Hello Everyone,
Has any one put some real money into google adwords focusing on local search and your keywords?
Marketing companies suggest that for every dollar you spend you should have a 5 dollar return.
Sounds to go to be true. That suggests If I spend 1K I will get approximately 5 K in business.
i interested in hearing about any negative or positive stories.
thanks so much
We are a tradeshow, exhibit and display company with a national focus on clients. In 2015 we spun off our graphics department into its own division and marketed it locally to Atlanta to keep the graphics department busy during our slow times in the summer and winter to keep us busy. We went to web.com and had them create a leads site and utilize google adwords additionally.
We had a $2000 budget each month. Over 8 months, we may have generated $2500 in revenue. Depending on the day/time, we would show up in the top 3-5 google results for the adwords we focused on, ahead of the franchises and companies that I knew had a big presence in our market for the products we were offering. 85% of the calls were tire-kickers, clients that had no idea what they needed, and clients that were out of our service area.
It was poorly executed... We bear some responsibility in that because we focused on the entire Atlanta area, which is waaaay too big. We would get calls from 100+ miles away for small jobs. We should have figured out a way to focus more locally. Couple all of this with a bad choice for a salesperson and we ceased marketing our "Graphics Division" 8 months into the endeavor.
I do believe that adwords can work. We are rebuilding our corporate website currently with a local web/marketing company that is optimizing the site to comply with recent google ranking changes that will help drive more traffic to the site. It's expensive and smaller companies probably would struggle with the budget needed to really drive the results needed to get the number of QUALIFIED leads the justify the costs. Regardless, it's going to be a numbers game. I am sure that there will be many more UN-Qualified leads coming in from the web overall.
My advice would be to try Facebook first and see how that works for local business generation. I don't know what the market looks like in Vancouver but I would take some time and research how your competition is marketing themselves... Google, Facebook, or word of mouth. If they have a large presence on google, they are either spending a lot of money on Adwords, or they have been able to generate enough organic searches that push them higher in the search rankings. If they are active on Facebook, have lots of "Friends" and reviews and you know them to be doing a good amount of business, that may be an indicator of what they are doing to market themselves.
I left out google reviews in this discussion, but I have found myself relying more on those myself although I will still do my own research rather than rely solely on the recommendation of the reviews. I took a quick look at Yelp regarding sign companies and while there are a few reviews, its nothing like other local businesses and restaurants.
Sorry for such a long reply... I just think that a lot of thought and consideration needs to go into your decision to throw $$$ into the cloud for Adwords. What comes back down to you may not be what's expected.... Regardless- Good Luck to you!
