Adwords is like a maze for the small business owner. With EOFY, comes a good time to look at increasing the Return on our Advertising Investment.
“Adwords doesn’t work, it’s just too expensive”, I’ve heard people say.
And for some it’s true. Winning new business with Adwords can be a tough game for any business, especially those without extensive marketing knowledge.
Website Magazine highlights:
“Because Google pits you directly against your competitors in a war for clicks, AdWords is a rough scorecard of the strength of your business and marketing model.”
Adwords is overpriced if you don’t have an adequate business model. We’re talking about how the business makes money. You must be constantly refining product offerings, work systems, and the whole marketing system (often called a sales funnel).
Like any advertising, successful marketers are willing to lose/break even on the first sale because their back-end system is so good that the eventual revenue will result in profits. This leaves some advertisers out in the cold, those that don’t have enough cash flow to lose upfront to gain long term.
It is overpriced if the marketer doesn’t test. Test landing pages (that’s the pages that you direct people to from the ad) and test ads against each other. But that’s not where it ends. All top traffic ad groups and traffic sources need their own tests; this way you can see if a ‘losing’ page is actually effective for a certain traffic source.
It is overpriced if the marketer is consumed with being #1 and will pay any price to be on top. Adwords offers prime spots to the highest bidder, so for competitive markets, some enter into bidding wars.
And, Adwords is overpriced for anyone who doesn’t set up the account right.
Adwords Account Strategies
Relevancy is key. Look at the quality score next to each keyword inside your account. Quality score is Google’s way of showing how relevant the words on your website page is to the words you are bidding for. The higher the number, the more relevant and the less it will cost you. (i.e 3 not so good, 5 or 6 much better).
You must get your CTR (Click Through Rate) UP, while keeping your CPC (Cost Per Click) DOWN. To achieve this, firstly block irrelevant traffic with some “negative keywords” – that is, keywords that are used by anyone who is not after your offering. For example, “fashion sales” would be a negative keyword if your business is a fashion design magazine.
You see, Google Adwords will reward you for showing relevant ads by offering better positions at lower prices (relative to the competition).
Secondly, if you run your own account then ensure your ad groups are tightly focusssed on keywords related to that group and landing page – not to your whole business. With specific ads and specific landing pages your overall CTR should go way up.
Next, what you want to do is look at what your first-time visitors are looking at. Pretend you know nothing about your business. OK, do they even know what you do from this landing page? Are there three great benefits of buying from you? Does it have a call to action at the bottom or top of page?
Does it have an opt-in box for an exciting offer (tips newsletter, free ebook, etc) so that if they don’t take action right away, at least they are still in the marketing loop? (Or else an exit window offer).
Program your Adwords for success with an account manager. Please ask your questions about Adwords and ROI below.