In Michael Stelzner’s experience, it was. As he tells it, one Google ad brought him 4,000 strong leads in a year, for a total cost of around $1,500. That’s a pretty great result, and he recommends five basic things to consider :

Why are you advertising?

Your landing page is critical.

Spend to Earn.

Good headlines outperform.

Track your conversions.

Well, our AdWords experience wasn’t so positive.

We knew why we were advertising—to attract potential clients.

We knew exactly where we wanted visitors to land, and every page had an action message: “Click here for a free white paper.” “Click here to request a free estimate.”

We’d written pretty good headlines.

Yet we had almost no conversions. Tons of people Googling for “meeting coverage” or “rapporteur” clicked on the AdWords link to our meeting coverage page, for example. But several months and thousands of dollars later, not one had asked for a quote or requested a white paper—let alone brought us any business.

We shut it down, and to this day we’re not quite sure where we went wrong. Maybe people just don’t search for professional consulting services on the Internet. If you have any ideas what we might have done differently, please let us know in the comments.

Posted in Management of a publications enterprise, Marketing and promotion