Google Ad Words?

[Silas Barker]

There are some old threads on here about this not being that great, but its 2012 and google should be better then ever LOL.

Anyways any successes or is this a waste of money? I am targeting businesses and corporations with the $1000-$5000 project range in Sacramento California area. (This might work best by word of mouth??).

Thanks for tips!

[Silas Barker]

Anyone?

Do Google Ad Words Work?

[Mike Watson]

Cost per impression is so low, I'd do it. My average project is in the $5k range. When I looked into it, it was literally pennies per click. You could serve hundreds of clicks and never get a job, but then again, you might have only spent $20 and gotten a $5k job. I have a lot of these sort of things hanging out there (I go to a lot of CDC schmoozers, $50 or $100/year) and between them all I'm picking up 1-2 jobs a year.

[Josh Bass]

Here was my experience:

I had a google adwords ad up for about a month and a half. In that time, on almost a daily basis, it got clicked to my maximum daily budget. Not only did I not get a single job from it, I never even got a single INQUIRY.

Now, I did set the price per click pretty high, so that only 10-15 clicks a day would max out my budget (but the higher you set the price, the more likely it is to show up in a search result). Maybe that was my mistake. . .maybe I should have set the price at 25 or 15 cents a click.

Anyway, the guys on here will tell you to make each ad very specific. Mine was not, 'cause I don't do a whole lot of any one thing. They will tell you to have an ad for weddings, another for corporate, another for music videos, etc. Instead of an all-in-one ad. If you post on craigslist in the services section this is supposed to garner better results as well.

[Mike Brice]

In my experience, and the same holds true for many of the photographers I know, Google Ad Words only makes money for Google. Same for Facebook advertising.

Having your website first or second in the organic google results is the only way to generate traffic - and that is free if you have the SEO (search engine optimization) configured correctly for your website.

[Silas Barker]

Interesting.

Mike - 1 or 2 jobs a year does not seem like its very effective, but it sounds like you got some high paying ones so it was worth if for you.

Josh - I think if it was specific it could help, but yeah I don't know because I ve never done it before.

Mike - My website comes in second on Googlew if you search for "Sacramento Videographer."
I think maybe its my website layout that is confusing so I may work on my home page. you can see it at Sacramento Video Production, Videographer & Cinematographer Silas Barker

I am trying a Facebook ad for my business facebook page, and I ve gotten 5 likes, and spent $20. No calls or anything yet though. I'll probably go to $50 and then quit unless people start calling. I need to put some more content on my FB page get more calls probably however.

[Josh Bass]

From what I remember, SEO is all about constantly adding new content, adding meta words where appropriate, and submitting the listing to hundreds of databases. I could never get it to work.

[Kevin Spahr]

I tried Google Adwords, got some clicks but not one sale. They just sent me a $100 credit so I'll spend their money and try another angle.

Must say Facebook was a total zero when it came to responses. I've been noticing that a lot of major companies are dropping Facebook advertising, JC Penny, GM, etc.

[Tim Polster]

I have had some success with Adwords. It takes some study to make sure your add only gets clikced on by your potential customers. If the ad is off target you are swimming upstream. I am still evaluating if it is a good deal or not. I am going at about $40 per month, so not a lot even if the work is sporatic.

In general, I think a lot of internet advertising is more branding than marketing. As mentioned above, larger companies can afford to pepper the landscape just to increase their brand recognition, sales or no sales. Us small entities need sales to justify the costs. In some ways, this kind of marketing might not be for us. At least adwords is very controllable and targeted. If you have a niche you can probably break through. If you are just selling "video" your will have a tough time getting relevant clicks.

[Kevin Spahr]

Once again Google Adwords resulted in zero sales. I used Google's $100 free ad money so it didn't cost me anything. I was advertising a very niche product (not production services) and was offering a free downloadable booklet and I received very few takers for some "16,000" click throughs. Funny thing is my web stats only showed around 50 hits for the page that was linked to the ad.

I don't know about you but I totally ignore those google ads on web pages, why would I expect other people to be different?

[Josh Bass]

Must be workin' for somebody. Isn't that how Google made their billions?

[Josh Bass]

As for the clickthroughs vs page hits, my friend has a theory there's a guy at Google who just sits there clicking ads.

[Kevin Spahr]

I was just stating my experience with google adwords and that's all I really "know".

If you spend $100 to advertise a $20 DVD and you sell zero, would spending $1000 get results? IMO there are MUCH better ways to advertise than putting two lines of text in the margin of some web page whose content may or may not have something to do with what you're selling. If google gave me another $100 credit I wouldn't waste my time using it.

I don't see a lot of people in this thread recounting amazing results by using adwords...

And as for google's billions, I think their profit comes from selling ads to people who will sell you information on how to make adwords work for you : )

[Tanya Vandenberg]

I'm amazed - for me, Adwords has been an absolute godsend... I've spent very little on advertising, but gained about $100 000 in business from it in just over a year. It takes a while to gain momentum, and at the beginning, the commitment to track performance and change ads, content and so on until it's working.

[Noa Put]

Realy? Are you into wedding or corporate videos? I have used that free google coupon to try out their ad words but came up with zero bookings, I get much more result just with my wordpress website by adding some new posts now and then containing text related to weddings and that gets picked up and indexed by google very well. That doesn't cost me anything extra but still gives me a good precense in google when people type in keywords for what I do.