The #1 Biggest Problem with Most Google Adwords Campaigns

In my opinion, Google Adwords is possibly the greatest advertising medium developed for business owners, like yourself, in the last 20 years.

As an advertiser using Google Adwords, your goal is that, when someone types a keyword relating to your product or services as a search on Google, your ads will be displayed. The visitor gets taken to your site where they will hopefully sign up for more information or make a purchase.

Instant, measurable, affordable, controllable – there really is no other advertising medium which gives you the same results.

However, set Adwords up in the wrong way and you will spend cash for poor results and you will end up disappointed.

The following describes the #1 biggest problem we see with most Google Adwords campaigns and what you can do to fix it:

Poorly Constructed Webpage/Landing Page

This may seem as though it is unrelated to Adwords, but in fact, this is the cornerstone of every good Adwords campaign. Think about it, what is the point in paying to send traffic to a website which is not compelling and does not generate sales or leads? You might as well take a pile of cash and set light to it.

When we consult with businesses on their Adwords campaigns, we always include a critique of their landing page/website, because we can send the best targeted traffic to a poor website and the results will still be poor.

Several issues to bear in mind when looking at your website/landing page:

1. Does your site offer something that your target market actually needs or wants? Have you researched your market? Have you made sales already from your site? If not, you should put yourself in your customers shoes and really critique your offering.
2. Does your site/landing page relate to the keywords/ads that sent the visitor to the page otherwise the visitor will hit the back button – result? wasted click!
3. Does it include a headline? You have a fraction of a second to capture the visitors attention the headline needs to hit visitors hot buttons, be relevant and related to the search they performed.
4. Is the site well designed, look professional and easy to navigate? Otherwise, that back button will be used again!
5. Does the site include useful, relevant information that helps the visitor make a decision about the product or service you are offering?
6. Are there multiple ways for the visitor to interact with you? Do you just offer a phone number and email? Are you collecting leads if the prospects dont purchase right away? If you are not offering multiple methods for a prospect to interact with you, you have no idea whether your site is of interest and no method of performing follow-up marketing.
7. Are conversions set up with your website to capture statistics in Adwords relating to sales and leads? If not, you are flying blind with your campaigns you receive leads/sales but you have no idea which ads/keywords generated the action.

Get your website right before you spend a ton of cash sending traffic to it otherwise you will have nothing to show for the work you have put into your finely tuned Adwords campaign.

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Want to get professional help with your adwords campaigns? Sign up for a no-obligation, FREE consultation with a Google Adwords Qualified individual. This is not a thinly veiled sales pitch but a consultation aimed at helping you figure out what needs to be done to optimize your Adwords campaigns. Or, if you are new to Adwords, let us spend some time with you discussing whether Adwords is a viable medium for you to consider.

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During the last 6 years, we have consulted with small businesses routinely who have set up an Adwords campaign and have just about given up on this medium. Usually the complaints include things like:

1. I receive lots of clicks (which costs tons of cash), with very little to show for it.
2. I really have no clue what I am doing on Adwords – it is too complicated.
3. I do not understand how to set up Analytics or conversion
4. I have a good set of keywords in my campaigns, but I seem to get too many clicks, for no leads.
5. I have set everything up, but I don’t see my ads anywhere.

7 Biggest Google Adwords Mistakes

Once we get to take a look at the settings in these campaigns it is usually pretty obvious why the company is not achieving the results it expected:

1. The website is not designed to be compelling, nor capture leads or sales.
2. The keywords are too broad in nature – e.g. ‘carpet’ and ‘cleaning’, instead of ‘carpet cleaning Houston’
3. The keywords are lumped into single adgroups with no attempt at putting them into themed groups: e.g. ‘carpet cleaning’, ‘tile cleaning’, ‘upholstery cleaning’ are all in a single adgroup.
4. Conversions are not set up, so there is no method to track leads and what keyword, ad etc. generated the lead.
5. Ads do not match the keywords, or do not point to the relevant page in the website.
6. Ads are poorly constructed and do not entice visitors.
7. Bid costs are too low relative to daily budgets or vice versa.

It is perfectly possible to stick a bunch of seemingly relevant keywords into a campaign, slap together an ad and let it rip!!!

However, doing this will almost certainly not bring you the results you would like.

Does Google Want You to Fail?

Of course the answer is no, but you have to understand that Google has built its dominant market share by realizing that people using a search engine want ‘relevance‘ – they want to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. This means that if an advertiser is bidding on the keyword “dogs”, but they sell “custom dog collars”, they will get a ton of searches for anything containing the word “dog”, 99.9% of which will not be relevant for “custom dog collars”, so the click through rate (CTR) will be very low for this advertiser. (CTR is the percentage of clicks relative to the number of times that an ad was shown in a search).

Google will penalize this advertiser by showing their ads lower down the page (or more likely on page 24!!!) because they are not relevant to most people searching for dog related keywords. This gives a better experience to the search engine user, which is the goal.

How to construct a well put-together Adwords campaign is not rocket-science, but it does take a degree of understanding of the mechanics of the system to ensure the type of results that are desired.

Further Help

MW Strategic Marketing offers a FREE Google Adwords Healthcheck, where we take a look at your settings, keywords, ads and even your website/landing page. We then schedule a 1 hour phone call to go over the specific changes we would recommend you make to your campaigns.

You can find out more about this service here: Google Adwords Manager.

Also

If you are interested in becoming proficient with Google Adwords, yourself, we recommend Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Google Adwords” – he also offers a free 5 day course. Find out more about this Perry Marshall.

As always, drop me an email if you have questions, we would love to hear from you.

To your success!

Matt Whitworth

Principal Consultant
MW Strategic Marketing

Check out our free video which gives the #1 secret to marketing your small business online – Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

Email: info@mwstrategicmarketing.com

Web: www.MWStrategicMarketing.com