Hi there,

I launched a new anniversary gift website a few weeks ago and have been using Adwords to advertise online.

I'm still learning, but my campaigns seem to be going pretty well with a low bounce rate and decent conversions, but I wondered whether I am spending enough? At present I spend about £5 per day, but feel I might not be reaching a wide enough audience.

Is there a recognised amount of hits that I should be aiming for each day as a new business? How do other people organise their adword campaigns?

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Al

Hi - the way I would suggest approaching this is to work backwards from your business targets. How much do you want to sell? How much can you afford to pay for each new customer (CPA)? There are no hard and fast rules on what's achievable but if this is a new-ish campaign you can almost certainly improve it! And £5 per day for a gift related site doesn't sound much to me, with online gifts being big business. 

Armed with your goals, your order values and the data Adwords provides you can figure out whether you should, or can afford, to spend more.

It's hard to say much more without knowing the details of your campaign however if for example you can see a very high number of impressions for a particular phrase that seems to be converting relatively well (are you using Adwords conversion tracking  - very useful, nay, essential), is there scope to drive more traffic to your site from that phrase through e.g. bidding the phrase to a higher position, tweaking the ad copy, using related phrases derived from it and so forth. Google has also just launched a tool that will allow you to test various configurations of your landing page for conversion effectiveness.

Hope this helps

Iain

In most cases a small increase each time to expand your advertisement time is the safe option, your £5 a day as mentioned could also only be covering limited hours and maybe not the best hours for your business.

A cautious start is always wise as adwords spend can easier get out of control, but with careful monitoring of spend and your ROI success can be achieved .

One of the most effective ways I have used to control smaller budgets is to split your products by campaign then you can control spend on each product as each one with have its own profit margin.

Apologies for the slim message above - just getting the hang of this thread.

Seriously, thanks for the advice though.

I'm definitely going to investigate adwords conversion tracking. Also, going to work on some tighter campaigns and try to get my goals established so that I measure my spend more effectively.

A website selling gifts will typically have a visitor to sale conversion rate of between 1% and 2%. Based on the assumption that your site performs well, with an average conversion rate of 2%, and here I'm making another guess.... that your average cost-per-click is about 30p, your daily spend of £5 will generate 16 visitors. At a 2% conversion rate and a daily spend of £5, I would expect your campaign to generate less than one sale per day - in fact, one sale every three days. Can your business sustain itself at this rate of sales?

You need to work out how many sales you need per day to support the business, and work backwards to define what your daily campaign budget should be. Then test the campaign with tracking code to find out what your actual conversion rate is. If you get above 2% you should be very pleased with yourself!