I am asked all the time by my clients if I trust Google…
As an Expert in Google Adwords, clients and marketing directors are always asking me the question on whether or not I trust Google’s PPC advertising system, Adwords?
I always respond to the question in this way, “yes I do trust Google and the data they provide. Google has invented a tool that is the most profitable ever made. However, Google knows how to make Google money. It is upon your business to know how to leverage Google Adwords to make you money.”
Google Adwords Is Hard To Use
First, if you think you have the knowledge to manage the campaign, go and take just the Adwords Fundamental test. If you can pass that, you have an idea of what you are doing and it would be safe to say you know enough to be dangerous. If you want to know if you should be managing a budget of more than $500 a month, take one of the Adwords Certification exams. The sckuttlebut in the community of Adwords Experts, it is believed that 70% of first time test takers fail the Adwords Certification Tests.
Second, do not spend $1 with Adwords PPC if you did not have an expert first set up your campaigns. Make sure that every aspect from the initial settings, demographic targeting, keywords (bids, matching, landing pages, Quality Score) and most importantly the tracking has been through a Quality Control Inspection to the Adwords Best Practices and to your business strategy.
You Can Not Manage What You Do Not Measure!
9 out of every 10 Adwords prospects that we speak to do not have their Adwords Campaigns set-up to best practices as taught in the Google Certification Program. This includes marketing agencies and other Adwords Consultants; do not let anyone but a certified Adwords Professional manage or optimize your campaigns.
The most important thing to know with PPC Advertising
On average, only 3% of your keywords will actually bring you sales. That means that 97% of the keywords that you are bidding on in Adwords are going to waste your money with irrelevant clicks and people who are not interested in your products or services.
To manage Adwords or any Pay Per Click campaign, you must make sure that you are tracking the profitability of every keyword conversion and the cost per acquisition of the customer. If this is not how you are managing your campaign, it is cheaper to spend 1 hour with a wise man than to spend weeks, months and years of self study.
Just because you are paying someone to manage your Adwords campaign doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. Here is a link to a list of PPC Management (http://www.alexfender.com/ppc-management/ppc-management-questions/) questions that you should ask before engaging any one to advise you on your Adwords Campaign.
We get calls on almost a daily basis typically from a business owner or manager who is DIY Adwords and they are pissed off at the Adwords Phone Support. We hear many times that their campaigns were performing and they were making sales from Adwords but then things stopped working after they took some bad advice. Calling us in desperation because they have been wasting thousands of dollars with no return on investment.
This is also one of the key advantages of Adwords PPC, you can know to the penny the profit margin and true ROI in real time analytic dashboards.
There is always a reason why your Adwords campaign stopped performing and if you have the tracking setup correctly, the answer is in the data. In Google Analytics, look at the user experience reports and the sales funnel reports. Then identify the bottleneck and begin testing to get sales coming back in.
Again, you can not manage what you do not measure.