I've been doing some research on Adwords over the past few days and people seem to be pretty split on the subject. Since there is no such thing and a sure thing, I'm not surprised.

For a retail website is using Adwords a good way to go?

If so, I am thinking of using the actual brands I am selling for some of the keywords. Of course not every keyword, but a few. Is that a good idea?

I have a site (not officially launched) that is getting 80% of its traffic from blogging. I have been very active with it over the past month and I only get around 100-250 visits a day – most of it through blogging.

I am thinking of using Adwords and was wondering:

If its worth it for an ecommerce site?

If so, I am thinking of using some of my product brand names as keywords. Is that a good idea or should I stick to more broad, general terms (as long as it relates to my site and products)?

The important thing to remember when doing retail advertising via google is that the money is usually made on the back end.

You might for instance make £10 profit for each pair of jeans you sell but it costs you £20 in advertising to get a new customer to come and buy them. This would look like a loss but in fact most retail sites have monster back end marketing which means that they look at the 'life time value' of that customer instead.

So if on average each new customer will buy 5 items from your website over the year at a markup of £10 each then a new customers actual value would be £50 putting you £30 in profit.

These are simplified figures to try to explain the point. There are a lot of people out there that truly understand this principle and are willing to pay a lot of money to get a new customer so in some fields competition on adwords is really tough.

I would recommend you have a look at this website - http://www.perrymarshall.com for some good training material on adwords or get a professional to set up your account and if you don't have a plan already for your back end marketing then don't set your profit expectations too high.

I do have a campaign for e-commerce site and I can tell you that in my case is worthy. Every client can make an order of min 100$; and until now did cost me in average $10 to get a client. So for me it works.
The secret is customized ads for every product.