Does anybody out there expect to be getting enquires now?

[Chalky]

What experience do you have of AdWords, Paolo? Do you use them, and have you any feeling for their effectiveness in terms of bookings, as opposed to clicks? Is £1 per day a big enough budget to get reasonable visibility?

Chalky

[Guest3]

We've tried Adwords..but you have to bid against others to be listed at the top and it's cost per click. For example we tried Adwords for the villa, we started out with 10 euro cents per click and our villa was not even on the first page...so we upped it to 50 cents per click and it was in the bottom three. All in all it worked out quite expensive for us because of the cost per click system.

[paolo]

What experience do you have of AdWords, Paolo? Do you use them, and have you any feeling for their effectiveness in terms of bookings, as opposed to clicks? Is £1 per day a big enough budget to get reasonable visibility?

I run a number of AdWords campaigns year-round, and I change the wording according to the time of year, or just to see if I can improve click-throughs with different wording.

I do not know how many enquiries come from an AdWords click because I don't have the capability to track that. I think that asking enquirers how they came by your site would probably give you misleading data, because they often can't remember and/or may not differentiate between a Google search result and an AdWords ad.

£1 per day is fine, I just wouldn't bother targeting the most popular search phrases for your location. Try for phrases that can put you on page 1 of Google for no more than £0.15 per click. That means in the top 8 positions.

Remember that the more refined the phrases you target, the likelier the searcher will want what you have to offer. For instance, 'Avignon rentals' as opposed to 'France rentals' or 'Provence rentals'. And of course the more refined the phrase, the less you will pay per click.

Another reason to run an AdWords campaign, even if you get nothing out of it and spend a few pounds/euros/dollars, is that you will find out how popular certain search phrases are (if you are paying enough to get in the top 8 results). This is handy because there will be phrases you may not have thought of that you can optimise pages of your site for.

[Alan Knighting]

Paolo,

£1 per day is not nothing. It is £365 per annum which is enough to pay for 3 or 4 rental site entries.

Another reason to run an AdWords campaign, even if you get nothing out of it and spend a few pounds/euros/dollars, is that you will find out how popular certain search phrases

If I will get nothing out of it I don't see the point in doing it. Sorry, I'm selling holidays not discovering phrases.

Regards

Alan

[Chalky]

I agree with Alan, £1 per day is not 'nothing', but it does depend on the success rate, and the relevance of the 'clicks'. On one advertising site my listing has generated 533 views and 5 bookings - roughly a 1% conversion rate. If that listing had cost me £100 per year for the last 3 years then each booking would have cost £60.

If each Google AdWord click is £0.15, with the same 1% conversion rate the cost per booking would be £15, which is pretty good value by comparison.

As Paolo says, a lot depends on getting the target phrases right so that the 'clickers' are genuinely looking for what you have to offer.

Presumably you can dip in and out of AdWords so that you don't bother at times of year when you're not expecting any enquiries?

By the way, Paolo, excellent web site - I've spent far too much time browsing the various forums over the past few days when I ought to have been doing other things:!:

Chalky

[vrooje]

Well, £1 is not nothing, but presumably you're not going to test it for an entire year to see if it works. £30 is also not nothing, but it isn't a lot to spend refining your keywords to create a potent AdWords campaign (in my opinion).

I should also say that I haven't done any of this yet -- AdWords is next on our list of advertising methods.

[marcus]

We set a maximum of 1 euro per day when we tried AdWords, but the actual cost was never more than about 0.15 euros.
We stopped after a couple of months beause we were no longer looking for bookings for 2005 but I think we never had a successful booking from this route (3 months approximately).
Any amount is expensive if it gets no results! better to focus on getting your own site well ranked I think, so it appears in the search engines for free.
But we might try again in the spring...

[paolo]

£1 a day is not nothing, and I wouldn't suggest trying out AdWords for a year. Maybe 2-4 weeks will do for a trial.

Alan, you're not testing search phrases yet, but when you get into creating your own website this winter, they should be of interest. It depends on how you decide to do it. You can either write the pages naturally, and let the search engines make what they will of it, or you can try to optimise pages so that you will rank well for certain phrases. If the latter, AdWords is really the best way to find out what real people are typing into Google.

[paolo]

On one advertising site my listing has generated 533 views and 5 bookings - roughly a 1% conversion rate. If that listing had cost me £100 per year for the last 3 years then each booking would have cost £60.

Those 533 views will probably include visits by search engine spiders, which could be a surprising proportion of the total. If it was 533 visits over 3 years, your conversion ratio should be revised to ??? who knows, but it could be as high as 100%!

[Alan Knighting]

Paolo,

Point taken. If and when I have my own website I will probably become extremely interested in search phrases. After all, I will want my website to do something for me, i.e. generate bookings, and not just be a dormant respository of information to which I can direct people. They must be able to find it on their own.

Regards

Alan

[Guest3]

Well my husband is the brains behind our website and he's very tuned into 'phrases' and search optimisation to get our website found.

If you do the following search on msn.co.uk our website is listed on the first page

'golf courses'
'villa fuengirola'
'beaches costa del sol'
'helle hollis' (and on this one today we're above the actual Helle Hollis website!)
'villa torreblanca'

We're only just getting to be found on Google and this year we have had bookings direct from people finding us on msn search.

[paolo]

I like MSN search, it lets our little sites rank as high as the listing sites, because it doesn't seem to take account of inbound links (which is what Google does).

But there must be something wrong with a search engine that returns a villa in the top 10 of a search for 'golf courses'! Incidentally today you are not in the top 200 for this phrase

Top 10 for 'villa fuengirola' is excellent though. Now all we have to do is wait for MSN to overtake Google. Who would bet against Bill Gates?

[vrooje]

Who would bet against Bill Gates?

I would, though it might be wishful thinking!

[Hells Bells]

If I search on MSN for ski apartment+serre chevalier it's top of the list this morning .

[F1REFLY999]

Got 2 bookings today for next summer, but looking to receive more for over the winter months