Google Ad Words

[Elissa]

Has anyone used Google AdWords? What is your opinion of it? A friend suggested I try it. However, living in a resort area I think it could become a costly form of advertising if I understood her correctly. Thanks for any input.

 

[~*~honey~*~]

I use Google pay per click. Anyone typing in "Cozumel Massage" sees my business in the upper right area of the screen. This was a good way to get more people to my website while I was working on getting my Google ranking up there.

Yikes! I just tried it and I'm NOT in the upper right. Gotta check on that.
Well anyway, now I'm #1 on Google for that phrase anyway, so it doesn't matter.

While it WAS working, it cost me next to nothing. Note that you can set a budget for the maximum you want to pay per click and the maximum per day. After you hit your max, it just stops appearing in the upper right for the remainder of the month.

I set my pay per click at 5 cents max, and my daily max at $1. They have some fancy algorithym that determines what they actually charge you per click and it always worked out to something less than 5 cents. I think the most I paid in a month was between $1.50 and $2. It may not sound like it did much good, but you never know. I also found that after I started doing pay per click, my website showed up as a sponsor for other search engines as well.

In a nutshell, well worth it.

** I just checked it out and was shown that my chosen phrase was inactive since my bid per click was so low. It recommended I increase my pay per click to 40 cents which I did just to see what happens. I guess it takes a bit of time to take hold, because I'm still not showing.

 

[Alex B]

Sally,

I am curious how many new clients you have received from your pay per click ad.

Brian

 

[Gwennie B]

I too would be interested to know how many clients you got from using it. Have you set up a system to know where your clients are coming from eg: internet, referal, other? I would need to find a way to know if the pay per click is really "paying off".

 

[ezzzzz]

Because I have a lot of internet exposure, from my website, pay per click, internet article, Cozumel bulletin boards, etc, it's impossible to see how many clients I get from the pay per click. Since the cost is so low, I figure if I get one per year, it's worth it.

I do ask my clients how they found me, and if they say, "I found you on the internet", I ask if they were specifically looking for a massage in Cozumel. If they were, even then it may not have been the pay per click that brought them to me.

I read somewhere that for name recognition, a potential client needs to see or read about your business in three different places. So I try to be in many places without spending too much money. I have brochures (not many left and I don't know if I'll print more as they are expensive here) and business cards around town, lots of word of mouth advertising, and a strong internet presence. I always sponsor local charitable events by donating a massage for their raffle or door prize. I am also sponsoring an upcoming televised event, "The Ultimate Diver Challenge", being filmed here in August. The minimum sponsored amount is $250 so I donated 6 massages and they were happy with that. It helped that I was the first business to sponsor this event, so five minutes after they announced this project, they could then say they already had their first sponsor. I did spend $35 to have a banner made for one of the promo photo shoots in 2007, but it is re-useable.

I checked the pay per click and at 40 cents per click, my business now shows in the list on the upper right area of the screen. I'll keep an eye on the cost to see if I want to continue. As more and more businesses use the pay per click option, the cost increases. Supply and demand.

 

[jimbad05]

I think that Google Ads would be especially beneficial if you lived and depended on potentially one time visitors in a resort area.
barefoot, I just did a search on google and there you were! The first name on the left, but you were the second name on the right hand side.

That is pretty darn awesome!

 

[flattrack75081]

Actually, by typing in "Cozumel Massage" in Google, 6 of the top ten listings lead to me in some way. The top two go to my website, the next two lead to a "directory" of three American CMT's in Cozumel including me, #5 is a defunct aol webpage with nothing on it, #6 is a review of my services, #7 recommends an MT who left the island years ago. I bought her domain and so anyone going to her website ends up on mine, #8 promotes things to do in Cozumel including massage, #9 is the website of one of the other two American CMT's here, and #10 is a beach club that offers massage on the beach.

I have three more in the 11th through 20th listings, two reviews and a listing.

It took a while to establish this but it really helps people find me!

 

[Pompal 09.]

Adwords can run up a tab pretty quickly.

They run some algoriths based on

How much you are willing to pay per click
How much you are willing to spend per day
How many others have bid on the search term and their per-click and budget parameters.

You may have the #1 bid, but if you aren't willing to outspend the #2 budget, you only get displayed x% of the time.

