This is further information to a post I did on the 25th Sep called “The Unseen Pitfalls of Google Adwords Marketing” (http://julian101.com/2007/09/google-marketing-pitfalls) where I talked about the unseen downside to Adwords. The rising bid price and lowering conversion rate. It’s slowly changing for the worse and if you didn’t measure it, you wouldn’t know. I have been tracking this for some time now and hope this research saves money and time for companies thinking of, or using Adwords or other PPC marketing.
There are many FREE marketing methods we use that bring good traffic, convert to sale well and are no hassle. In fact about 90% of all ProActive Software’s traffic, trials and subscriptions come from FREE marketing methods and customer referrals!
GOOGLE ADWORDS & PPC INFLATION!
(it’s worse than oil price increases!)
Firstly, as a disclaimer, I think Adwords is a fairly good concept, and I’m not wanting to speak out against Google, rather it’s the general PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising model that’s got me concerned. I’m just using Google Adwords as an example and we’ve been tracking a limited sample campaign for 12 months.
Need proof?
Download our PDF analysis sheet and take a look for yourself.
Here’s the link: Google_Adwords_Analysis.pdf
I couldn’t resist sharing this link:
http://www.onemorelevel.com/games.php?game=566
This is a cool online game where you try to simulate the growth of a successful Web2.0 company to the point you hopefully get bought out by Google… Brilliant! It’s always worrying and fun (and educational) to watch how quickly you can burn through IPO/Venture money.
I reckon these guys should build another game called “SimWeb2.0 Company – Bootstrap Edition.” to simulate starting a profitable software company from no money and no investment. That takes a completely different skill set. One I can respect.
Both are good ways, but in either case you need to fully understand the game you’re in – or you’ll be burnt. ;-) What’s interesting though is that you can have money, or not have money and arrive at the save destination in business. Plenty of people have done it both ways…
ProActive Software is a company driven by metrics. We measure and test EVERYTHING. We like to know what works, what doesn’t and what will drive the company forward. In regards to marketing, one of the most commonly used tools by software co’s is Google Adwords. We did an experiment lately to see how ours were performing. We have regular sales but how many were coming from Google Adwords?
Although we use other marketing methods, both paid and free, our typical budget was $1000 per week on Adwords. We have a professionally built campaign with 900+ keyphrases. Our campaign is split to different groups based on country so we can selectively geo-target locations (ie: spend on Australia this week and lower spend on the US). For as long as I can remember the campaign has been going well. We started at a few hundred a week and have been lifting spend each month.
One of the reasons we had to evaluate Google was that:
A. Other PPC providers were offering good deals (ie: Yahoo, Miva, MSN etc)
B. Google’s “Price per bid” to retain a set position has lifted 80% in the last year.
So we did a test!
With people generating many new phrases and terms in modern technology, it has become hard to keep up with what they all mean. One of the most commonly used terms on the world wide web (www) today is the phrase “Web2.0″.
It seems like every web solutions company trying to make a living is selling their stuff off the phrase. So to the average Joe who is not a geek, what is “Web2.0″?
Well according to Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia…
The phrase Web2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services – such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies - which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. The term became popular following the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, and has since become widely adopted as shorthand for user generated content shared with other users.
Ian Andrusyk from Fastservers.net wrote an interesting article about some of the buzzwords surrounding the Internet industry nowadays. These are words like Software As A Service, SaaS, Web 2.0, VOIP. He calls it “An era of buzzwords” which is true. However the interesting point he makes is that whilst these buzzwords are the ‘hot thing’ nowadays, the technology and business practices underlying them have been around for many years. I agree with his thoughts.
Here’s the article:
http://www.fastservers.net/blog/from-the-ceo/saas_web_20_oh_and_supercalafr/
