Giving up google ads for Lent

The one good thing that a recession does for you is make you re-look at your business and think whats working, what can be fixed and what should we move away from?

Because the £ collapsed against the $ last year we had to completely review our product range which means that a year later we have 2 new fair trade suppliers and some fabulous rag dolls and cotton crochet toys

We also took a long hard look at how we met new customers. We had been running google ads for years (because you do!) and over that time we had various different agencies come in and manage them for us. When we looked at them closely we realised that we did not know whether they were working and whether they were value for money so we simply stopped them

That was back in January and the results were hideous. Traffic to our website instantly fell by 30% and the number of enquiries plummeted. There was definitely a certain amount of panic but we had made the decision to keep them off for 6 months so we did

So we have now come to the end of our 6 month trial and the results are somewhat different. Traffic to our website is still down by 25% but virtually all of this was from the USA. Our toys are not tested to USA standards so we can't sell them there. Traffic from USA is not commercially valuable to us. Enquiries are now back to where they were and traffic from the UK has increased significantly

Traffic from google ads is not always as targeted as they would like you to believe. You only have to look at the way visitors find you to realise that there is a certain mismatch (last week a visitor was directed to our soft toy wholesaler website by typing in airsoft gun!). Google ads should bring you in specifically targeted traffic but unless you are completely focussed on them they also bring in a lot of dross. And this all costs you money

We should point out that when we took the google ads off we were forced to find other ways to increase traffic to our website so in away it made us look at all aspects of SEO. When you have a certain amount of visitors to your website its amazing how quickly you can become lazy about looking for more. The sudden and significant decline in traffic brought us out from our comfort zone and we actively searched for other ways to increase the visibility of our website

Now that we have a base level of traffic we will try google ads again but this time we will have more knowledge and specific targets for them to achieve. And if they don't achieve them we will go back to not running them at all!