What you think about GoogleAdWords?

[studylicense_com]

Hello everyone,
I wanted to ask your opinion and share our experience.
We are California real estate school online, a start-up company StudyLicense_com. We advertised our services thought google adwords as we did not know a better place. We spent a lot- a lot of money. We were still happy as we got our students.
When real estate market went down this marketing venue stopped working for us as we realized we spent way too much on marketing.
We cut GoogleAdwords and we thought the company would go dead.

What was a great surprise for us that half of traffic was still coming to website! but now it was almost all profit as major cost was cut out. So now our school has less students but became more profitable and I just think it is a better model of company.
We have no idea where the students hear from us we still need pull the data and analyse it. It could be that courses are very affordable, or students had good experience and they referred their friends/relatives to us. I don't know 100%.
But we thought google brings us life and it was not the case. Sometimes we paid so much per click as $3-5 and there was no garantee of purchase.
Anyone has the same experience with Google Adwords?

[Kevin Kirtz]

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with Google Adwords. I am not trying to be rude, but Adwords accounts can be a bit too much to handle without professional help. Paying $3 a click? That's absolutely astounding. There is no need to pay nearly that much for a clickthrough in an Adwords campaign. That's a lot of cost involved that doesn't need to be.

[Codythebest]

Good for me.
My click are 17 cents and my adwords budget is around 25% of sales.
Really good so far....

[VicBilson]

Rather than paying those high click prices for competitive keywords, you might be better served to identify some less competitive keywords - but still relevant - that have lower bid prices. I've done this for many sites with success.

Another nice thing I like using Google AdWords for is for testing different ad copy and/or different landing pages. Rather than waiting for organic traffic I can do a short AdWords campaign and drive traffic to the site to test very fast.

- Vic Bilson

[militaryforsaleforrent]

Well, I can understand your pain as I also paid google for nothing in the beginning.... 2-3 years back but now i don't pay more than 10 cents for single click.

Adwords is not just like create AD and go live. It cost you money, your hard earned money which visitor won't ever think before clicking on your ad. So you must be very careful about it.

People are right here that you should choose those keywords which are low in price. I know you must be thinking "how"? Its not such an easy topic to explain in few words because it needs proper study and devotion of time, so my honest suggestion to you is, either learn yourself how to make cost-effective ads or hire some professionals help. I am sure that will cost you less than paying 3-4 dollars for each click.

Try to search google for: google adwords keyword suggestion tool

and you will see many keyword suggestion tools available. I wish some will help you to achieve your goals.

Good Luck!

[RealEstatePromos]

In my buisness, promotional items we frequently have to pay up to $7 per click for certain key words. I monitor those key words closely. Google has been a good place to advertise for us. But it is definitely something we review on a weekly if not daily basis.

[kelsheikh]

Sometimes we paid so much per click as $3-5 and there was no garantee of purchase.
Anyone has the same experience with Google Adwords?
I would focus on more relevant and long tail terms. By Google telling you to pay 3-5 a click simple says that they don't find what your targeting relevant. You can cut cost big time by being suoper relevant and by not using huge volume search terms. Adwords is also great for branding, so if you advertise yourself correctly, you can definitely get traffic at the moment and even later on by an intereated visitor who landed on your website ages ago.

[thedeallocator]

You need to TEST and Track your ads. This will save you a lot of Money.

[goreseo]

I think adword is better than Yahoo and MSN PPC programs.

[the-ref]

Paying $3-$5 per click means only one thing: you've been 'Google Slapped'. This is pretty much Google's way of saying they don't think your landing pages are relevant for the keyword(s) you're using. Well, I should actually clarify. In some niches, you can pay over $5 per click pretty easily, but if Google is saying your minimum cost to use a keyword is $3-$5, then you have been slapped. There are a variety of things you can do to get around this, but for starters you may look at changing your landing page so the keyword(s) in question are more relevant.

[MIAFORECLOSURE]

I have done the same mistake, I was paying about $3 per click and it was number one for Miami Foreclosures, my bill the first month was $2,000 and I learned my lesson and just started optimizing the site myself and appearing on the search engines organically

[Indochine]

It's the best method of paid advertising I could find.
Many others, including Facebook, are either too expensive or not working properly.

