Talk to me about Google "adwords"

[Ryan Dossey]

I am in the process of building a lead generation website through Leadpropeller. (review to follow) 

A buddy of mine runs the adwords campaign for a national appliance retailer. The marketing brings in over 95% of their sales. I can see how something like this would be extremely lucrative for an outfit like that. You search a model # and they pop up on the side with pictures, review, and pricing. 

Have you guys had any success with lead generating websites using adwords? 

What type of "budget" do you set?

My buddy has a 50k daily budget but in their industry they find that they have a certain % of success vs cost. That percentage would equal out to 2k in marketing per house. I'm not sure it works that simply though.

[Dev Horn]

We've had an REI lead gen service for over a decade that spends over $1M per year on AdWords, so YES it works.

In our business, you'll need to throw out a pretty big net as far as your area on AdWords, probably St. Louis County, just to get enough lead volume.

You'll find that certain keywords (e.g., "sell my house fast") cost $10, $15, even $20 a CLICK.  You can set your budget at $10 a day and miss out on the more expensive clicks.  I like a $20 per day budget at least.  Once you get your campaigns really dialed in, you can set it on $500 a day (i.e., unlimited) because there will be a limit to how many searches meet your criteria on a given day.

It can take 5, 10, even 20 clicks over to your landing page to get a form filled out.  If you're doing well, you can get forms filled out for maybe $75 each (cost per CONVERSION).

You can set up a simple account, but you'll soon learn that MATCH TYPES and AD GROUPS are very important to getting your lead quality up and your cost per conversion down.

Wish you the best!