Google AdWords — despite fierce competition from Facebook — is a powerful, dependable, stable, and almost accurate source of steady traffic when you are willing to pay for ads.
While it’s that powerful, most businesses don’t use Google AdWords to its potential.
In fact, because of false starts and being uninformed, most small business owners tend to get excited with the possibilities, launch right away, and end up draining their complete budgets in less than a few hours of launching their campaigns with nothing much to show for it.
Meanwhile, your aim is to squeeze the most out of your PPC ad spend.
Google is a business like any other, and their default settings are built to make “them” money, not you.
To succeed with Google AdWords, you’d need strategy, due diligence, and attention to detail. There are rules for Google AdWords that you just have to follow.
Above all, you’d have to make sure that you don’t end up spending money on Google AdWords for nothing.
Here’s how to be absolutely sure that you aren’t going to waste your money on unnecessary clicks and false starts:
No offers? No campaigns
There are a lot of businesses just like yours (your competition) and they are all out there trying to woo the same kind of customer — you know? The customer who can pay.
You might have a USP, your products might be the best out there, and you could truly be the best solution for your customers’ problems.
There’s only one problem: your customer doesn’t know you yet. To get your customers through the door, you need to make an offer (and it doesn’t have to be a discount).
Your offers will give your customer a reason to consider your products or services. Google ads are fickle affairs and launching campaigns without an offer doesn’t give your customer any incentive to click, to sign up, to consider, or to think about why you are the best at what you do.
Say no to Google’s campaign managers
Did you ever get a call from Google’s offices volunteering to help you run and manage your campaigns?
There’s only one good reason why you should let these Google AdWords’ campaign managers handle your account for you: when you truly don’t have the time or resources to do so or when you have an unlimited budget to spend.
In most cases, we’d never entertain these campaign managers for the simple reason that they had never spent any of their own money to run their campaigns.
People who don’t learn by spending their own money or putting their own skin in the game don’t know a thing about running paid campaigns. Period.
Campaigns are flush tanks without sales funnels
Paid advertising (Google or otherwise) makes you believe that it’s incredibly easy to launch a campaign, and it really is.
But if you just went ahead and launched campaigns the way you are made to believe, you’ll spend your budget in less than an hour – flat out.
You’d need sales funnels — the complete setup from ads making a specific offer (see above) to landing pages, and from landing pages to email marketing automation. Without sales funnels, your campaigns are guaranteed to fail
Learn what sales funnels are and why you need them. If you need help building sales funnels, just schedule a call with us and we’ll take it from there.
AdWords Express is for the lazy folks
AdWords Express (a simpler version of Google AdWords) lets your ad show up with just a few clicks; no need to mess with ad groups, multiple ads, landing pages, and all that jazz.
For an absolute newbie, AdWords Express makes it just as simple as popping open a soda bottle. It’s easy, quick, effortless, and an absolute cakewalk.
But a good campaign is not a cakewalk.
AdWords Express doesn’t let you control anything. You can’t determine how your ad should show, what keyword combinations should trigger your ads, and any of that deep stuff, like testing Ads, landing pages, A/B testing, and more.
If you want good results — like really good results — don’t touch AdWords Express.
Don’t touch Google’s defaults
Google’s defaults are built to make Google money.
Drop a keyword without modifying or controlling how or when it’s shown and you are in for trouble. That’s because your keywords will start showing up for absolutely every instance of your keyword being used. That’s why your ad budgets drain so fast.
In another instance, the way Google works is to show your most popular ad more often than others (and that’s a default setting).
If you let Google do this, how will you control and test your ads? For good A/B testing practices, you’d need to have two ads show up equally (with almost equal impressions). With such a setup you are able to distribute traffic equally to both the ads.
The right option to choose (instead of default) is “Rotate all ads equally.” This option will make Google show all your ads equally so you have the ability to split test your ads.
How do you think you are draining your Google AdWords’ budget? If you are draining your Google AdWords budget faster than you can read this line, it’s time to get on a scheduled call with us.