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Sometimes,
just in the middle of the night you think, 'oh right, we should advertise
just renew your vows,' or something like that and get up and start a campaign at 4.am,
and by the morning, 100 people have clicked in.
When the law changed in 1754 it meant you couldn't get married in England till you were over 21
without parental consent. But in Scotland it was still 16,
so people would run over the border into Gretna Green, as the first village.
Originally I was a photographer. So we started off doing wedding photographs,
and then we came to Gretna, being the hub of weddings.
But there wasn't many weddings here in the early days to be honest.
My Dad had the idea, after speaking to some Ministers that he knew,
who could set up this bureau, but it was very small.
There was a local brochure that went out from Gretna which we had the first ten pages or something.
So we spent a lot of money on that, but it was only going
to a small number of people. But when Google came along,
it opened up the market world of course.
We found out about AdWords because one of our competitors
told us about it, and we were photographers mainly at the time
and we did all their photography, and they suggested,
we start an AdWords campaign, to sort of compliment theirs.
He spent the entire year's budget in one month advertising on Google,
I said, "This is ridiculous".
But then he said "Look at the results".
Overnight the phones just started ringing off the hook,
and we were up and running. It was really quite fun.
Our business expanded 20 fold, since we started working with Google Adwords,
there's no question about that.
We went from a very small business that was maybe
3 or 4 people to 21 I think we've got now,
and to a multimillion pound turnover to be honest.
Our AdWords campaign has changed our business, we've taken on two premises in Gretna now,
and a lot of staff, and it's affected the whole town really.
There are a lot more wedding based businesses,
people opening new hotels. The whole town has changed
to accommodate this influx of people.
Our Account Managers have been fantastic. They've been really helpful
with suggesting new keywords and new campaigns we could start,
keeping us informed on changes to AdWords. But a lot of it comes from talking to couples on the day.
They typed in a certain phrase or something and you think,
'oh that's the good, we'll advertise there more'.
It was Google search, we just typed 'Gretna Weddings' in, a number of sites came up
but that was kind of a sponsored link and it was just probably the best quality one on there.
We wouldn't have had this business if it wasn't for AdWords, there's no question about that.
It has just lifted the business tremendously, that's the only criteria we use for advertising now is AdWords.
AdWords has become our business,
everything starts with AdWords.