Take 1 minute and ask yourself this question: name all of the places you go to get information?  

Take 15 more seconds, where else do you go for information?

According to the most recent report by Internet World Stats 2014 Q4, 42% of the world and 86.9 of North America are online. And we all know that Google dominates search engine usage.  Did you know that Google also dominates the online ad space on websites like cnn.com, yahoo.com and thousands of other sites?

If you can send those customers to a website, landing page, or video where you can educate and answer your customers questions and provide solutions to their pain points and needs,  you will have happy readers that will engage your business. Google Ads are targeted ads sending people to specific landing pages that help solve their problems, educate them on products they can buy and sometimes businesses over how to videos or free downloadable guides.

If you want to know how Google Adwords works, click here.

For many businesses, Google Ads will not work & help you increase sales

Top 4 Reasons Why Google Ad’s is Not Good For Your Business

Strategy

Marketing professionals use the word strategy like it is cheese spread that needs to be put on top of everything.  Too often, your strategy is guided by a young person, who is not truely invested in the outcome of your success. They definatley do not have as much to lose and they probably have never managed the growth of a business. Most likely, have never managed the growth of your type of business model and their “strategy” is going to lack the knowledge that your sweat and sleepless nights have accumulated.

Google Advertising requires strategy in 3 forms, people, process and product.

Poor Setup

Setup is a process issue and when your process fails, your advertising will fail. It’s that simple.

Unfortunately for small and large businesses alike, if your campaign settings are not exactly correct, you will waste a lot of your ppc budget to irrelevant clicks.  Understand, untill you have an expansive negative keyword list, you should expect some irrelevant clicks.  Sometimes words that doe not make sense to us end up bring paying customers. Thats called an anomaly, “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.”

Poor setup will generate impressions and boost traffic to your site, but it will be from irrelevant or low quality visitors.  Google makes Adwords so easy to setup and even provides customer service reps (Googler’s) who will do the setup for free. The majority of U.S. advertisers have their campaigns bringing in the international traffic even when their campaign settings are set to local or U.S. only.

I would estimate about 30% of our calls are from businesses who are advertising on Google and have significant problems in their account because of how their campaigns are setup and currently running. Setup problems basically cause poor quality or irrelevant traffic and when that occurs Google Advertising will not increase your sales.

Business Model / Sales Process

Yes, Google Ads does drive new customers and sales but you will not be able to “sell your way out” of a business model problem. If you use a cell phone as the first touch point for a customer, meaning the job of director of first impressions, don’t use AdWords.

If any of your people, product our process suck, you will know because their will be traffic on your site but zero engagement. This is where the Learning ROI is so important and it requires everyone in the business, from executive to front line CSR to listen and change.

Business reasons that are not measured in PPC costs:

1. Pricing
2. The math doesnt work, i.e. not knowing your real numbers
3. Poor user experience and low conversion rate

The top reasons why Google AdWords doesnt help businesses is when they do not track sales numbers or have inaccurate reporting systems. It’s really no different than a business that has poor business and banking records. This impacts small businesses with cash flow challenges to large corporations who have issues with slow paying Google Invoices.

If you are going to scrutinize every pay per click cost, then you must also do that to every sales costs and lost opportunity do to poor user experience and customer service experience. To see how to make AdWords work for your business, click here.

Or, save your save self time and money and work with Google AdWords Certified Consultant. Track the ROI in phases of experimenting, testing and then optimizing.  Call us to ask about the next 4 phases after optimizing.