In just over three years, Nathan Wood has transformed his small Derby-based electrical store into an online enterprise boasting over 70,000 customers, high-profile contracts and a month-on-month turnover growth in the order of 50%. His business? Vacuum cleaner dustbags. Wood admits his product "is not a sexy item", but from the minute he launched his AdWords account for www.Dustbag.co.uk, the business of dustbags proved to be very healthy indeed. "I found Google AdWords, and that's when it really began to take off", he notes.

The idea for www.Dustbag.co.uk came to Wood as customer after customer left his electrical store disappointed. "The majority of the time they didn't actually know the model of their cleaner", he says. Furthermore, with well over 500 different types of bags, even larger supermarket chains quickly learned that the logistics of stocking vacuum cleaner dustbags is invariably financially unviable. Yet, there was demand. Indeed, unlike some of the other appliances that Wood sold, dustbags almost guaranteed repeat custom: "It's a product that 12 months down the line they'll need again". The challenge was to find some way of tapping the undeniable demand for the product. "I thought, well, there must be a better way", comments Wood.

Using a centralised warehouse, Dustbag Ltd. has built up the largest collection of vacuum bags, filters and accessories in the UK. The role of Google AdWords was to link this traditionally niche product with a national and international audience. Wood's traditional advertising techniques had centred on "rather expensive" offline advertising. On his move to AdWords he says "I didn't really know what to expect. But what I didn't expect was the response that we got. Literally overnight, straight away, we had all these orders coming in."

The benefit that AdWords offers to small, local companies like Dustbag Ltd. is a direct link to customers. Wood's electrical store had received exposure in both the local and national media. The results seldom converted to sales. He explains "unless somebody wants a bag at that particular moment, they'll almost certainly have forgotten us by the time they need one". He goes on to say that some publications that he had placed advertisements in might claim that "5 million people read them, but if they're not buying bags it's a waste of time." In contrast, AdWords linked www.Dustbag.co.uk to a huge but diffuse market of vacuum cleaner owners, at the exact moment the customers required their product.

Dustbag Ltd. is still a small company in terms of staff with just four full time employees. However, with the sales volumes they are achieving through AdWords, their brand has been making waves in the industry. "Suddenly, we began to get noticed by bigger shops and they're talking to you like you're a massive company." In such a dynamic time, the ease-of-use of AdWords allows Nathan Wood to run his advertising campaign at the same time as dealing with his responsibilities as Managing Director of Dustbag Ltd. While he does use some of the advanced features of AdWords such as Analytics, Wood often only finds the time to check the bottom line. When it comes to advertising, Wood's philosophy is simple – "it's easy to get side-tracked. Really, what you should be looking at is what you spend and what you take…nothing compares to the amount of business we get from Google AdWords."