David from the UK sent me this question, and my answer follows:

Hi Steve,

Hope you're well, and that business is good!

I've been working for a recording studio, and the owner is looking at adwords as a potential advertising scheme. I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions for me to help us out..

How much should he pay-per-click to make things worthwhile? The studio is based in London and doesn't really need to appeal to people outside of the UK - would that make it cheaper?

He's got a minimal budget, and naturally wants to make the biggest impression with the smallest cost. Are there any other methods you can recommend?

Is there any way of getting top of the list in google's regular search (probably with the search term 'london recording studio' or similar)without having loads of link juice.

I know I'm kind of asking for your secrets - but it would be a big help if you could shine some light on the subject.

Many thanks Steve,
Take care

David

--------------------------------------------------

Ok David,

I am working on an update of all the videos at the moment, which is actually going to be a 4th CD added to the set.

Mostly I deal with the US, although Adwords is still pretty big in the UK, and the principles are all the same.

Its hard to come up with a price per click without knowing the profit margins in his business, and what the actual value to him is in aquiring a new customer.

So the factors of:

Targeting and relevance of keywords and ads,

Good ads that make people click,

How good the site converts people to become sales leads,

Percentage of the leads that are closed, with how much money they generate.

How well he can get them to continue to buy more services/products, are the main ones to consider

That equation will tell him what his worth is per sales lead, per visitor, and what the cost per click will be. There are a lot of ways to make the whole process more efficient, depending on what he works on.

A lot of people spend thousands to get visitors, without testing different designs and sales copy on their sites to continually improve the results, and a lot of times just something like the change of one or two words in the headline can change a losing campaign into a winner.

If he is on a limited budget, niche markets are the way to go- find one type of client that needs your recording services and design a campaign just for that, like cleaning up audio for depositions for lawyers, recording voice overs for documentaries or producing background music for ads for radio stations, recording teenagers first albums with the help of their rich parents, (whatever you find out from your own market research, I don't know this business, so I am just throwing out ideas.)

Make a special landing page directly related to only that service with the best sales copy you can, and monitor the results of the entire sales cycle.

If you do this you will likely have less competition, and your profits will actually be higher, while still keeping your advertising costs as low as possible.

Now if this niche market throws you a little bit, have him go through all his invoices over the last 2 years, jotting down information about the different types of sales, and the types of people, and the types of services that have been already delivered - Just within your own business you will find different subgroups of people who have ALREADY PAID YOU MONEY, and different services you might not have realized were hugely profitable.

If you re-target them using adwords, you can definately get more of those people, especially if you have success stories from these prior customers to show potential new customers.

That's my two cents that I can give you without actually going there

Good luck,

New Content Network Super-Targeting in Google Adwords

Submitted by steveblom on Tue, 2005-10-11 14:20. adwords news | Adwords Tips and Tricks