I can't remember how/where on google's site, you can find how often a given term has been searched in a month. YOu would be suprised how in-frequently "massage" and "City name" are searched.

If you go to broad - like we made the mistake of doing with "Spa parties" - you get tire-kickers from all 50 states checking you out, at $1 a pop!

 

[buckfever321]

I've been considering doing ad words myself, and R&R, I was wondering if you know what the most common search words are, if not "massage" and "my city"?

 

[Megan!91]

I've been considering doing ad words myself, and R&R, I was wondering if you know what the most common search words are, if not "massage" and "my city"?

Check out the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The only thing I don't care for about this tool is that it uses graphs instead of actual numbers. I can get the actual numbers if I do keyword searches through SBI! but I use the Google tool for my blog keywords. Plus I get all my traffic specific info through SBI! so that I know what search words people used to find me and what link they clicked on to get to me.

Brian

 

[johnsonjulie67]

Google adwords

I've been considering this as well. As a massage therapist in San Francisco, I've found that everyone looks everything up on Google.

 

[Jill Kim]

If you don't live in a touristy area where people often search the Net for massage before they leave their hometown, you can set up your Google Adwords campaigns so that only people in YOUR hometown can actually see your ads (i.e. the area that surrounds your practice) when they type in any of your keywords.

This way you will only get clicks from people within YOUR area, which makes it much more targeted advertising.

The question always begs though, do people in your area seach for massage on the Internet?

This can be hard to fully gage so the best way to test it, is to go ahead and set up an Adwords campaign and try it out.

Unless you live in a heavily populated area, you're probably not going to get a lot impressions, let alone clicks, so it won't cost you a lot (you set you're own budget anyway).

But hey, you just may get a few clicks and end up with some clients, perhaps even regulars.

All the best.

 

[amethystannie]

Google AdWords

I found adwords to be of no use at all as the conversion rate makes it far to expensive, when you consider that %50 of ppc advertising is not from serious people and may be your competitors just checking you out.
Do some link Exchanging with other Websites and get a naturaly good ranking in google .
Currently I have a PR3 home page and am looking for other massage sites of similar rank to do link exchanges with. How ever if you have a lower rank I can include yoou on some inner pages.
Regards Tracy
links @ knotscornermassage dot com dot au

 

[~Looking Forward~]

Adwords can be a good way to get instant search engine exposure until you have a natural high rank. Only problem with this is unless your doing it for a fairly small city, it can get pretty pricey.


Ryan Connolly

 

[Violette]

Exactly Ryan. I used Google Adwords for my first few years. Just lately I had to adjust my max price to get any listing at all, and then it just became too expensive. By then my natural ranking was high enough to justify dropping it anyway.

 

[Pompal 09.]

Yes, keywords for some larger cities google recommends bids of close to $5.
I have some free articles and things on my site providing information on some better ways to gain clients and build a high natural search ranking.
The site is fairly new so there is still more to come.
Links are in my signature.


Ryan Connolly

 

[asambrano752]

I made a video that shows how to setup adwords.

PM me if you'd like to take a look at it.

-Chris

 

[jay7]

I tried AdWords for one month with no conversions, so I dropped it.

Set up Google Analytics on your site before starting AdWords so you can track your conversions. I used my Contact Me form as the conversion goal.

 

[The Paranoid Android]

The thing is that you need a really good website to back up your adwords campaigns. Just getting your site to the top position in Google is only the first step.

Your website has to provided enough information to be able to convert clients. You can do that by writing articles about all of the different diseases and conditions and those things that you tell people all the time about.

What people are looking for is a solution to their problem. Writing quality content develops a relationship of trust.

You also have to learn to write for clients and not for yourself. Explain what the real benefits of YOUR massage are - not the long list of increases circulation which people don't really care about. Don't have a long list of the different techniques you know - most people don't know what any of them are. All they care about is what it will do for them- will it relieve their pain or stress or whatever.

If you write good articles using good keywords you probably won't need adwords to get your site to the top of the search engines - it will get there on its own.

Julie

 

[Antonious]

I am using adwords now. I set up my buget to be $50 for the month. And last month I ended up paying $22 for my ads. I got one new client off of my ads last month, so I felt it was worth the money.