Google Adwords - Translating clicks and impressions into sales.

This week I've been monitoring my adwords campaign and I would have to say that I'm pretty good at getting clicks and impressions on my ads and not so good at getting sales.

My initial campaign had 5 different running ads with over 60 keywords I was targeting and a daily budget of $9.67 a day.  It had 4000 impressions and 40 clicks on Wednesday when I re-evaluated my campaign.  Astonishingly I found out from Google's search term reports (a report that shows the keywords people are actually searching) that I was receiving a lot of clicks from the wrong audience. People were clicking on my ads looking for relationship advice, tips, teenage dating, etc and it was costing me a lot of money - over $20.00 in clicks for people that I was not even targeting.

I also noticed that a few people were clicking on my ads that were searching for quizzes or tests which is one of my products but no the one I was trying to push people to.  I started an adgroup for tests and targeted some of the keywords people were searching for and I had over 30 clicks in 1 day (compared with 5 days of running and 50 clicks total) also my costs for those keywords were much much lower.  However, my keywords are still not translating into sales.  So I either have the wrong audience still or my landing pages are not functioning as well as I want them to.  I know there's a lot of data and I just have to sift through it to try and identify where things are a problem.  I'm also considering giving a free offering of a portion of my products that people can try out for free and then purchase.  I wonder if people are not wanting to spend the money I'm asking for without actually trying out the product.  However, this will take some time to build so I'm not sure I'll be able to get it done in the context of my class but I can look at it as a future plan for my business.

Overall I am very happy with what I have learned about google adwords.  I've found that by narrowing my focus I have a much higher click through rate.  For example a keyword I was targeting that only has 70 searches a month, has a click through rate of 20%, others with volume under 500 all have much higher click through rate as well.  These people stay on my site longer (as I can see through google analytics) and look at more pages.  Somehow I just have to figure out how to get them to convert (hence my free offering idea).

Again I know now know how to get traffic to my site, I just need to find the right audience / right product fit.  I may find out eventually that my products just aren't wanted / desired but I think based on my click behaviors that there is a market I just to have to refine the message and the product to meet people's true needs.  I'm excited about the journey ahead!