For people that use the content network, you may have been aware about the ability to site target your campaign. Well, Google has done it again, now tweaking their technology even more, so that you can show your ads on an exact SECTION of a site. This is actually huge. Here's the message you may or may not have seen when you logged in: "Target your ads to specific pages on content sites with Section Targeting. Now you can advertise on specific sections of a site in the Google content network. Choose the section 'sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla' rather than all of sourceforge.net. Or place your ads only on 'anandtech.com/digitalcameras' instead of the entire AnandTech site." Here's a link with more information on how this works: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=25716&hl=en_US You know, I get mad at Google like anyone else, and then they do a tweak like this, and you see why they are the total leader in this area. For both advertisors and publishers this is a real godsend, and gives you the ability to laser target your advertising to the exact people that you most want to reach. I will definately be working with this in the near future. » steveblom's blog | read more Google's Lawyer Speaks out on trademark terms case Submitted by steveblom on Wed, 2005-08-17 14:15. adwords news Correction on the Google vs. Geico case with comments from Google's Lawyer: Apparently the ruling was in favor of Google more than was origionally reported by various sources on the internet. Here are some comments from one of Google's lawyers: "I saw your post on the GEICO ruling and thought it might be helpful to clarify a few things. The recent ruling by the judge in this case was essentially a written version of the judge's oral ruling of December 15, 2004. Her ruling was an extraordinary victory for Google. In the critical part of the decision, the judge ruled unequivocally in Google's favor. » steveblom's blog | read more Adwords CTR Algorithm Change Submitted by steveblom on Mon, 2005-05-30 17:52. Adwords Marketing | adwords news | mastering google adwords Change in Adwords ranking algorithm As you remember, last month we talked about the slight change in the algorithm in how Google will be displaying adwords ads, which in a way is back to how it was in 1998 or so. Back then, ads themselves were looked on as either relevant or not by looking at the content of the ad itself, and after Google got money hungry, this dropped in importance a bit. Now however, this might be becoming important again. So, if you are advertising on a keyword phrase it will give you a slight boost in ranking in addition to making those words bold in your ads, if you have those words or related words in the copy of your ad. This will help your CTR quite a bit in theory. I wish I could say I have been dutifully testing this for you but I have actually been having fun with testing some other aspects of copy and landing pages, so I can't report any conclusive results yet. But this is something to keep in mind when you are making new ads. You can find more details here: Adwords CTR discussion » steveblom's blog | read more Google finally gets it- content network improvements Submitted by steveblom on Tue, 2005-04-26 15:47. Adwords Marketing | adwords news Google finally gets it- improving the content network Well I have to say that its good that Google is listening, because the content network has always been kind of a joke in terms of quality and avoided studiously by marketers like me for the most part. Overture never did get it, and keeps trying to shove all their crappy traffic down the throat of advertisors, even though they have a lot of low quality sites in their network, and haven't listened to advertisors complaints for YEARS now. So I do have to give some kudos to Google for listening and attempting to work on the problem. What they are working on is to make it possible for advertisors to pick specific sites in the content network to run ads on, instead of having no choice and having to run it everywhere like it is now. This should be a major improvement and will definately shake up the industry a little bit, because what will happen is that the sites that are really good at converting specific types of traffic will probably see their advertising revenues increase, and it will be much better for site visitors, too. It's good that advertisors will have the flexability to pick other sites to advertise on that is a better "fit" for them and it really makes a lot of sense. Even though Overture was the first major player in this market, and even though they got bought by Yahoo for big bucks, they are really going to be falling behind now. This kind of superior targeting is what advertisors and site visitors both need, and it will encourage sites to provide useful things to their visitors. Sites with better contents and reputation will be rewarded with more reputable and richer (we hope) advertisors, and recieve more revenues as a result. Advertisors might have to pay more to advertise on "better" sites but that's fine, the market will adjust itself. Google is also taking another big step with advertising on a cpm (cost per thousand) basis, with an "adjustable" cpm model kind of like adwords works on with their adjustable CPC. I am not thrilled about this one because it really is a "black box" like adwords is, where you don't know the prices your competitors are paying or sometimes even the price YOU are going to pay, until you do it. Then you have to resort to various hacks to figure out what your competitors are paying. But on the bright side, you can probably find ways to get a cheaper CPM than if you just had to pay a straight price to some big media company, so there is some benefit there. You can read more about the changes here: http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/sitetarget?hl=en » steveblom's blog | read more Is Google destroying the other search engines? Submitted by steveblom on Fri, 2005-03-18 22:10. adwords hacks | adwords help | adwords news | Adwords Tips and Tricks Google is creating an army of search engine experts at a much higher rate than yahoo/overture ever did. I tried calling yahoo about their ambassador program but they never returned my calls, so since I got a much higher ROI on my Google campaigns anyway, I went over to Google and trained my staff on their training program. Its not perfect but its a real step in the right direction, and since it is automated I think they are going to kick yahoo's butt in the long run. They even gave me marketing materials to use to get clients. » steveblom's blog | read more Recent blog posts Controversial Advice for Adwords - Clickbank affiliate marketing Adwords Search Engine- second try Adwords CTR doesn't mean SQUAT Simple Free Tracking Urls for Google Adwords My Greatest friend- Adwords Advanced Tools Google Content Network Comes of Age Adsnatcher Pay Per Click Competitive Intelligence When do I stop testing my ads? Google Worldwide Search Term Trends Taguchi Techniques for Adwords and Landing pages more MSN Adwords News Browse archives « July 2008   Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31   User login Username: Password: Request new password copyright 2007 In Touch Media Group- All rights reseverd In Touch Media Group is an Adwords qualified company at (727)403-3252 at 205 myrtle ave south, Clearwater FL 33756. If you are having trouble with Adwords, call us immediately.