My brief experiment into building a non-Internet marketing list for profit has come to a relatively clean point after running a 2-month Google AdWords campaign as the primary source of traffic.
The target market was a traditionally off-line, real world industry that consists of UK home business and shop owners alike. From the offset, I knew it was going to be a challenge to convince such an audience to spend their money on information-based products, but it was something I wanted to experience for myself.
Results Of Google AdWords Campaign
The AdWords campaign was run for approximately 2 months and consisted of 4 different text ads in total.
Average CTR of all text ads for all keywords: 7.77%
Total ad clicks: 264
Total conversions (click through and sign-up to the mailing list to receive the branded freebie): 12.5%
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the ads were converting searchers to list sign-ups. After a bit of initial tweaking on the ad copy, they worked with the targeted keywords very well.
Total ad spend was a shade over £99
Conversion rate (cost per list sign-up as reported by Google): £3
Total direct sales made: £15
Total affiliate sales made: £18.50 (50% commission on a single year long subscription, non-repeating unfortunately)
Total email sign-ups: 62 (7 have unsubscribed, 3 have failed to confirm their email addresses leaving me with 52)
This gives me some confidence that what I’m sending them is of interest. As well as offering some tips and recommendations, I also offered a short online video demonstrating how to use the membership website to get what I thought they wanted.
Points To Note
- Of the four text ads I used, three employed more traditional copy techniques and achieved CTRs between 6.59% - 9.11% and sign-up conversion rates between 9.5% - 16.4%. The fourth ad employed a Rich Jerk style of copy, achieving a CTR of 7.93% and a sign-up conversion rate of 16.2%.
- This told me that the RJ style of ad copy could be just as effective as more traditional ad copy when used by the same copy writer. The more distinctive style of copy compared to competing ads should have made my RJ style ads more noticeable and hopefully more enticing.
- I didn’t switch on the conversion tracking until about a third of the way through the campaign so those figures are slightly skewed as not all of the sign-up conversions would have been counted.
- What I found to be of real help was to bid on keyword variations, making use of the available matching options. This whole process was made a lot simpler by using Keyword Permutator to generate my keyword list. Using matching options, I was able to hone in on those users who were searching for very specific search terms. This meant that a lot of my competition was simply not able to compete with me because they’d not targeted the same keyword variations.
- The best performing keywords, by far, were those where matching options had been applied. This told me that my ads were working best with people who were specific in the way in which they searched.
- An extra benefit of using matching options is being able to see exactly what people are searching for just by looking at the statistics provided by Google.
Conclusion
It’s certainly been an interesting couple of months. To start with, the reported statistics were fluctuating quite a bit so it was important to stick it out for a longer, more normalised test with a larger sample size to measure.
If I were to do it again, I’d try to target specific positions on the search results page to help make the ads more visible. In this campaign, my ads were displayed around the middle positions on average and depending on whom you ask, this may or may not have had a detrimental/beneficial effect.
I’d also consider running a campaign without any broad matching at all to see the effect of targeting people who know what they want.
I’d definitely revisit the content of the mailings and perhaps place more emphasis on relationship building first before recommending any products or services.
Financially, I’m currently out of pocket by £65.50, but I do have a qualified list of over 50 people to continue promoting to. Whether or not I manage to make a profit out of the list remains to be seen. I may be down, but I’m certainly not out!
Technorati Tags: Google AdWords, list building, AWeber, GetResponse
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Hey Will,
I was wondering when you’d post up the results of your experiment
Where do you get the £3 cost per sign up from though? £99 ad spend, 62 sign ups = £1.60 per subscriber. If you want to be more accurate, it’s 52 maintained signups so £1.90 per subscriber, which gives you a loss of around £1.25 per lead.
Will you continue running the campaign at £0.37 p/c?
Also, how much split testing of the landing page did you do? Conversions at 16% isn’t bad, but on the page I’m blogging about (see link above) I’ve just broken the 37% barrier, so higher rates certainly are possible (I hope to reach 50% eventually!).
Thanks for posting it up, I’ve been planning on using AdWords in the near future. This will make great reference material.
The £3 per sign-up was reported by Google, but the figures weren’t going to be spot on because I didn’t switch on conversion tracking until well into the campaign. By that time, some people had already converted into sign-ups.
I didn’t actually make any edits to the copy on the landing page. That, and tweaking the ad copy, is something I’d probably do if I continued the campaign.
For the time being, I’m not going to continue the campaign until I review the newsletters and find more products and services to promote.
The problem with targeting a niche that doesn’t yet embrace the Internet and informational products in a big way is that it’s not as easy to find things to promote.
37% is bloody good! I’ll have to head on over to your blog for a nosey