26 Jul 10 9:23 pm
Hi,
I use Paid Search to get campaigns running very quickly. You don't need to be getting lots of clicks and spending lots of money to be gathering valuable information. The smart marketeers are using Adwords to gather market intelligence and to construct their sales funnel... as well as getting traffic.
Don't forget, you only pay for clicks... but you get stats on how often your Ads are shown (the impressions).
Couple this with your impression share and you can quickly get an idea of actual search volumes, and the actual search queries being performed.
For example, I ran a campaign for one month that had 10,000 impressions. The impression share was 50%, so I can assume that there were 20,000 relevant search queries that my Ads could have been triggered for.
I had a respectable initial starting CTR of 3%, so had 300 clicks. These cost €75, and resulted in additional sales for my client.
What was more valuable, however, was that we now had data for what the 9,700 people who "missed" the website were searching for.
My client was an electrician and very keen for "wiring and rewiring" jobs, and thought that "smoke detector" installations would be big due to the number of landlords in the area he covered.
Our stats showed that there were only 12 searches that triggered his smoke detector installation Ads, and whilst there were searches that triggered his "wiring and rewiring" Ads... they were expensive and did not result in and sales leads.
We did learn that 50%... 5,000 of the searches were related to cooker, oven, or washing machine repairs.... and that there were a significant proportion of searches that were *exactly* "dublin washing machine repairs" or "dublin washing machine repair". So we bought the domain
www.dublinwashingmachinerepairs.com. If we were ever to do an SEO campaign we'd know exactly what phrases were searched for the most, were the most competitive in the paid arena, and resulted in the most visitors.
Don't be scared of Paid Search. Done correctly, you can gather fantastic market intelligence that can tell you very quickly whether to continue with a particular venture or not.
Wouldn't you rather fail fast?
Hope that helps.
