I got a $100 credit from Google to try Adwords. I tried it, put a very high bid on CPC, got a whole bunch of clicks, but only a a few calls, which I can’t even be sure were attributed to AdWords.
So, I paused my campaigns on Thursday before they started actually charging my credit card for a service that wasn’t necessarily doing anything for me. I MAY put an ad up with a bid of maybe $0.10 instead of the $3 I had been bidding to show up over Service Magic and Fish… just to keep it going.
Today, my organic search results took a MAJOR nosedive. I didn’t change anything on my site or anything. In most cases I was #3 for my keywords, right behind All County and NJ Window Washing, now I’m like #10.
I haven’t dropped on Yahoo (#1, probably because they host my site) and Bing (#7 because honestly, I haven’t focused on Bing yet).
Has anyone had an experience like this with Adwords? Is Google ****ed at me because I paused my ads?
On a related note, would ad programs like AdSense hurt, boost or so nothing for ranking?
I would not worry about it if I were you. Google fluctuates alot. Adwords and organic search are 2 different animals. Just continue your SEO, unless of course youre hooked up with paid links somehow, and google has devalued your links. Otherwise, wait a couple weeks and see what happens.
1 in sponsored links is what I’ve been bidding for, but I’m starting to see that its all a timing thing. My ads are now only dropped on certain days, and NEVER at night lol. Seems to be working out niceley that way
No they make it clear that they would never do this. I have paused my CPC campaign many times and it has never affected my organic results. If it’s happening to you it is because of something else.
Also, if you want to find out which calls are coming from adwords and which calls are coming from your other sources of advertising get a google voice number and use it for your google adwords ad. The google voice number will announce to you that the caller is calling your google voice number and then you know it came from adwords.
the only tricky thing is that you have to point your adwords ads to a new page in your site like yoursite.com/adwords.html or something because you have to switch all the phone numbers on that page to your google voice number. And then you need to break all the links going to other pages in your site that might have your old phone number. Because if the adwords user clicks through to your site and look at several of your pages they will most likely see your non google voice number and may call that and then you will not know that that customer is a lead from adwords.
Or you can do what we do and duplicate your entire website only change the phone number on each page to your google voice number. register a new domain ($10 a year) and host it on your hosting account (should be free with your hosting service, if it’s not switch hosting services). Just make sure you set up a .htaccess file to keep the google bot out otherwise they might crawl it and hit you with duplicate content. If you do it this way it has several advantages - you know all calls that come in are in fact from google adwords, and you can set up a seperate analytics account to track the data of your adwords site seperately from your organic site.
Also, some other trick with adwords. Put your phone number in your ad. Google allows this and it gives the person the opportunity to call you without even clicking through and charging you for the click. You can even bid high enough to be on the first page but low enough to not get clicked on this will put your phone number on the first page of google results with few clicks to pay for. Google does however have minimum bid amounts and it’ll be much more then .10 per click unfortunately.
To be honest we have found google adwords to be great for the recurring services we offer but we do not use them any more for window cleaning services because the price to get a customer is too high and there is not enough profit margin and most of our window cleaning customers are hard to sell on a recurring service.
