Wedding and Portrait Photographer - Increased Clicks and Reduced Costs For Google AdWords

John Wood Photography started in 2008 and quickly set up a website to advertise Wedding and Portrait Photographic services.  The only problem was that no one could find the site because it takes both time and money to rise in the Google Search Rankings.  This is a typical problem for all new websites and Google Ads is one quick solution to this problem

Setting up a Google Ad account was easy and within a matter of hours people were clicking on the Google adverts and visiting the site.  Success, or so it appeared until the cost of the clicks was added up.  All sorts of people were clicking on the adverts and most of them had no intention of buying a service.  The advert had simply appeared at the top of the Google Search page and people had clicked on it.

The solution was to refine the search criteria for the adverts.  So when a local town or county was entered in the search words then and only then would the advert appear.  This meant that only people who specifically wanted to find a photographer in the local area would see the advert. 

The other change was to stop the 'Content Network' adverts.  This option allows your adverts to appear in other sites such as eBay.  If someone searches for photographic equipment then the advert may appear on that page.  As the person was not looking for a photographer, it is very unlikely that they would pay for a photographic service and therefore paying for their click does not make sense.

These two steps made a huge reduction in the number of impressions (ie the number of times the advert was shown) and also the number of clicks fell significantly, which reduced the costs.

The number of clicks per day was then low and the cost of actually getting those clicks was as high as £2 each because of the high demand for those clicks - it seemed like every wedding photographer in the area was using the same key search words and we were simply trying to out-bidding each other to get the clicks.

The competition for the County in the search phrase is much higher than the competition for the local towns.  So separating the county searches into their own campaign meant that they could have a higher maximum cost per click and all the town searches could have a lower maximum cost per click in their own campaign.  This reduced the average cost per click, which mean that there were more clicks per day for the same budget.

The next step was to make the adverts more relevant to the searches.  By creating different adverts for each county or town, this gave the adverts a higher quality score and made them more likely to appear.  It also increased the likelihood of a potential customer clicking on them.  By using different ad variations it became obvious that if someone search for a specific town then they  were more likely to click on the adverts which mentioned that town.

The subsequent step was to generate a lot of different key words.  There will not be many people using each of these phrases and so the competition for them and the cost per click is relatively low.  But the chances of your advert appearing are high.  These relatively unlikely key word phrases generate the cheapest clicks - you just need to have a lot of them.

The combination of these steps has significantly reduced the average cost per click and can either cut my costs or increase the number of clicks for the same total cost.

Please feel free to visit the website and let me know if you think it was worth all this effort.