Does Adwords Search Ads actually work for anyone here?

Using adword search can be very costly and if you are starting for the first time. why not try YouTube video ads, its cost effective and highly targeted.

As an account manager, I can assure you there are many businesses, big and small, for whom Adwords and other ad networks work very well. Others like dburk will tell you the same. Since this forum is for those looking for answers and solutions, "here" you may get a wide variety of opinions. Typically, they will fall into two camps. The first saying to save your money, that PPC doesn't work and stick with SEO. Those are the ones who never figured out PPC properly. The second camp are those like me saying it does work, you just have to be smart and use it properly.

Think of it this way. If it didn't work, Google would not be making those billions.

What's disconcerting in your case is that you say an expert did your campaign. Well, there are many out there saying they can do this but are often no better than you are. You may have just hired the wrong "expert".

Maybe it was the right person and got you quality traffic but your landing page is not doing its job at closing the sale. Just because it's professionally designed doesn't mean that it will convert. There's a difference between these concepts.

Well if adwords was not working it was not so expensive and searched .It is expensive but the traffic its good ,ony that IM its not easy no matter its free traffic or paid traffic .With paid traffic you must test again maybe facebook ads ,maybe changing niche landing page etc .I was had experience when poorly landing pages converts more profesionaly than profesional looking pages

Hi zigg66,

Sure, plenty of us do well with AdWords. However, keep in mind that marketing is a contest to win customers, and in each contest there is only one winner, and winner takes all.

Search Advertising in AdWords is perhaps the most competitive ad platform on the planet because more customers are won on AdWords than any other digital advertising platform.

It takes time to learn strategies and tactics that can defeat your toughest competitors. You will probably need to invest a lot more than $400 to get a highly optimized campaign. It's a start, presuming you have gathered data on search terms, various value propositions that were split tested in your campaigns, and at least a couple of targeting strategies.

With that small of an ad spend you may not have enough data to have reached statistical significance on your A/B, or multi variant split tests. Limited data means few insights to be gained from your data, which means your campaigns are far from being highly optimized.

There are a number of strategies to consider some are likely to work in your niche better than others, it might be useful to test a couple of different strategies to see if there is a difference in the performance.

In your posts you seem to make to assumptions that you may want to re-evaluate.

1. "My website is professionally designed" I don't doubt that it was designed by a professional web designer, however professional web designers often know little or nothing about marketing, and it is quite common that a "Graphic designer" will design a beautiful looking website that is not all that user friendly. Most graphic designers that design websites are not UX designers. Thus, a beautiful and professionally designed website can easily be a poor performing website.

2. "my campaign has been 'optimized' by an expert" As I pointed out above, that is highly unlikely because there simply hasn't been enough time passed, and not enough conversion data has been gathered, to do any any significant optimizations.

At least one of those two assumptions has to be wrong, else you would have seen better results by now.

In addition to website design, that focuses on aesthetics, you need design that also focuses on UX (User Experience), and perhaps more importantly you need to have great sales copy that delivers a compelling value proposition message. Your marketing message does 90% of the converting, the look of the design, or UX of the design are just the background canvas for your sales copy. It has got to be the right message delivered to the right audience, at the right time, to be effective.

Marketing when done well is a continuous process, it isn't something that you do just once and your done. You might need to go through several iteration of website design ,perhaps hundreds of modifications to sales copy, and many many ad variants tested before you are even halfway there. It takes highly experienced teams to get even close on the first iteration.

Keep at it and make sure that you learn everything you can from every bit of data that you gather, you will get there if you do.

HTH,

Don Burk

Hi zigg66,

AdWords search is still very effective until today. However, you need to test it on a small scale first (say $100 in a first few weeks) for you to avoid spending money just for nothing. Get a feel on how your campaigns is performing and your clicks if they are spending longer time on your website via analytics. Look at your Average Time Sessions and bounce rates in analytics and analyze what point/page your visitors leave your website.

You should also try to add "buy", "for sale" + your product on your keywords to have more buying intent on your visitors. User remarketing campaigns as well because most of the time, visitors will not convert directly from their first visit.

You should also start exploring other channels like Adwords Display (Display has been much improved now) or Facebook Ads. Both of them have very low CPC and also lower competition.

I am running adwords search campaigns with $1,000 customer value, and we are getting at least 5 to 10 customers per month with just $500 adwords monthly spend.

I hope that helps!

Regards,
Gie

Hi zigg66,

Which ad type(search/display/youtube) is perfect for your business depends on your business type.
You must aware about your customers behavior. Where your customer searching for your products/services and where your customers visits(other websites).

Suppose, you have "cleaning service" business then you should choice Search ad or you have "e-commerce business for fashion products" then you should choice Display ad but sometime both ads types may work for same business.

For search ad keywords selection is most crucial and sensitive task. You must have to measure keywords buying intention and search volume. Selection of keywords match type must be with consideration of campaign budget and strategy. And to avoid unwanted cost you must have to add negative keywords.

If you need more clarification then you can ask me in reply.

Thanks