Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

Although we are based in Rugby, Warwickshire, we launch anything up to 10 websites per month for our customers around England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Being in the centre of the UK in Rugby is a benefit as the majority of the UK’s population live within about 60-90 minutes of travel. When you are on the Internet, trading online and advertising to get traffic & sales, you don’t know if your competitors are across the street, overseas or in the same area of the country.

So when it comes to Google Adword advertising, I thought I’d pass on a few comments on our recent experiences from our customers.

A customer launched a new site, wanted more traffic and started Google Adword advertising on a set budget per day. Within the first day, his budget was being used up before the end of the day. However, although this generated clickthrus, it didn’t result in huge number of sales. For the sales it did generate, the amount of profit from the sales wasn’t enough to cover the online advertising - resulting in a loss being made.

Zarr Retailer is a comprehensive ecommerce package but also includes a significant amount of management information to measure and track sales, clickthrus etc. I think that the information it provides is essential if you want to trade at a profit online.

By using the information in Zarr Retailer, we were able to see that the majority of clickthrus came during the midday to 5pm timeslot, and from these, a tiny percentage resulted in sales. I’m of the opinion that it was our customer’s competitors using up his Adword budget by clicking regulary during the day. Google obviously put in measures to Adwords to stop this happening, but I’m not convinced that it can be stopped or wiped out completely. Outside office hours your competitors will have gone home too so can’t use up your budget.

We suggested to our customer, who was running the site, that they switch-off the Google adwords between midday and 6pm and only run it outside those hours. Since then, the Google Adword spend has reduced by 70%, and sales have increased by 20%.

Obviously, this may not work for all sites, but if you do find that your Google Adword budget disappears before your eyes, leaving you with little or no sales, try just enabling it outside office hours and see what happens!