Right time to start adwords ads?

We recently launched a food gift website where you can create & personalize your gift. The site has several innovative features which people like a lot. There is an online food gift market in my country. However this site will be the first one enabling personalization.

We contacted several national media reps, bloggers in order to create awareness. Started to get coverage. Also launched adwords campaigns about 2 weeks ago. We had good sales on valentines day thanks to our adwords ads but the search traffic and our sales died the following days and week.

I'm starting to feel that adwords can not be very effective in a giant gift market where there are there are 100s of different products. Therefore we tried to focus on the search terms related to gift baskets, chocolate gifts since people looking for these items may be our potential customers. I cant say that this tactic has worked well either. We are getting traffic but no sales. My adwords budget is going into creating awareness rather than sales.

Im assuming credibility can be an issue, therefore before jumping into adwords getting coverage in blogs and some newspapers may be a better way to create traffic for an innovative product in the beginning rather than banking on adwords. What do you think of the function of adwords in launch of an innovative product ? Should we expect it to function more as an awareness tool (since it will be very hard to trust and buy in the first visit, unless its people are really hectic as the valentines day) rather than a sales based tool.

I think you start investing in AdWords in the following scenarios when;

• Your business is new and you want awareness in the market about your website, products or services
• You want quick traffic from dedicated audiences
• Your product/website pages don't appear in SERPs on targeted and relevant keywords using natural SEO methods
• You have launched a new product/service
• And most importantly, when you have additional funds to run inorganic SEO campaigns.

But there are a couple of tips I want to share with you prior to start AdWords campaigns.

• Make sure at first that your website is organically SEO ready and human friendly as well. Without SEO-finished landing pages; the CTR will rise significantly and thus the Quality Score will be affected as well.
• When your products are matured enough to meet your customer needs without reporting any bugs (possibly).

I would go with when you have a product that is worth selling. Whats the point of doing adwords if you will not make any money when people click year ad and land on your website. Sure you get the traffic and exposure but what about converting?

An important factor in AdWords success is the continuity of the chain.

A person searches for X, the keyword targets it exactly, the ad speaks to it precisely, and the landing page continues the work.

A generic approach just doesn't work.

So if, for example, someone searches for "personalised food gift" and is taken to a page pushing "customised food gifts", even though they may be one and the same, the person won't see the precise solution that they're looking for.

There's a good chance you can tighten up your AdWords and really squeeze out a good ROI. Don't give up on it yet.