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Have you ever used Google Ads for your own marketing purposes? How effective is it?
Thread poster: Niraja Nanjundan (X)
Madeleine MacRae Klintebo
Madeleine MacRae Klintebo  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 08:57
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First of all you have to Jun 29, 2010

To get your terminology correct. AdWords and AdSense are two different beats.

John Fossey wrote:

I tried Google Adwords for a while and also had quite a lot of traffic but no buyers. I'm convinced that using Adwords successfully is a whole science on its own, and takes a webmaster or expert to focus on it. Where I've heard success stories has involved a separate focused landing page (or even website) for each ad, getting visitors to sign up to an email newsletter (rather than people buying anything right away), continuously adding content to the website or newsletter (to hang on to contacts until they're ready), and so on. For those of us who would rather just translate, I question whether its a viable way to get business.


My in-house company (non-agency) has roughly a dozen people working on SEO for around 10 languages. However, paid-for links is a small part of this team's work, natural search results always beat paid-for adverts.



[Edited at 2010-06-29 20:17 GMT]

[Edited at 2010-06-29 22:01 GMT]


 
John Fossey
John Fossey  Identity Verified
Canada
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Adwords, not Adsense Jun 29, 2010

Madeleine MacRae Klintebo wrote:

To get your terminology correct. AdWords and AdSense are to different beats.


Just to be clear, this thread is about getting business using Adwords, not monetizing using Adsense.


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
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Longterm versus once-off clients with Adwords Jun 29, 2010

Egidijus Slepetys wrote:
At the beginning, nothing happened. But then he received so many jobs, that he had to turn it off. Till today a few of these clients (agencies?) are his main clients.


It is impossible to predict which of your new clients will turn out to be longterm clients. But longterm clients are quite valuable, and they find you through all kinds of sources.

My own Adwords "campaign" ran for less than a week. My advert was displayed 30 000 times, and was clicked 120 times. My average cost per click was EUR 0.04, and my average cost per thousand displays was EUR 0.15. The total cost of the 120 visits to my web site was EUR 5.00. Two of those visits turned into (albeit very small) jobs for private clients who didn't contact me for further jobs yet.

Alex Eames's book contains a simplistic description of what it costs to get a client. The example amount he mentions is about EUR 35.00 per client. This is what every new client costs if you divide the total cost of your marketing efforts by the number of new clients you get from your marketing efforts.

In my very short Adwords campaign above, the average cost of my new clients wasn't EUR 35.00 or EUR 25.00 or even EUR 15.00. It was EUR 2.50 per new client. If it costs EUR 35.00 per new client, it makes sense to try to find longterm clients, but if it costs only EUR 2.50 per new client, then it doesn't matter even if every client uses your services only once.


 
Madeleine MacRae Klintebo
Madeleine MacRae Klintebo  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
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Not an exact science, but Jun 29, 2010

Samuel Murray wrote:

It is impossible to predict which of your new clients will turn out to be longterm clients.


If you have the time and experience, not to mention the data, you can get a pretty good idea.


 
Niraja Nanjundan (X)
Niraja Nanjundan (X)  Identity Verified
Local time: 14:27
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TOPIC STARTER
Thanks, everyone! Jun 30, 2010

Interesting comments, but I don't think Google Adwords (or Adsense) is something I would look into myself.

Have a good day!

Niraja


 
3ADE shadab
3ADE shadab
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Agree with Madeleine ! Jun 30, 2010

Madeleine MacRae Klintebo wrote:

To get your terminology correct. AdWords and AdSense are two different beats.

John Fossey wrote:

I tried Google Adwords for a while and also had quite a lot of traffic but no buyers. I'm convinced that using Adwords successfully is a whole science on its own, and takes a webmaster or expert to focus on it. Where I've heard success stories has involved a separate focused landing page (or even website) for each ad, getting visitors to sign up to an email newsletter (rather than people buying anything right away), continuously adding content to the website or newsletter (to hang on to contacts until they're ready), and so on. For those of us who would rather just translate, I question whether its a viable way to get business.


My in-house company (non-agency) has roughly a dozen people working on SEO for around 10 languages. However, paid-for links is a small part of this team's work, natural search results always beat paid-for adverts.



[Edited at 2010-06-29 20:17 GMT]

[Edited at 2010-06-29 22:01 GMT]


Yes ! I do agree with Madeleine, It is always better to go for SEO rather then google adwords. Once you have done good SEO for your website its going to be permanent visitor on your website which inturn give you client, in adverds you will only get a impression on limited time and according to money invested.


 
Samuel Murray
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Netherlands
Local time: 09:57
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English to Afrikaans
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Not mutually exclusive Jun 30, 2010

Mohd Shadab wrote:
It is always better to go for SEO rather than Google Adwords. Once you have done good SEO for your website, it's going to be permanent visitor on your website, which in turn give you client; in adverds you will only get a impression on limited time and according to money invested.


1. Adwords and SEO are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to do just one of them. If you decide to do Adwords, you are not somehoe prohibited or prevented from doing SEO as well. So in my opinion SEO isn't even relevant to the question of whether Adwords can work for translators.

