Does adwords work for nudist clubs?

A year ago I was asked by my local nudist club, the Arbutus Park Club, to build and maintain a club website. I went the easy route and used a wordpress blog and by february I think the website was up!

The next question was how to drive traffic. There are several ways to do this. I considered the following:

1. Dynamic relevant content for Google to use.
2. Social Media campaigns
3. Advertising (specifically Google adwords)

The Wordpress based website is absolutely a non-dynamic design. The content is static and fairly basic. Social media campaigns are rather effective these days but they take a large time commitment that I was hoping to avoid. That left me with advertising.

I briefly signed up to have advertisements placed on this blog - a huge failure! However; because i had an Adwords account, Google sent me a free 100$ credit for Adwords advertising. I decided to use it for the Arbutus Park Club website instead.

The process is simple in concept. You basically tell Adwords the following:

1. When and where do you want to advertise
2. How much do you want to spend in a time period
3. What keywords you want driving traffic to your site
4. How much do you want to spend on each click for a specific keyword
5. What keywords should never lead to an ad for your website

I tinker with these settings often but I generally pay 50 to 75 cents per click. I capped my daily budget at $2.50. I received about 4-6 visitors per day and Adwords was constantly telling me to increase my daily budget for more clicks!

There are a couple of struggles with this kind of advertising. The first issue is what keywords do really want to spend your money on? Generically advertising on the keywords nudist and naturist works but its really not ideal.

Naturist advertising is flagged as 'Adult' by Google. I disagree with this label but I chose not to fight it. This flagging means that only people who disable Google's Safesearch will see any of these ads. Frankly this mostly means people who at some point search for pornography. 

Now before I sound like an anti-pornographic crusader, I understand and accept that many many men watch pornography. I myself watch pornography and I accept that somebody looking for pornography may stumble across naturist information and successfully differentiate between his current state of sexuality and a future state of naturism. 

A more ideal scenario is that an individual, at some point in time,  turns off safesearch for any reason - sexual or non sexual but searches again at some other time and finds naturist information while not in a sexual mindset. This preference leads to the list of 'negative keywords' that Adwords uses to let you restrict the searches that can lead to your website.

For example: I have banned all body words that are used as slang. Tits, ass, pussy, and cock for example. This way somebody who searches for 'nice tits on a nudist beach' will not see an advertisement for my website but somebody who searches for 'relaxing day on a nudist beach' could indeed see my advertisement.

This leads to a cat and mouse chase. I keep tabs on the keywords used to get to my website (using Google analytics or the wordpress dashboard) and anytime I see a keyword that I wish hadn't been used to find my website, I ban it on adwords so that I am at least not paying for a sexual search result.

Anyhow, All this work lead to me using up most of my 100$ credit. The traffic changes were fairly profound.

In the summer, June,July,August - when people are out enjoying free nude beaches - I got 100 pageviews per month. In september and October I got about 250 pageviews each. Then in november, I enabled my adwords campaign and I got 550 pageviews. So for about 55$ I drove 100 unique persons to my website and they looked at 2-3 pages each (which is great considering I only have about 5 pages total)

This meant I paid about 55 cents per unique paid visitor. It is difficult to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the campaign. I will simply speculate. Our club hosts monthly nude swims and we generate revenue of at least 12$ per swimmer. Thus, to break even on this month's advertising, I need about 5 swim-visits to result from the campaign. 

So out of about 100 unique paid visitors, how many are even candidates? If this campaign leads to one new couple attending the december or January swim, I will be pleased but I cannot consider spending actual money instead of free credits unless I had actual data showing the paid results netted me actual attendees.

If anybody out there have any experience with Adwords they'd like to share OR if you have any questions they'd like to ask, please reply in the comments or email me at maraudingnaturist@gmail.com