Last Sunday I started advertising Preceden via Google AdWords. I’ve played around with it before, but never seriously.
I wrote a few ads, picked a bunch of timeline-maker keywords to target, set my daily budget to $3 (and a day or two later $10) and flipped the switch.
Week 1 Results
Impressions: 18,439
Clicks: 564 (3.06%)
Visitors: 548
CPC: $0.13
Cost = $72.16
Sign Ups: 3
Revenue: $87
Profit: $14.84 (21% ROI)
Thoughts
The variance of this whole process is extremely high. 3/548 is a 0.54% conversion rate. Good, bad… I don’t know. It seems bad, but I don’t really have a lot to compare it to.
The good news is that the campaign made money. Not much, but something. Had 2 people upgraded instead of 3, it would have lost money (-20% ROI). Had one additional person signed up, the return would be exceptional (61% ROI). This whole thing makes you appreciate how small improvements to your site, which in turn might convince a few more people to upgrade, can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
Next steps: Refine A/B tests, bump daily budget to $30, and see what happens.
Here are the keyword details:
Matt Mazur 
Hey Matt,
Great write up.
I’ll be starting a Google Adwords campaign soon to see if their is a market for a product i’m considering to develop.
I’m sure you used Google External to test the potential search queries before your campaign, how did those figures compare to the real?
Cheers,
###
Hey Rory. They match pretty well, actually. No big surprises.
I’m also learning about Negative Keywords, which let you specify that you don’t want certain terms or phrases to appear anywhere in the queries that your ads show up on. For example, I added the exact phrase “timeline” to my negative keywords list because I don’t want people who just search for “timeline” to see an ad for Preceden (because they probably aren’t trying to make one). Using the exact phrase ensures that my ads will still show up on queries like “make a timeline” though.
Lots of data to play with…