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The 8 Most Costly Mistakes in Google Adwords Campaigns:

Find Out How Much They are Costing You.

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8 Most Costly Mistakes in Google Adwords Campaigns:

Find Out How Much They are Costing You.

I’ve been in Advertising for a long time and until I was introduced to Google Adwords I never really thought any of it seemed like rocket sci-ence. The biggest advantage to Google Adwords also seems to be its biggest challenge for advertisers: DATA and information, more data than we ever imagined possi-ble. The challenge is to know how to track and report on all of this data so that you can optimize your campaign without spending eight hours a day looking at reports.

The biggest “kicker” is that many people think that who-ever offers to pay the most shows up at the top of the ads, this is not true and the main reason you need to have an optimized campaign. Google charges less and gives favorable treatment to ads that users tell them are the best ad for their search (how this is done is also very interesting and will be the source of a report in the near future).

1. Tracking

Most people put this at the end of the list, but for me this is the most important element of a successful campaign. If you are not tracking you will be back in the 90’s where you are spending money and not know-ing whether it is working or not and that is the only thing worse than a campaign that does not work. In today’s world if you are spending more than $1,000/month for online marketing you should be able to track exactly how much business you are closing from not just the campaign but every single keyword in the campaign. Please note this report is not focused on e-commerce, it is focused on companies that tend to generate leads not sales online. For less than $100 a month you can track which keywords caused someone to fill out a form on your website but also receive an email every time your phone rings and tell you which keyword generated the phone call! This allows you to stop spending money on keywords that don’t drive sales and spend more money on those that do.

receive an email every time your phone rings and tell you which keyword generated the phone call!


2. Value Proposition

When the client finds your ad, what is it that is being said that makes them want to choose your business over everyone else? When someone goes to Google and searches for “Bankruptcy Attorney” they are going to have access to hundreds of thousands of choices and I can assure you that while they won’t look at most they will look at several… and you better stand out! This is a problem that has been at the top of the list since the beginning of advertising and it’s really not an advertising problem, it’s a business problem. If you cannot give a good reason that someone should do business with you then it will be very difficult to grow from anything other than referrals. One of the great things about Adwords is it helps you focus in on people that will relate to your value proposition. If you are cheap then advertise as a “Cheap Bankruptcy Attorney” and you will get the peo-ple that truly have no money and want something cheap. If you are an expensive bankruptcy attorney hopefully you are also very high quality and you can help clients that really have assets that they are trying to protect so they will be willing to pay more for quality.

3. Landing Pages

If you don’t take anything else from reading this report, take THIS piece of advice: Do not send all of this wonderful Adwords traffic to your Home Page! If all of your Google Adwords are sending traffic to your homepage stop reading right now and go and pause your campaign… If the service or product that the client typed into the search bar is not listed in the title of the page you send them to, (we will get to the ad itself in a minute) you will be paying three times more than your competitors and getting lower quality leads. That’s right, many studies show that ads that go to a page with the product or service listed in the title of the page will generate from 2-10+ times more leads for the same budget. The pessimist would say that we as consumers are too lazy to spend two seconds to see the product listed in the side bar and click to go to that page but the consumer would say “Why bother with a company that won’t take a few minutes to make sure and send me to the right information first. “

One of the great things about Adwords is it helps you focus in on people that will relate to your value proposition.


4. Keywords in Ads

If I’m searching for blue baseball netting and there are 35 companies on the home page trying to sell me sports netting, but only one company that tries to sell me “blue baseball netting”, which ad do you think I’m go-ing to click on? In an Adwords campaign you should have hundreds of keywords in most cases and your ads should be written specifically to my search. The stats are overwhelming. If you’re in the Insurance business and I search for “boat insurance” you better have the word “boat” in your ad and don’t forget that it needs to be on the landing page as well.

