Is it time to ditch adwords?

[karel]

I am now with the help of this forum doing really well in google and getting about 150 unique hits a day from searches in google alone.

I still use adwords, but find for each keyphrase I am usually on the first or second page anyway. Adwords at the moment costs me £90 a month and gets me 15 hits a day, the trouble is i have no idea how many sales come through this.

So the question is, should I ditch the adwords and just rely on natural search traffic. I suppose I could pause it and see if sales drop.

The adwords maybe highly targeted as they are all U.K based, which is where 90% of my sales are.

A little confused on what to do, any suggestions?

Regards Paul

[Karen Mac]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

Paul

You could pause your ad and see what effect it has on sales, and then you will know for certain, how many sales are from that. No penalty for pausing it or restarting it last time i checked.

Karen

[karel]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

I may do this Karen, the trouble is the site seems to be gaining sales every month as more and more people are finding me, every month has shown a ***** rise in visitors, so it would be hard to guage and like anything, some weeks are crazy and other weeks are slow.

I think i will wait until my hits steady and then pause it for a couple of months and see if I can guage it this way, thanks for the reply.

Regards Paul

[Karen Mac]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

Paul

If you have google analytics on your pages, it will tell you which is doing your business including their own adds. Alternately you can look in your stats and find which page they came from in google, and I forget what it says when they have clicked thru on an ad, but its a wierd string with client id in it.

Karen

[Bethers]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

Paul,
Any advertising campaign HAS to be tracked. If you don't know how many of those are converting to sales - you can't know if it's worth having the campaign.

[karel]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

Agreed Beth, I have an instinct it does o.k as when I first set the site up, adwords was the only way for me to go and worked o.k. But now even after changing key phrases to suit my campaign, I find myself on the first couple of pages for these phrases anyway, so I maybe paying for something that if they looked a little furthur down they would see me anyway. So adwords visitors I would maybe get for free, hope that jumble makes sense.

I have also never really looked at any tracking program within adwords, I did not know something like this was available.


Paul

[Dori]

Re: Is it time to ditch adwords?

Hi Paul,
The tracking is available. Log into your Google account and click the reports tab. As Karen said, there is no penalty for pausing your ads. Try it if you want, but I think between the google stats and your cpanel stats you should be able to get a pretty good idea of where people are coming from and who of those folks are buying.