Recommendations and experiences with Google Adwords

Hi,

I'm about to start developing a website for a medium sized business in an attempt to promote their webpresence.

I have some experience with search engine optimization, but was wondering how much sense it would make to start with google adwords within the first few months before pages start ranking well in google results.

Can anyone provide a plus/minus list of their experiences with google adwords?

Many thanks in advance to all those who participate!

When I first started, I used Google Adwords to promote this forum. It definetely cost some upfront money, but it did bring in much targeted traffic which helped the forum grow and obtain some content so that it can finally get targeted traffic on its own from the search engines. I think I used Google Adwords for about 1.5 months until things got rolling good. I probably spent about $150.00 to $200.00.

Google Adwords Pluses:
Gets a lot of traffic fast

Google Adwords Minuses:
Traffic ain't cheap

Google Adwords plus:
You can really optimize which keywords should display your ads, so you can actually reduce what you pay per click if you're more interested in finely targetted traffic.

Bottom line for me:
For big general keywords you may pay a lot per visitors, so concentrate on niche keywords that your site is really good at.

Google Adwords is a very good way of receive highly targeted traffic to your site, but never spend more money that what you think you may get back from your site in return.

It may be best to only spend a little bit of cash with Adwords first so you can monitor your traffic and study your results. If you like what you see, then add more cash in Adwords.

I would not recommend Google Adwords unless you keep track of all the statistics and you can monitor which search phrases convert more customers into buyers. After that, the answer is easy, just look at your stats and see if its paying off. Doesn't hurt to try.

Yeah, usually you end up spending more than you would like in the beginning because you do not know what keywords work. But if you work with it and optimize it down to your best ROI keywords, it can be used to make alot of money. I usually spend about 20% ROI, but its alot more in the very beginning.