AdWords is a great place to lose a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even if you know how to work the system, you still need to have a clear plan of how AdWords is supporting your business before you start sinking money into clicks that may never convert.

For online companies that want a download or just visits, this may not be too tricky, but for e-commerce companies sales take longer and your SEM plan needs to factor in the sales cycle.

Here is a basic plan to use AdWords for consideration purchases:

Know your sales cycle

You can’t evaluate anything until you know how long it takes someone to buy. Do people shop for a week or for a month? For verticals like travel, a customer may search dozens of sites over a number of months before finally purchasing a ticket. If you don’t know this then you may discount a campaign before it has a chance to produce sales. Setting up E-commerce tracking in AdWords is one way to get data on your sales cycle. Read the rest of this entry »