The Right Way to Run a Successful Google Adwords Campaign

One of the most competitive online markets and one which gets more competitive by the day is the travel and accommodation market. This presents us with an opportunity to see how well the topmost organisations easily out-compete the vast majority of sites competing in the same market.

Before discussing the right way in some detail it’s important to show a wrong way and a bad mistake that is made by many advertisers on Google. Take a look at the following screenshot… the search term was "accommodation". CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGE

The search for the broad term "accommodation" shows many advertisers which means the cost of a click is very high for the top positions and in fact for any first page position. The search term is so vague any chances of a conversion are almost zero. This means it is more often than not fruitless and costly to advertise using such keywords.

There are many advertisers which means the click cost is going to be very high to get into the uppermost positions.

It’s almost certain that any of these sponsored links which gets a click will not make a conversion for the reason the search term is far too broad and is in no way identifying the intentions of a searcher. A person typing such a keyword into Google is definitely a browser. The person is almost certainly not at the shopping stage and almost certainly not at the buying stage.

In general unless an organisation runs an Adwords campaign to promote branding or a concept it is most unlikely that bidding on single word keywords will generate any ongoing meaningful profit.

Let’s zoom in and get closer to a searcher’s needs. The highly competitive search for "Cape Town Accommodation" yields the following search results page. .. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Notice in this search for "Cape Town Accommodation" that advertisers cover: Hotels, Guesthouses, Apartments and Villas. Clearly a number of these ads are "fishing" in the Cape Town Accommodation market. While more targeted than the search for accommodation the searcher’s intent is unknown and searchers are probably browsing and at best the majority will be shopping. From my experience unless the advertiser has a very large profit margin on a sale it’s very difficult to make a profit out of a shopper in this market.

The problem with advertising to a large and generic market is that click costs are high and the majority of searchers who click are, at best shopping, and probably browsing. This means the chances of a sale from such a visitor are small.

The volume of searches (impressions) for "Cape Town Accommodation" is high.

The search is too broad as evidenced by the offers of apartment, hotels, guesthouse and villas.

To be continued