At this point, I’ve basically given up on Adwords. I’ve spent over $12/conversion, and for a freemium site, that just plain sucks. I’ve already sent off for 5000 postcards, and am going to take a hack at direct mail next week. I’m not sure how well that will work, but I’m assuming it will cost less than $12/conversion. The standard law of seven I’ve read about in various sales books has said it takes about seven attempts to sell a customer via direct mail. So $0.03 for printing plus $0.28 for postage means $0.31/postcard x 7 = $2.17/conversion? That might be oversimplifying things.
Anyway, I should get to the point of this post. The $12/conversion turns out to be a bit misleading, but in a good way. Last weekend, I switched all of my ads to image banners. Not a whole lot went out because my budget is fairly low at this point (I’m just using some free credit I got through a promo from Google via their own direct mailer). I only got 2 clicks on the thousands of impressions I got and neither converted.
These were pretty spiffy looking banners, so I was a bit puzzled at first. What I realized after looking at my Analytics stats is that I actually got quite a number of clicks, just not on the banners. At the same time as I began running my image ads, I also began getting a lot of hits via Google search for my brand name. Based on pageviews via these keywords, it’s pretty obvious they were conversions, just not paid ones from Adwords. Sweet.
So what does this mean? Not a whole lot, actually. Apparently when a banner doesn’t get clicked on at all, Google stops running it. It stopped running my ads yesterday, and coincidentally, I stopped getting hits via my brand name again (and fewer signups as well). I’ve upped the value of clicks and added some managed content sites, so this might start working again, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.
Note: I do have a call to action on my banner ads, just not the words “Click here”. Maybe that’s what did it. Another thing I might try is adding my URL in big letters. With the advent of tabbed navigation, I have a feeling that a lot of ad viewers are popping open tabs and going straight to ad URLs now. This might be good reason for me to stop running image ads on my own site.
