Breaking the adword rules

If you are like me you have probably read a lot on the web about how to make adwords work for you.  2 of the rukles I keep reading are:

1. Link to the actual product page on the site.

2. You have to be top of the rankings to make it worthwhile.

For the first one I set up the ads and linked to the product page to get the visitor to buy the product straight away.
For the second I set the Cost per Click (CPC) high enough to always be 1 or 2.

Well, it kind of worked.
We got clicks and a some people actually bought, but the conversion rate was really low.

I just fel that the visitors to the site were not confident in the company to actually give their contact details.  After putting items in their cart they would then visit some other pages on the site that had details on the product and the company.  My hunch was that we were asking them to buy too soon.
Based on this hunch I changed the ad campaign to go to the homepage and not the product page.

At the same time I reduced the CPC and droped the ads to 2-3 in the results thereby getting more clicks for the same budget.

I did both of these things at the same time, so I’m not sure which made the msot difference, but straight afterwards to conversion rate to sales more than doubled for the same budget.
Not a bad return for breaking the rules.

Again, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, just experiment and see what works.  With the Adwords CPC rates it can really be a low cost investment in understanding the behaviour of your visitors, so you can make the right changes.

I also contacted the site owner and let them know that Adwords recommended the budget is increaed by 5X to maximize the orders.
I just have to see how they respond.

Next is to convince other companies that I can do the same for their site.