I hired a well known Google Adwords consultant to setup some campaigns for me late last year. Geographic targetting was done on the basis of my previous sales database. The consultant finished work for me recently and I’ve been going through the conversion results to check the ROI. In terms of downloads (the only metric I can reliably track from Adwords or Google Analytics) the campaign appears to be reasonably successful. Here’s a graph of the traffic since the start of this year originating from Adwords.

Adwords Traffic

The blue line shows total Adwords traffic, the orange line is traffic originating from Italy (one of the 10 countries I targeted with Adwords). The big jump in March is when I switched off the search network in Adwords and directed by entire budget to the content network. The cost per conversion for the search network was simply not viable. Since mid-March the cost per conversion has been quite reasonable. Today, when I was conducting my first audit of the ROI on the Adwords I found something very different.

Italian Adwords referrals comprise 11.0% of total Adwords traffic since January 1. Conversions (software downloads) from Italy comprised 13.4% of the total. However, when I examined my sales for the period the total sales made to Italy totalled $0. Let me repeat that, $0. It turned out that 3 or 4 of the other countries we’d targeted since day 1 had performed just as poorly. So needless to say these countries are now excluded from the Adwords campaign leaving budget to be spent on countries that I know do convert!

Moral of the Story : regardless of what historical information tells you always check what is going on now. Italy has been the source of quite a few sales for me over the years but clearly Adwords traffic from that country is rubbish for my products.