Google Adwords is not the best use of your advertising budget

As part of helping a friend with an online store, we set up Google Adwords to drive traffic to the store. Our first  focus was on a designer perfume brand. Her margins were enough on that product so we could spend some advertising dollars and provide a  discount to customers. As long as we made a few sales, we’d be net positive.

What we found was surprising. As we expected, customers liked the offer and were buying the product. It’s not a huge volume of searches on  google, and the product is priced at around $145. There have been about 6 sales in the 3 weeks of Ads. Not a huge amount of volume, but enough  to test a theory. However, Google was taking a big chunk of the  potential profit that was on the table. We ended up paying google around $30 per conversion.

I’m hypothesizing that in the long run when the store contains more  products and is receiving organic traffic, overall costs will go down  since people may have shopping carts with more than one item. And, as  long as we’re net positive on every adwords sale, why not run the ads?  These costs are cutting it close though!

What can we do about it?

Paying google $30 for a customer does nothing for customer loyalty. But, providing that discount to existing customers does.

Why not run a customer appreciation campaign that gives existing  customers a good discount? They’ll probably tell their friends and  family members and instead of converting faceless googlers, you’re  reconverting existing customers and deepening their engagement. I  recently saw the quote below in a presentation by Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos

"People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel."

Whenever I receive a nice discount from a store I’ve shopped at, that makes me feel pretty good, right?

We’ll be experimenting with twitter marketing and email marketing to try to have a deeper engagement with customers (and thus more online  sales). I’d like to try to translate the wonderful way my friend interacts  with customers in the store into an online experience.