2. It is a mistake to believe that you only need to SEO your web site once. One can optimise one's web site for the most basic SEO principles and leave it at that, but once the competitions gets in there, it takes additional (and frequent) SEO for a web site to maintain its high position in listings.

3. Large agencies and translation companies can spend lots of money on SEO and grey hat web design, which means that their web sites will invariably come up near the top of the search result for most of your prized keywords. Very few search engine users look at results number 11 to 20, and even fewer ever look at results 21 to 50. If your site doesn't make the top 10 results, and the top 10 results contain what the user is looking for, then your site will not get visited (as often).


 
Dr. Julian Keogh
Dr. Julian Keogh  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
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Translators use of Adwords Mar 25, 2012

Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote:

The question you should probably ask yourself is: would you choose a translator using Google Ads? Would you be sufficiently reassured that you are going to receive a good service chosen with mass advertising?

Personally I would not. Most Google Ads I am shown are irrelevant or unattractive in my case. I prefer word-of-mouth and online opinions in the process of choosing a vendor for anything.


I cant say that I agree with this analysis, people have many different motivations for using Adwords but it is primarily obviously to promote one's business. To be successful on Adwords you must be very careful about your targeting and the choice of keywords. I started using it years ago (back in 2002) and i got an extremely good ROI, I found however that you had to do more and more work tokeep the bid prices down. One problem is that Googles algorithms can not always see what is relevant and what is not, and still favour SEO optimised pages when sometimes they are tailored to death just to get optimisation.
There are two types of translators, one that prefers to work with agencies or communities like this and the other that takes the lead by advertising themselves directly to the end customer. Either way is fine but I fear the former are going to be squeezed more and more by the walmart style giants whose ananoymous PMs use dubious practices to keep their translators. If you've found your niche, good luck, but you will always need to find new business to stay alive.

Dr. Julian P. Keogh


 
Dr. Julian Keogh
Dr. Julian Keogh  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 08:57
Member (2007)
German to English
Adwords vs SEO - or mutually beneficial Mar 25, 2012

Samuel Murray wrote:

Mohd Shadab wrote:
It is always better to go for SEO rather than Google Adwords. Once you have done good SEO for your website, it's going to be permanent visitor on your website, which in turn give you client; in adverds you will only get a impression on limited time and according to money invested.


1. Adwords and SEO are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to do just one of them. If you decide to do Adwords, you are not somehoe prohibited or prevented from doing SEO as well. So in my opinion SEO isn't even relevant to the question of whether Adwords can work for translators.

2. It is a mistake to believe that you only need to SEO your web site once. One can optimise one's web site for the most basic SEO principles and leave it at that, but once the competitions gets in there, it takes additional (and frequent) SEO for a web site to maintain its high position in listings.

3. Large agencies and translation companies can spend lots of money on SEO and grey hat web design, which means that their web sites will invariably come up near the top of the search result for most of your prized keywords. Very few search engine users look at results number 11 to 20, and even fewer ever look at results 21 to 50. If your site doesn't make the top 10 results, and the top 10 results contain what the user is looking for, then your site will not get visited (as often).


I think the problem is that you can overdo SEO. It is very difficult and nigh on impossible for a small guy to do SEO so well that he will appear on the first page of google's organic listings for a translation related keyword. It just isnt worth the work. In addition, many SEO optimised pages are not necessarily optimised for human viewing and appreciation, which could reduce the chances of any client conversion. One approach could be to improve SEO so that PR is raised to 2 to 3. It might not always get you on the first page of the organic listings, but it could have the useful side effect of increasing your site's Quality Score so that you don't need to bid so much for Adwords keywords to ensure a reasonable listing.

Dr. Julian P. Keogh


 
Jeff Whittaker
Jeff Whittaker  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 04:57
Member (2002)
Spanish to English
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Google Ads Mar 25, 2012

I have tried it, but the truth is that if you have a ProZ profile, you can get almost the same results from the keywords section. My ProZ site comes up on the first Google page for most relevant searches. Most of the time ahead of my own website.

Ali Ahmed
 
Vadim Kadyrov
Vadim Kadyrov  Identity Verified
Ukraine
Local time: 10:57
English to Russian
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The science behind the Adwords campaign is Feb 21, 2015

to narrow down the list of your keywords and in this way to hook the clients who searched the exact thing you advertized. If you take too generalized keywords (like "translation", "translator"), you will get thousands of clicks, just because those people who click on your ad may be in need of an English-French translator, Chinese-Spanish translator, or they are simply searching for a free on-line translation web-site. You have to play the system of the so-called minus-words.

This
... See more
to narrow down the list of your keywords and in this way to hook the clients who searched the exact thing you advertized. If you take too generalized keywords (like "translation", "translator"), you will get thousands of clicks, just because those people who click on your ad may be in need of an English-French translator, Chinese-Spanish translator, or they are simply searching for a free on-line translation web-site. You have to play the system of the so-called minus-words.

This is the most basic challenge. Of course, you may spend thousands of dollars on your campaign per month and get thousands of visitors per month as well, but that can only be justified if you get thousands of dollars of income per month generated by your ads.

[Edited at 2015-02-21 06:48 GMT]
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