I was just wondering how many of you do PPC, and what kind of experiences you have had with it? How much per month do you spend? What kind of return are you getting? Anything I might want to know about this before diving in?

Budget brides.

There are apparently some areas where costs are nominal (15 cents per click) - but here it's $3-$5 per click to get $1500 weddings. So expect to pay a lot.

(And if you ever see my ad - don't click on it or I'll send you a bill.)

I think when you start from scratch and dont have an established customer base it's a great way to get started. Me and my shooting buddy set up last year and didnt have any clients at all but throwing a website up doing lots of SEO and also using google adwords has gotten us as many weddings as we want to shoot for this year (20+) and quite a few bookings already for next year (about 7)

Weve now worked our way to the top of the page for our targetted search terms in google so are getting lots more organic enquiries as a result of that and so we have cut back our adwords budget to just £10 per month (the spend is always less than that) and so were not being displayed all the time now or being displayed at the top but we do still see some clicks through it and then enquiries.

What we spent on google adwords was definitely the best marketting spend we have made in the last 6 months, that and a very small wedding fayre is where virtually all of our clients have originated from and then knock on clients from those people refering us have also started to come in now.

Everybody wants to get to the holy grail of 100% referal business, but until you get there your missing out big style if your not near the top of page 1 on a google search for "photographer your area" and other keywords, using goggle adwords will help offset that whilst your working on your Search engine optimisation.

Google and Yahoo ad words can also be abused.

Here in the Indy market, we've got one photographer who uses other photographer's names as his keyword.

For example, if you're in central indiana and google my name, you'll see a result of my photography biz site returned in the left side column. And the other photog's ad link in the right hand column.

He's got this keyed to a geographical setting, so if your IP address (where you connect to the internet from) isn't in Central Indiana, you won't see his ad.

Unfortunately, this has caused some of the affected photogs to purchase their own names as adwords at a higher price, just to stay above this joker on the adwords side.

EDIT: I just did my morning google routine to see who's using who -- and he either took his adds down, or he hit his spending limit on his account!

Geeeesh!

So, this just shows how to abuse adwords in a legal but un-ethical way to get ahead.

--- In answer to your first question, the ads do bring traffic to your site if you get the right keywords, but, as John Pointed out, clicking on a competitior's ad link is not cool.

I use the google ads and as far as I'm concerned they give me a great bang for the money spent. On average I spend around $15/month

I couldn't tell you directly if anyone that has clicked on the ad has booked but if you think one person does then the turn around on the ad investment is awesome!

I use it, I get a good number of hits I otherwise wouldn't get (right now, I'm buried at 250 in google, I hope that changes). However, I can't say I've gotten an inquiry from it yet, even though I've been using it since Oct or so. So I'm questioning why I do it, even though I am getting hits. I definitely want to redouble my efforts and improve my SEO so that I don't have to rely on adwords

I've just recentl;y tried adwords. he cost is minimal so far, but so are the results.

I'm gotten 4000 impression for 8 clicks.

Maybe I should change my keywords?

we spend what I think is a lot on our ppc, $200US some months. We've been using it for 6 months and have booked 5 weddings through it in this time, so it has paid for itself in spades. Most of our business is via referral, but even 4 or 5 bookings via google per year is worth it for us.

My average click-through rate is less than one percent. By some strange coincidence, today, it was over 6%. It shows there are least some dipshits on here.

PLEASE DO NOT CLICK another photographer's link in the right hand column of google or yahoo.

Who ever is listed there pays for each person that clicks! Sometimes that can be a few dollars for each click!

Just google their name, and click the regular link in the left hand column.

Good enough, John? I'm always willing to help a fellow PJer.

So how does the process work? I'm a bit clueless about how you set it up and what key words to use.

I want to reach into some neighboring markets as I have priced myself out of my local market.....for the most part.

The set up is pretty easy. Just google "ad words", it will walk you through the process, you pick your geographic regions. It should help with keyword selection if you give it some examples.

then, it rotates your "ad" through with the others who have bid on the same key words. If you bid $1 for a keyword, you'll be below the folks who bid $1.01 and above for the same keyword.

If a viewer clicks on your link in the "Sponsored Links" colum, then you get charged your bid price. They add up all the charges for the month, and then ding your credit card on the billing day.

Did that explain it well enough?

Sounds simple Troy, thanks.

I guess I thought it was a fixed price per click. Can you set up a monthly budget?

yeah, you can set up a budget. obviously, if you set a higher budget your ad is shown more often.

It was up to 9% today - so I stopped running it. (But don't worry - I'll track down the ip addresses.)

FWIW: The dude that is using my name, as well as the other names of photogs in this area as his keywords in Google, says that this piggyback marketing is the wave of the future. And, because Bella does it to get their banners on top of everyone's search, that it's cool for him to do so as well.

Plus, he says that this is part of a special type of adword campaign. The cost per click is pennies instead of dollars.

I've been all over the google ad words site, trying to find this special "use your competitors as keywords" program and cannot find it. If I can't find it, then I can't read the TOS and make sure that what he's doing is kosher.

Anyone got any ideas on what it is?

Major companies have sued Google for allowing the same thing with their trademarks. You may be able to get it stopped just by complaining.

The only cheaper form of ppc that I know of is to use the content network. However, there certainly isn't much competition in most places for specific business names in searches, so the cost would usually be a lot lower than for anything else.

Another method is to create an "authority" site - one which provides advice (or pseudo-advice) about wedding photography - making sure to mention all your competitor's names frequently. In fact, you can create a network of them - and even buy software that creates sites like this for you (of course, the content is pretty much garbage - but the search engines don't know that).

I'm always so cautious when clicking on a link to a photographer. I don't think a lot of people think about it or realize that it costs them when you do that in some places.