Adwords Yea Or Ney

Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Google Adwords. I read some hubs and found some interesting thoughts.

One thing to consider is is it worth it? I compose and record my own music and have my own studio. I have my own site under my own domain. Here's my problem: I have invented the genres of Rockoetry (music), and Tatoetry (writing). These are very specific keywords which I own. Great right? Wrong! If no one knows these words they will never be searched. So I have to figure out how to get them known. Using Adwords for those keywords would be a waste of money since they are only searched an average of 16 times a month; most by me trying to find out how they are performing. Related keywords are too broad or have too much competition, or they are too expensive to use for Google Adwords.

Consider this: If you start an account using a $100 voucher and you pick a word which costs $.10 a click, then you get 1000 targeted visitors to your site. Lets just say for the sake of the exercise 5% of those people are willing to make a purchase (actual number is more around >1%). If those 50 people make a $10 purchase (like one of my CD's, or books) that's $500. Now, I have my books and music listed on Amazon so that means I get maybe $2 royalty from the sale. I just broke even for doing all of that work. If I had physical inventory (lets just say I had 50 CD's that cost me my time and a buck to print up; books are out of the question) I made $450. So Adwords would be a good investment.

Let's just say that the figures in the above example are true. The reality of the whole purchase goes like this: The targeted person of interest clicks on your Adword ad. They go to your site, then they have to figure out which title they want to purchase (if any, because most will just be browsing). Let's say they found something they want to purchase. They then have to click on that title which will take them to Amazon sign in (if they are not already logged in), and then they can purchase from there. So there's five clicks from the initial Google Adwords ad. That translates to five times of being asked "Are you sure" before making the final purchase.

Now consider this: Amazon does not allow for paid traffic which means I can't set up Google Adwords to take them directly to my Amazon Store front. This would cut out revenue of the hosting sites by eliminating the need for building a site. (Sure you could build a free site, I've got many). I don't like the odds still, so I optimize my site to funnel traffic to make purchases. If I could get rid of two steps, there's still three times the customer is being asked if they are sure they want to make this purchase.

Just a side note: Why do you think they are willing to give away so many vouchers for $75 and $100?

So is using Googles Adwords worth it? Not in my opinion.