[ExtraArm]

AdWords is definitely not plug and play. Money is there, but make sure you track conversions so that you can evaluate the real value of every term you bid on.

[MoneyMan]

Picking the right keywords.
Daily spending limit
Correct bid amount
Common sense
All play a factor as to how well your campaign will do.

[rainier]

google adwords are good but you need to spend more money.it will be better if you promote your site manually.

[fmanness]

Well, my point of you is that adwords has so much options so you can easily start to not understand what you're doing, and the problem is that you pay for that. So my biggest recommendation is to go safely, very safely to protect your budget.

[Pinehurst Real Estate Guy]

Google has some good tools for selecting the words and tracking the results, if I were dependent on this I would certainly use them.

[lyka27]

Well, that probably a big scam. :o

[rainier]

well you made the right decision by optimizing your own site, though it takes a lot of effort but this will give you a good results.

I have done the same mistake, I was paying about $3 per click and it was number one for Miami Foreclosures, my bill the first month was $2,000 and I learned my lesson and just started optimizing the site myself and appearing on the search engines organically

[billnad]

To lower your cost per click you just need to look at the following variables:

Your ad - make sure that oyu ad is relevent to your customers. The more often that your ad is clicked the more that Google will trust your ad

Your keywords - everyone wants to rank for <cityname> Realtor and <citryname> real estate but there are many more keywords that are much better to rank for with less competition and lower cost.

Your landing page - making sure that you landing page that you are sending your traffic to is realted to your keyword is critical. The more relevant that it is the better.

When looking at these three variables you can see that making the most of your ad being seen with the right keyword and clicking through giving a relevent page is a lot of work. I would bet that you can cut that $3 - $5 keyword down to 20 - 30 cents per click

[seo-expert]

you have to be very focused and have a landing page for the traffic your driving, not just get them to go to the home page and hope for the best.

but in terms of finding people that are looking for what you're selling, you can't beat google adwords.

[karyljm]

It all depends on your keyword phrases as to how much the cost per click. Sometimes your competition is the reason the clicks are so espensive. About a year ago i was checking on a phrase for a lawyer in Los Angeles and it was like $12.75 a click. Pay close attention though, they have been quite known to charge for clicks that don't exist. If you don't have time to watch it everyday or so don't do it. :eek:

[jamesww]

you have to be very focused and have a landing page for the traffic your driving, not just get them to go to the home page and hope for the best.

but in terms of finding people that are looking for what you're selling, you can't beat google adwords.


Can you tell us how best to take advantage of google adwords if our business model is residential real estate sales.

[rainier]

it depends on the proper used of kws and meta tags of your site.

[arre]

Hello everyone,
I wanted to ask your opinion and share our experience.
We are California real estate school online, a start-up company StudyLicense_com. We advertised our services thought google adwords as we did not know a better place. We spent a lot- a lot of money. We were still happy as we got our students.
When real estate market went down this marketing venue stopped working for us as we realized we spent way too much on marketing.
We cut GoogleAdwords and we thought the company would go dead.

What was a great surprise for us that half of traffic was still coming to website! but now it was almost all profit as major cost was cut out. So now our school has less students but became more profitable and I just think it is a better model of company.
We have no idea where the students hear from us we still need pull the data and analyse it. It could be that courses are very affordable, or students had good experience and they referred their friends/relatives to us. I don't know 100%.
But we thought google brings us life and it was not the case. Sometimes we paid so much per click as $3-5 and there was no garantee of purchase.
Anyone has the same experience with Google Adwords?

Your story just proves that a paid advertising campaign pays off in the long run as well as short term. You will have many people visit your site through your paid link who then return at a later date for more info, or to buy.

[amjadindiaint]

If you really want to know that where your sites visitors are coming from you must put analytics or statcounter on your site. by using these analysis tools you will be able to know the source of your sites visitors as well as some more statistics about your web site.
I use analytics for my site, it gives complete analysis of the visitors, visiting location, keywords used to reach the site and much more. Where users are entering on your site using which keywords.
you can contact me personally to get more assistance or information about this.