I’ll be the first to admit that I have not been a huge fan of Google Adwords lately. Dealing with Google when you have a problem is next to impossible. It also seems like every account has difficulties when you first start it up, namely Google stops showing your ads for no apparent reason, or just wants way too much for a click. However, something just happened that changed my mind a little.
I have a site that ranks #1 in Google for several keyword phrases. The site is about a year old and sells a hard product. Unfortunately, my margin on the products prohibited me from using Adwords to drive traffic so I relied on organic traffic only. The manufacturer recently agreed to fund an Adwords campaign to drive traffic to my site so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I set up the campaign on 4/14. The two highest traffic keywords were costing me .35 & .40 cents per click on the first day, for ads in the number one spot. These are keywords that bring in about 1000 visits per month from organic traffic, resulting in sales of about $4,000.00 per month.
I checked my cost per click today and found out that Google was only charging me .04 & .10 per click for the number one position! I am amazed at getting .04 clicks in the number one spot. I expect this will result in a nice bump in sales.
I attribute the cheap clicks to several factors. Things like relevant keywords, relevant ads, and a relevant landing page all add up. However, I’ve had this combination before and never saw anything this cheap. What was different about this campaign is that I was sending the clicks to a page that ranked #1 in Google for these same keywords!
This illustrates how important the big picture is and why SEO is so necessary to compete in business today. Internet marketing experts tell us that we want to dominate page one in the search results. That means organic rankings, paid results, and video rankings. By owning a highly ranked landing page, this process becomes much more cost effective.