6 ms·

My $1/day Adwords Account

57 points by profquail 17y ago

ShabbyDoo 17y ago
The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business -- $6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it. Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion. I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.
- qeorge 17y ago
  Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords This is a brilliant idea, and I would be shocked if Google doesn't have plans to do so.
  - prawn 17y ago
    http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ use AdWords campaigns and customised phone numbers to track referrals by phone. Client of mine use them. Not quite as "all in one" and affordable as AdWords+Voice would be, but the same sort of thing is being done by a third party.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  What you've described is precisely Yext's business.
  - ShabbyDoo 17y ago
    For the clueless like me: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yext-scores-a-big-round-from-ivp-after-techcrunch50-debut/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yex...
- ddemchuk 17y ago
  Trust me, it's a biggggg market with a lot of room for improvement. Working on it :-)
apowell 17y ago
In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants.
- qeorge 17y ago
  it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite learning curve.
  - jwesley 17y ago
    That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against them.
- prawn 17y ago
  This is one of my problems. I recommend that a lot of my smaller clients experiment with AdWords as an alternative to Yellow Pages. Try $50/wk and see what happens. Many are eager to continue but don't have the time or understanding of AdWords to do it themselves. The problem comes when setting up and managing a small weekly account is as much work (billed hourly) as is being spent on the ads. That's a little difficult to justify and never worth my time to handle.
- axod 17y ago
  Incorrect IMHO. In the last year I've seen both bids, and average per click payouts from adsense drop significantly. Like halved. The OP is about divorce. Legal, finance, class action lawsuits. They're all crazy click prices because they're potentially very lucrative. Managing your own campaign is extremely easy. You don't even have to set bid prices any more if you don't want to.
patio11 17y ago
If Google wants its employees to experience the point of view of its customers, it should stake them with meaningful amounts of Google monopoly money, have them actually attempt to achieve business goals with it, and put half of their salary on the line based on their CPC performance. Every so often, something should go wrong -- subtly or otherwise -- and then the employee should have to go through seven redirects on the AdWords interface to locate the form to send a message to a representative. The message should, with 30% probability, never be read by anyone. If it is read, it will be read by someone in a call center in India, who does not know the customer is a Google employee, and has only a cursory knowledge of Google's own policies and none of the algorithms. Escalation should be nearly impossible to achieve, but if it happens, it should go to someone in Mountain View who is as unhelpful as possible to avoid giving the customer any incentive to ever call back. For the fully authentic experience, if the employee doesn't like this state of affairs, they should be encouraged to either a) blog about it and pray that it ends up in Matt Cutt's feedreader or b) make a lateral move to Microsoft, for an instantaneous 90% reduction in salary. Google employees who did this for a few weeks would have a much better sense of where AdWords advertisers are coming from than somebody who is playing with a toy account. (The Google employee experiences < 1% CTR and one click a day? Good, you may succeed in identifying where the buttons are in the AdWords interface. You have no idea what the actual use of the platform is like.)
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Extrapolating from 1 click per day is also really funny. For any kind of statistical relevance there ought to be a substantially larger number of impressions and clicks. The price per click is interesting information though, now it would be nice to know how much the publisher received of that $.88 (assuming it got paid out at all).
- netcan 17y ago
  This is not an exaggeration (even though it's funny). I have had Google reps literally run out on me. IE, stop answering emails, supplying phone numbers that go nowhere etc. When I finally did get someone back on the phone to talk to, they acknowledged that they had stuffed up with their suggested "campaign optimisation" & that they must restore the old campaign. They promised to call back within 20 minutes once a person with more authority was located. I haven't heard back since, had to try & restore things myself. Even with this terrible service, this account still sent almost $1m to Google this year. In fact, we haven't even been able to get reasonable payment methods from Google & they still follow their hide, acknowledge then disappear CRM. This comes up a lot since credit cards don't always work well when you try to charge $2k every 5 hours. Adwords has all sorts of bugs that appear when the banks get suspicious about these.
stuntgoat 17y ago
Send the google ad link to a page with an alt phone # or alt email. You can track the calls or emails per impression that way. ( or ask new customers how they found you )

