Google Adwords. Is it worth the cost ?

<p>I have paid for Google Adwords on and off over the past few years but found that I was paying a lot of money (about $300-400 per month ) with very little in the way of results. I planned my keywords carefully and eliminated those which I thought were attracting useless click-throughs. I would love to hear your experiences and all suggestions will be appreciated. (I did a search for this topic and much to my surprise, found nothing)!<br>

<strong>Please note that I did search the archives on the subject, most of the threads are five or ten years old or older so I would like to have fresh imput on this subject. Thanks.</strong></p>

<p>I had a similar experience a couple of years ago--lots more hits but no appreciable increase in business, so I stopped using it. One of the things that sealed the decision for me was the number of ads for other photographers in my area that showed up when I went to this site (Photonet). I can't think of a greater waste of money than trying to sell photographic services to other photographers...</p>

<p>If you are using Adwords to simply drive traffic to your web site, you might do as well to insure your web site is optimized for search engines. In addition to your own optimization, depending on what you use to develop your web site, some development applications have plugins that will assist and make suggestions for optimization. </p>

<p>During my first year in the business, I spent almost $2,000 on Adwords and earned no clients. It was a tremendous waste of money, and I recommend you stop ASAP. Despite that, Google is pretty much my primary source of business, since I appear on the first or second page of the results for my targeted keywords. Organic search results are free, longer lasting, and carry greater trust in the eyes of clients. Most of the paid search results in my region are for affordable photographers anyway, and I don't want to be another drop in the bucket of photographers being shopped around for the lowest price.</p>