In our previous post Larry and Jeff decided to apply their own internet marketing techniques to generate new business. After running a campaign for 3 weeks, what was the result? This is Jeff’s analysis. I consider myself foremost a web designer and programmer, not a Google pay per click guru. So this is my learning process.

 
Ad Group Name Default BidMax CPC Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos
SEO   $0.80 71 126,926 0.06% $0.88 $62.63 4.9
Pay Per Click   $0.80 23 106,080 0.02% $1.04 $24.02 4.7
Google Adwords   $0.80 20 47,427 0.04% $0.62 $12.46 4.6
Internet Marketing   $0.75 14 46,298 0.03% $1.07 $14.94 5.1
Search Engine Marketing   $3.00 1 4,187 0.02% $1.94 $1.94 6.2
Total - all 5 ad groups - 129 330,918 0.04% $0.90 $115.99 4.8

 What does all this mean?

Our Ads Were Shown 330,000 Times
An impression (Impr.) is when an ad is served. So you can see we had 330,000 impressions. Where did these 300k impressions appear? Either on the right hand side of a Google search or on their content network (which consists of other websites that have google ads).

129 People Visited Our Website
We received 129 clicks to the various web pages. These would count as leads.

2 People Filled Out Forms
We received 2 forms filled out. One person never contacted us in return after following up.

1 Proposal Was Written
The lead went dead and cold. We ended up wasting too much time.

After 3 weeks and $115 we stopped the campaign.

Lessons Learned

Cost Per Click
To keep our costs down we served ads in Florida and a few select major cities across the nation. By doing this our cost per click (Avg CPC) was a very reasonable $.90. So basically every time someone came to our site is costs $.90.

Most of the clicks came from the Google Content Network. In laymans terms that means other websites serving up Google Ads. A very small percentage of clicks came directly from ads displayed on the Google search results page.

Keywords
Our keyword selection covered the gamut of terms you would expect. Remember, many of our clicks were from other sites in the content network - so keywords wouldn’t apply here. Just context. For the clicks that did come from search terms here is a sampling:

google ad words (5 visits)
internet marketing firms (1 visit)
search engine marketing (1 visit)

From the content network we had 87 visits of the 129.

Click Through Rate (CTR)
Our CTR was very low .04%. This is how often people saw the ad and clicked through to our site. From what I understand, click through rates vary greatly by industry; however, from the limited info I gathered this is low.

What’s next for us?
As we described in our previous post, almost all of our work is generated by word of mouth and client referall. The intriguing part for me is if we can get this working, it will be a very clean and calculated way of generating business. I’m moving on to monthly web site maintenance and I’m now focusing directly on website design and redesign.

More to come!