OK, please forgive the play on words.

We have seen a great deal of money spent on AdWords by our clients, some of them are addicted to the top line revenue and some of them can't stand the thought of a revenue decline. Invariably almost all of them lose money on their AdWords campaign.

A quick way to determine if your AdWords campaign is worth the money you are spending is to take your profit per visitor (not profit per order) from AdWords and subtract it from your cost per click in AdWords. In most cases we have seen our clients in the negative. Most of our clients even are negative when we subtract revenue per visit from cost per click. 

When does losing money on AdSense make sense?

Cost per acquisition for a new client is easy to absorb if you are in a business that can build a long term relationship with the customer. If you have a lifetime value assigned to a customer than you are ahead of the game and quickly determine how much you can loose to bring that customer to your website.

For long term success you need to be able to attract more visitor through organic search and marketing efforts that you attract via AdWords. If you don't have a plan for this transition, we can help.

Advertising on Facebook may be the best bargain on the Internet if you have a product or service you can tightly target to an audience. To be perfectly clear it is a bargain even if you don't tightly target but since I am all about the ROI, targeting is key.

Rather than bore you with a lot of marketing jargon I will simply give you a recent campaign we ran on facebook which will show you how to use Facebook to target a specific audience with a specific offering.

Facebook and Cowboy Boots

We recently set up a campaign to market Nocona's (owned by Berkshire Hathaway AKA Warren Buffet) Collegiate Boot Series. The Nocona Collegiate Boot Collection are very high-end cowboy boots that are customized to show logos of some leading universities in the South West. (not sure why they didn't do Harvard Cowboy Boots). Nocona launched the line of boots with three (3) universities; Texas Tech, Texas Christian University (TCU), and Oklahoma State U. (OSU).

To market these boots on Facebook we setup 3 separate campaigns that had 4 targeted ads per campaign.

First we setup a campaign for each university. Inside the campaign we further segmented the audience by gender, then we split those folks into current students of the university and alumni.

For instance, for Texas Tech we created an Add that was only showed to Texas Tech Male Alumni - The ad showed a high-end Cowboy boot with the Texas Tech Logo. The text was specific to the market. For our second ad for Texas Tech males we targeted the guys still in school. For the students we featured a less expensive boot and the text of the ad was geared towards the male undergrad. We repeated the same steps for the Texas Tech female audience.

That is great targeting. You would expect that we would have paid $7-20 per thousand impressions for that granular level of advertising. Are you sitting down? We paid $0.30 per thousand. We had incredible click through, normal conversion and huge ROI on the ads. Profit on the ads exceeded $230 for every $10 we spent. Try that on google.