Some Say AdWords Doesn't Work

quote
Google is one of the most profitable companies on the planet and its parent company, Alphabet, has become the most valuable listed company in the United States. It’s now worth more than Apple.
Of course, one of the big earners for the company is its pay-per-click online advertising service, AdWords. In the quarter to December 31st 2015, Google posted revenues of just over $21 billion. More than 75% of that came from AdWords.
Insurance giant, State Farm Insurance, spends over $40M on AdWords. Expedia spends nearly £30M and Amazon, eBay, Macys, Sears and JC Penney spend, collectively, almost $200M.

But AdWords Doesn’t Work…

Last year, The New York Times ran a piece along the lines that AdWords was too expensive for small businesses, it didn’t work and the quality of the leads generated was poor.
However, easy to blame the tools and not the workman. AdWords, in all its forms (the Search Network, the Display Network, YouTube etc.) is simply a tool for the marketer to use and, like all tools, it can be used properly or improperly.
One reason for poor AdWords performance is lack of activity within the account itself.
According to Google, a high percentage of AdWords accounts see no activity in a 90-day period. That’s 3 months!!
3 months in which no bids, ads, keywords (positive or negative) were changed. No campaigns added, no nothing – it’s nuts. No wonder people accuse the tool of not working.
That’s like saying a spanner is not working because the mechanic didn’t pick it up to undo a bolt in a 90-day period.
According to Google, only 1% of all small business advertisers made changes to their AdWords account every week. At The Scottish Shutter Company, changes are made on a daily basis.
Another major reason for failure is too few, or in some cases no, negative keywords.
These are the very things which will save you money and start to make your AdWords spend cost effective.
The SSC account has almost 153,000 negative keywords, across 29 campaigns.
That’s roughly 5,000 negatives per campaign. Now, I’ll admit, that takes a lot of work – but nobody said AdWords was easy.

Prepare for a Bampy Landing

…and Google doesn’t make it easy for the unwary.
There’s a myriad of settings in an AdWords account that are set to benefit Google more than the advertiser, unless they are changed.
Let’s assume we get those bits right and we start to generate traffic. People see your ads, find them compelling enough to click on and they arrive at your website (or more correctly your landing page).
This is where I find the most challenges with AdWords accounts.
The visitor is excited by the ad and then is truly disappointed by the experience of the landing page. They promptly say goodbye without as much as a hello.
In my experience, a lot of business owners simply refuse to acknowledge that it could be their landing page that is truly awful.
Remember, at this stage you’ve paid Google to get the visitor to your site but you didn’t get the chance to find out who they were.
They ignored the offer of your free whitepaper or they simply didn’t buy the product displayed on the page.
A lot of AdWords ads simply take the visitor to the website’s home page, regardless of the initial search query.
At The Scottish Shutter Company, if the searcher is searching for gable-end shutters they’re taken straight to the gable-end shutters page.
Likewise, if they’re looking for bay window shutters then they’re taken to the bay window shutter page.
There are over 100 of these landing pages each matching one of the 100 most popular shutter search queries.

Are You Getting The Message?

Regardless of how much you spend on AdWords (or any marketing for that matter) it is vital, nay, more than vital, to ensure that you can identify exactly which keyword, ad, ad group and campaign has resulted in you making a profit, selling your product or service.
One member who excels at this is John Arko from Finder Monkey. I’ve been working with John to fine tune his excellent AdWords campaigns.
At one session we were looking to cull unprofitable keywords.
You see, John measures exactly which keywords make money and which don’t. We started by using the 80/20 principle (read Richard Koch’s book on the subject) to identify which keywords stayed and which were to go.
One keyword shone above the rest – it had the most impressions, the most clicks and the most conversions (for John, a conversion is the visitor providing personal contact details).
However, thanks to John’s excellent system of measuring which keywords returned a profit to his business, we were able to show that this “star” keyword was in fact a rogue.
On the face of it it looked good, but it was, in fact one of the worst performing from a profitability point of view.

Clarity on your numbers is crucial.

This is why Pieter de Villiers and I have been working on creating accurate measurement of marketing spend for our clients so we can tell which 50% of the advertising budget is working.
The key here is to employ the right tools and technologies to ensure you are not guessing about where to spend your money or where your customers are coming from.
david-browne