AdWords thoughts

AdWords have developed into a highly dynamic advertising medium that has a great flexibility, but of course they aren't perfect for every product, or every segment.

For example, one of our clients has a swimming pool maintenance product and when he wants to sell to the pool owner then AdWords is almost certainly one of the options he should consider. However, if that same client hoped to target swimming pool installers and maintenance services in order to encourage them to recommend his product then there are almost certainly better and more effective ways of reaching those kinds of businesses.

B2B websites exist and serve a vital function, but many of them won their Internet audience by investing in more conventional marketing channels. If my client had an AdWord for his pool maintenance product which landed on a page which made it clear that the minimum purchase was several thousand dollars then many of the people who clicked would move away as quickly as possible. If he uses heavy pre-qualification in the AdWord to get across the message that he is interested only in B2B sales, then the price of clicks will have to rise substantially in order to get any reasonable exposure for the Ad. That doesn't necessarily mean the Ad will be uneconomic, simply that the economics will be very different than for a B2C Ad.