57 points by profquail 17y ago

The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business -- $6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it. Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion. I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.

qeorge 17y ago
Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords This is a brilliant idea, and I would be shocked if Google doesn't have plans to do so.
- prawn 17y ago
  http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ use AdWords campaigns and customised phone numbers to track referrals by phone. Client of mine use them. Not quite as "all in one" and affordable as AdWords+Voice would be, but the same sort of thing is being done by a third party.
jfarmer 17y ago
What you've described is precisely Yext's business.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  For the clueless like me: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yext-scores-a-big-round-from-ivp-after-techcrunch50-debut/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/the-25-million-demo-yex...
ddemchuk 17y ago
Trust me, it's a biggggg market with a lot of room for improvement. Working on it :-)

apowell 17y ago

In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants.

qeorge 17y ago
it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite learning curve.
- jwesley 17y ago
  That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against them.
prawn 17y ago
This is one of my problems. I recommend that a lot of my smaller clients experiment with AdWords as an alternative to Yellow Pages. Try $50/wk and see what happens. Many are eager to continue but don't have the time or understanding of AdWords to do it themselves. The problem comes when setting up and managing a small weekly account is as much work (billed hourly) as is being spent on the ads. That's a little difficult to justify and never worth my time to handle.
axod 17y ago
Incorrect IMHO. In the last year I've seen both bids, and average per click payouts from adsense drop significantly. Like halved. The OP is about divorce. Legal, finance, class action lawsuits. They're all crazy click prices because they're potentially very lucrative. Managing your own campaign is extremely easy. You don't even have to set bid prices any more if you don't want to.

patio11 17y ago

If Google wants its employees to experience the point of view of its customers, it should stake them with meaningful amounts of Google monopoly money, have them actually attempt to achieve business goals with it, and put half of their salary on the line based on their CPC performance. Every so often, something should go wrong -- subtly or otherwise -- and then the employee should have to go through seven redirects on the AdWords interface to locate the form to send a message to a representative. The message should, with 30% probability, never be read by anyone. If it is read, it will be read by someone in a call center in India, who does not know the customer is a Google employee, and has only a cursory knowledge of Google's own policies and none of the algorithms. Escalation should be nearly impossible to achieve, but if it happens, it should go to someone in Mountain View who is as unhelpful as possible to avoid giving the customer any incentive to ever call back. For the fully authentic experience, if the employee doesn't like this state of affairs, they should be encouraged to either a) blog about it and pray that it ends up in Matt Cutt's feedreader or b) make a lateral move to Microsoft, for an instantaneous 90% reduction in salary. Google employees who did this for a few weeks would have a much better sense of where AdWords advertisers are coming from than somebody who is playing with a toy account. (The Google employee experiences < 1% CTR and one click a day? Good, you may succeed in identifying where the buttons are in the AdWords interface. You have no idea what the actual use of the platform is like.)

jacquesm 17y ago
Extrapolating from 1 click per day is also really funny. For any kind of statistical relevance there ought to be a substantially larger number of impressions and clicks. The price per click is interesting information though, now it would be nice to know how much the publisher received of that $.88 (assuming it got paid out at all).
netcan 17y ago
This is not an exaggeration (even though it's funny). I have had Google reps literally run out on me. IE, stop answering emails, supplying phone numbers that go nowhere etc. When I finally did get someone back on the phone to talk to, they acknowledged that they had stuffed up with their suggested "campaign optimisation" & that they must restore the old campaign. They promised to call back within 20 minutes once a person with more authority was located. I haven't heard back since, had to try & restore things myself. Even with this terrible service, this account still sent almost $1m to Google this year. In fact, we haven't even been able to get reasonable payment methods from Google & they still follow their hide, acknowledge then disappear CRM. This comes up a lot since credit cards don't always work well when you try to charge $2k every 5 hours. Adwords has all sorts of bugs that appear when the banks get suspicious about these.

stuntgoat 17y ago

Send the google ad link to a page with an alt phone # or alt email. You can track the calls or emails per impression that way. ( or ask new customers how they found you )