What is the nature of the business you perform online? (site url(s), products you sell, how long etc?)

http://www.mandalorian.com/ - We do information security stuff. Penetration testing and Incident response mostly, we don't sell directly online, but we've been around for about 5 years.

Where do you currently advertise online? (e.g. google adwords, yahoo, bing, facebook, double click etc)

Currently, we have one adwords campaign running for a particular subset of UK local government compliance testing. In the past we've run a general adwords campaign, with mixed results, and we've tested ads on other networks such as facebook and chikita.

What do you like most about these services?

The adwords analytics is really good. In the past our campaigns were very general and not tightly focused. At the moment we're testing a highly focused online campaign with offline marketing followup. The results are essentially similar, with the exception that it's costing us about an order of magnitude less, so it becomes more realistic to continue.

What do you like least about these services?

Facebook and Reddit ads don't provide decent analytics (at least for us compared to google). We also found that Facebook and Reddit users, whilst amongst our clientele aren't actually interested in what we're selling.

Why did you choose them?

Facebook, Reddit and Chitika were experiments. Chitika wasn't too bad but didn't really offer anything over Google. We asked our target markets what search engines they use, and all of the people we asked said that they use Google. That told us that Google was the right way to reach them.

How do you measure overall success with your online advertising?

Goal conversions in adwords. We pay for the clicks (as the impression rate is fairly low - it's long tail terms and we're not highly ranked organically) and will do so until we're happy with organic ranking, but we track goal conversions (lead generation). We've spent about £50 so far with a total of 3 leads worth around £2,500 - £7,000 each. The campaign's been running for a few weeks.

In terms of the services listed above, which ones are the most effective?

Adwords, by a country mile.

Is there anything you would change or improve?
Google's quality ranking system is a bit off. Having to change your content to improve your quality rating for target keywords seems less about providing useful content and more about gaming the system. People searching for the keywords we want to list for have a reasonable click through rate, but because we don't keyword stuff Google doesn't want our ad listed for certain things.

How do you determine if a specific advertisement was effective?

I check Google analytics once a week for the current campaign, sometimes twice. I usually sit down and go through that and adwords with someone from our sales team or a Director.

What metrics are most important to you with this?
Goal conversions, CTR, Location and Impressions, in that order.

Are there any metrics that you would like to see or like to see more effective?
For adwords, there's nothing that I think we'd use. There's a whole load of analytics stuff we don't use at all.

How do you determine how much to spend on each channel (website, keywords)?
If we organically rank in the top 10, we don't pay much for the keyword. If we're in the top 4 then we don't advertise. If we don't rank on the first page we'll pay for a top 3 ad listing for specific keywords that have led to fulfilled goals. If we hit the goal a lot we'd pay more. If we don't, then we won't.