5. Bidding High to be # 1 on Google

Many people we talk to think the top position will get the most businessand to get there they need to outbid everyone else. This is simply nottrue. First of all, as stated before, the top position is NOT given to theperson that pays the most, it is given to the ad that will generate the mostmoney for Google while also serving the needs of the searcher. Forstarters, if your ad copy is written in such a way that three times morepeople will click on your ad than the average, Google will charge youless per click but still make more money because they aregetting more clicks overall. While that’s good for Google it may or may not be good for you. For example, if you run an ad for “Free Lawn Care” you may get a lot more clicks which will cost you more money obviously, but the qual-ity of the lead will be lacking due to this “bait and switch” –type ad. Obviously, your ad doesn’t relate to your offer and you just end up paying for a click that isn’t a good lead. Another interesting thing to note is that many people find being in the number three spot produces more traffic because it is closer to the or-ganic search terms where most people are looking…remember less than 25% of searchers ever click the ads. Finally, you have to know the value of a lead. We have some clients that would lose money paying $5 per click to be in the top ad spots but they can get a great return by paying $2 and end up lower on the page.

the top position is NOT given to the person that pays the most


6. Negative Keywords

We find that many clients put in high level keywords such as “lawn care” and have their ad run for all variations which at the high level is not nec-essarily bad, but you have to know that one of the most popular searches on the internet is for jobs and if you are not hiring, this can eat up an ad-vertising budget very quickly. So if you use “lawn care” as a broad term and I search for “jobs in lawn care” I see your company advertising and say hey let’s click over there…ouch waste of $3. It would have been easier for you to set up your account so that any searches that included jobs and careers were elimi-nated from your campaign, thus allowing your budget to be spent on more productive keywords. And don’t forget about the example in #1 where someone is searching for “cheap lawn care” if you are not the lowest price guy in the market then this is probably a bad lead for you.

7. GEO-Targeting

GEO-Targeting is where Google allows you to have your ads run in a specific area. This is great for a company that is not nationwide. Let’s say you are a mortgage company that only covers one city such as Atlanta, GA. There are a couple of great things that help you compete with a big national mortgage company. First you can have your ad run only in Atlanta so that you will not waste budget in areas you do not serve. Second many people may not want to do their mortgage online so those searchers will ignore many of the Lending Tree-type ads and click on yours because the ad tells them you have an office in Atlanta. Now, while many big companies can get a little lazy you need to know that if I am a big bank with locations all over the country I could also run different ads for every city where I have a location.

if you are not the lowest price guy in the market then this is probably a bad lead for you.


8. A/B Testing

This is where I am really glad that I paid attention in all of those stats courses in college. A/B testing is the ability to control one part of your campaign and see specific results. Two of the most common are in Ad Copy and Land-ing Pages. How does this work? First, for ad copy you should always be running two versions (maybe more on a large budget) of each and keep everything else constant. For example, a lawn care company providing overseeding services in the fall might want to try the following ad headlines: “Free Estimate for Overseeding” and “Keep Grass Green with Overseed-ing”. Google allows us to run the ads in a perfect 50/50 random mix so af-ter a month we can compare our tracking to see which one gave us the best return for our ad dollars. Another example is for the landing page, you can send half the traffic to one landing page and the other half to another. We have many case studies that have increased leads by as much as 300% with very minor tweaks in these areas. There are studies online where people are running a campaign that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to go from generating $1,000,000 to almost $3,000,000 in revenue from changes such as this and of course these changes to the page only cost the company a few hundred dollars… how about that for some ROI?

Truth be told, I could, and many have, made list of the top 100 costly mistakes in Adwords or Pay-Per-Click Advertising. While it is one of the more complex advertising mediums to come out it is also one of the most effective I have ever seen. Fun fact: it took the yellow pages over 100 years to get to $25 Billion. It took Google 10 years. Another reason I am bullish on adwords for the long term is this: Google makes 96% of its revenue from search advertis-ing, Google knows they have given you all the tools to know whether it is being effective or not and that if it stops working you will know within hours so Google has no choice but to make adwords continue to work for ad-vertisers. If you want to put your money on a winning team when it comes to the advertising world comparing Google to the New York Yankees of baseball would be a total understatement of the advantages Google has in talent and money. For anyone that has taken the time to read this report just give me a call and we will do a complete assessment of your adwords campaign for free. Just our way of saying thanks and, of course, if there is a good fit we are hoping you will be a client in the near future.

We have many case studies that have increased leads by as much as 300% with very minor tweaks in these areas.

Technology

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