What’s The Deal With Google Adwords?
No doubt about it, Google Adwords can be a powerful sales tool or a total waste of money! Here’s some tips on making Google Adwords work for you! However, up until last week, I was about to scrap my campaign in the garbage!
I’ll tell you what changed, and why I love Google Adwords!
Google Adwords can be a business owners best friends or worst nightmare. A program which is set up to charge you every day for something which may or may not bring you any revenue. When you first start out with Google Adwords there is a definite learning curve. I found this out the hard way!
I began with a very nicely designed landing page. I targeted people in my general area looking for a website. Wrote a nice ad and waited for the interested buyers to come in.
Low and behold, I got clicks from people who wanted “design suites,” to sign up for “graphic design classes,” and also people who searched for “graphic designing for beginners.” The worst part of all this is that each one of these mistakes cost me around $6 a pop! Bids on website design related keywords typically run around $5-$14. Normally people can get away with paying much less for their niche market.
So What Did I Learn?
Learn From Your Mistakes
First thing’s first, connect Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and your Google Adwords account to your domain! One of the most important things about all of these analytics subscriptions being hooked up to my website was the ability to learn from my mistakes.
Meaning, every day I go onto my Google Analytics account and search to see if anyone went to my website from Google Adwords. If I find out someone did, I then go into the Adwords section of Google analytics and click on “Search Query.” I see if the person who clicked on my ad actually wanted a website or not.
As you can see above, I kind of highlighted where to go in your Google Analytics account to see the information I’m talking about. Also, there is a list of matched queries that people clicked on to get to my landing page. The one about web design classes was obviously not what I was looking for. So I immediately went into my Google Adwords account and added the word class to my list of negative keywords. I do this every time someone clicks my ad from an unfavorable search.
This is because, obviously, the people are not looking for my services so I don’t want to pay for their click. This brings me to my next point.
People Click On Your Ad Even When It’s Unrelated To Their Search
I learned this the hard way. But when people search something in Google, they often just think that Google knows their best interest. Unfortunately Google’s algorithms are not that advanced yet.
So, we make up for that by adding to our negative keywords list every time a person reaches your ad by an unfavorable search. Also, by making sure your targeting, ad text, etc. are all extremely relevant to the searches that you want your target market to find you with. This brings me to my last point.
Quality Over Quantity
As I said before, bids for website design in my area range around $5-$14 per click. I really can only afford to spend $6 per day and in reality I’d really not wish to spend that much. Therefore I set up my Adwords account so that I really only get targeted searches and that has lead to my account only getting charged around once every 3-4 days.
Best of all almost every click has been a conversion to a paying customer and no I have almost more work than I can deal with. That being said, Google Adwords went from something that I was about to completely abandon to my #1 salesman!
Well that’s it for this article. I hope it has been informative. Please contact us if you want some more tips regarding Google Adwords or want us to check out your campaign! Thank you for reading and be sure to leave your questions, comments and concerns below in the comments box!