I have played around a bit with Google Adwords campaigns for both Terian Image Capture Pro and Terian ID Creator over the past couple of months with some interesting results.
Firstly, I will admit the following meme comes close to explaining my experience with Adwords…
Initially everything seemed quite daunting, but with help and assistance available on-line I managed to get a couple groups sorted with appropriate keywords that would potentially be relevant to both products.
The first campaign ran for a little over a month from mid August to September last year, and the second campaign continues to run since December. Without a doubt these campaigns have certainly managed to bring additional traffic to the Terian website, as can be seen in the following session graph.
By comparison, outside the campaign time periods website traffic is almost non existent.
Questionable Traffic:
Unfortunately I do question the value of some of this traffic, as according to the logs I am receiving almost half of my traffic from India.
This trend was also evident from the data usage logs…
Upon investigating the Adwords campaign, and checking the search terms that have been used the primary culprit for my Indian audience appeared to be searches relating to the ‘election commission of India’. With this little bit of knowledge in hand I have updated the negative keywords list and eagerly await to see how that affects the future demographics.
This merely highlights the necessity to stay on top of Adwords campaigns and ensure relevant keywords are used, and also an appropriate negative keyword list is maintained. Unfortunately one of the annoying aspects of Adwords campaigns, is that one has to wait for the data before information can be displayed, so changes can take days, if not weeks to show improvements.
Questionable Campaign:
Additional traffic is all well and good, but so far this traffic is merely a vanity metric and has not provided any direct benefit in regards to sales. I could just as easily pay someone to click a counter button for me and have the same effect, that being money going out with no money coming in.
I have this concern in the back of my mind, however I am also aware of the timing of the campaign and how Adwords campaigns are not meant to be an overnight silver bullet to improve sales problems. With this in mind I have committed to keeping the campaign running until April 1st, which will remain within the budget, and hopefully provide some additional data to analyse for future marketing campaigns (Adwords or other).
However, having said that my gut feeling at this stage is with the current campaign and related marketing activities, Adwords is simply throwing away money for no gain in my circumstances.
Journey from Code to Sales 