boards eh....? How do you do that then? Is there a help sheet anywhere.....?

Spoon

I'm all white and manage it.

You sound like you have grasp anyway so it won't be long before it all falls in place. Make use of negative keywords though. All explained on that site link I sent you.

Sparkly things that you wear are nice? Trying to be smarter and more creative is difficult in the amount of ad space available on search but again keywords rule. If your site contains words your ad contains then you stand more of a chance. Look into a site targetted promotion too, or at least don't discount it immediately if you think it's not for you. I've had success from featuring ads on my competitors sites. Obviously they can prevent this if they are canny, but most aren't aware.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Nope - nothing sparkly! And nothing that you wear.

Hehehe - am just mastering the knack of managing my bids per click....interesting.......

Interesting thought about the competitors sites though........thanks!

Drunken Bungle Whore

Quick question - opting for ads on "content sites" worth it or not?

Seems lots of impressions but naff all clicks....

Spoon

I get decent results from it but again, try it and opt out if it's no good. If the sites are decent it may pay off for you. It's only when the sites are relatively obscure that the clicks will be pretty much like a badly targetted keyword campaign. Maybe stop it and do it manually via the site targetting campaign and that way YOU are in charge and not Google. It'll be a few months before you really know what works best, strategy wise.

Also, sometimes I even increase my budget daily if I'm on a run, or pause it if I take time out and feel I'd rather be around to manage it closer, or if my Adsense revenue has overtaken my expenditure at that particular time.

My revenue on this particular site doesn't really come from the clicks per se, (except Adsense) it's more a way of advertising my site to people looking for something particular that MY advertisers own or have for sale and have paid me for showcasing them/their services.

Spoon

Don't get sucked in to Google's game either. I refuse to pay what Google ask at times and the keywords are placed inactive. However it's not long before the price asked falls drastically and puts you back into play on those keywords.

I try and keep a few 'live' but still won't play the game with those keywords if the asking price simply isn't good value for money. Advertising can wait as far as I'm concerned until Google has a reality check, which is usually within hours in my case.

As I type I've just had 17 keywords increase 6x last nights asking price so they'll remain doormant for now.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Large penny dropping fast!

It's like an intricate puzzle - and the pieces are now starting to come together. It's taken me best part of 2 days and I'm still not quite there - but feel I've now understood the key to it all.

Once I've got a decent set of key words & ads in place it should start to look after itself with minimum attention from me.

Thanks for your help!

TopBanana

Spoon, would you mind sharing the link that you sent to DBW? Thanks

Spoon

Yes, it can and will look after itself if you prefer it to be like that. I'm just keen on optimizing and experimenting and largely beating the system that can bite you if you sit back.

Is your site as monetized as possible and if so have you got the ads channelled? I'll be happy to take a look and give you my opinion if you pm me the address.

Spoon

Sent.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Thanks for the offer - but I'm not trying to generate revenue by the ads I'm running on my site, rather by selling through it.

You're right, you can't take you're eye off the ads for too long, but hopefully they won't require too much more of my full time attention. Perhaps just a quick tinker once a day or so.

Drunken Bungle Whore

Ha! in the past 24 hours I've reduced the cost per click by over half (in some cases even more!) and more than trebled the number of clicks!

I can see why it's so easy to waste a LOT of money with those if you don't figure the system.......

Spoon

Excellent, well done.

BlkKnight

Been using adwords & adsence for 3 or so years.

We spend about 300 per month on it and have about 25% click through.

It's really only worthwhile if you are very niche and have a target audience you can't reach through usual "searching" (IE your rankings are ****e).

Keyword / string optimization is essential as well as providing a good advert.

When a competitor started selling the same product as me, we initially entered a bidding war - paying up to £2.00 per click. I figured that was getting a bit silly, so I phoned their web guy and we agreed to set a maximum bid of 30p per click (just keeping above the rest of the advertizers).

J