Many businesses feel that its easy to get quick results with Google Adwords and Pay Per Click. Google makes it sounds super easy to add a credit card and drop a few keywords into the campaign and drive traffic to your website. Many times initially this will work because your Google Adwords account is focused when you start and you using money to push traffic with your keywords entries.
If you are unaware of how to manage your PPC account and maximize this it could lead to wasting your advertising dollars. As time goes on with PPC accounts your budget can be spent quicker as new broad term keywords are added, a poorly optimized negative keyword list, bad quality scores and mismanaged AdWords campaign.
What is Google Adwords and Pay Per Click?
In the past, I have explained Google Adwords and PPC similar to Las Vegas and the casino method of business. If your uneducated and not trained on AdWords management initially you can get attached to AdWords with some initial quick wins when it comes to your pay per click account. However, what the trend is with most companies is that its super focused when you start the campaign and those 10 keywords you targeted now becomes 1,000 keywords with the same budget. Also, you now are getting scored for the quality of the ads, landing pages and copy that converts within your campaign. The most disturbing factor I have witnessed is that 97% of the businesses that run pay per click campaigns have no conversion tracking, call tracking or a metric in place to even tell which keywords and campaigns are driving the results.
We all know the 80-20 rule where 20% of the things you do will give you 80% of the results. How do you measure this with no analytics, conversion tracking and call tracking where you’re spending your good money? How do you scale your sales and operations to drive more sales if there is no measuring what is exactly working?
Your working in the dark without any tools or metrics and you want to grow your company, yet what is the recipe you have investigated that will help you get to that target.
I have built sales teams, call centers, and sales acquisition processes and its impossible to grow anything substantially if you have no metrics. What is the cost per click and how has your content and landing pages been optimized to drive that cost lower? What is the cost per conversion and what keywords are driving the most conversions? What about retargeting and display ads and how are you making sure you’re filtering out the traffic that is not relevant to your business?
What is the difference between PPC ads and SEO?
Many times when I talk to business owners they swear they have SEO and they rank and have absolutely no organic rankings and only paid ads. They even will swear that they are on page 1 all day every day because they are running ads. Most business owners, because they are busy, have a faint idea of how to maximize their PPC account and shockingly do not even know the difference between SEO and PPC.
Pay Per Click Ads and Advertising is when you rent that space on Google in which it runs very similar to a paid auction so the highest bidder is on the top of Google for keywords they have bid on. Your ads will only show based on the amount of budget you have to spend daily on PPC. So in actuality, if you are paying $ 2 per click and have a budget of $10 per day then if you get 5 clicks by 9 am, from that time till the next day your ads are not running on Google because your budget has run out.
The biggest question is how do you get the most out of your dollar on Google Adwords? If you optimize your ads where your campaigns have a better quality score such as 9 or 10 out of 10 you can get almost 60%-400% discount on your cost per click vs. having a 1-3 quality score on your landing pages. This is why most of the successful campaigns have specific landing pages that have a strong call to action and drive behavior that leads to a call or a form fill vs. giving someone to many paths and options that confuse the visitors.
SEO is organic rankings that have nothing to do with PPC however having rankings can be a positive factor for your PPC costs and influence when it comes to results. SEO is like owning that space on Google vs. PPC Campaigns that rent that space from Google. They say that the portion of visitors on Google that go to PPC is about 10%-13% where 87% and up of traffic on Google’s search is organic SEO. The challenge for most business owners is they lack the mindset and long term thinking and belief to invest in SEO. SEO is worth it but you need to understand once is instant gratification where the other is delayed gratification but once you arrive with organic rankings the bounce rate drops and you are now owning that space 24 hours per day and seven days per week.
You can literally drive down the cost per click with ranking on the same page that your advertising on because the visitors now see your company twice on that page instead of one time. We also find that visitors that go to the organic results more than likely are educated and do not go to ads but companies that have an organic ranking because they feel they have been there longer and perhaps are more credible.
As a Consultant, I have helped companies with 200k per month AdWords budget
As a consultant working with lots of large companies I have reviewed, optimized and helped many companies scale up their sales through PPC management and maximizing their pay per click efforts. Several of my clients that did 20 million + in revenue have usually spent 15k per month and above every month because of the results they have received. I have reviewed accounts that have spent 170k per month in pay per click that understand the true value of PPC and SEO working together when it comes to a diversified marketing strategy to grow revenues.
The commonality I see with small businesses is that they do not commit enough of a budget to gain enough data to get information that is necessary to scale up. Most small businesses judge their marketing by spending 1k on Google Adwords and pre-maturely come up with a decision as to whether or not it works on such a small amount of data. PPC and Google Adwords is managed off the data that comes along with metrics that should be implemented such as Google Analytics, Conversion tracking, CTR ( Click Through Rate), Keyword performance, quality scores, landing page testing, and call tracking.
A Company needs to make a commitment when it comes to PPC and SEO in which they should commit working with an expert or an internet marketing consultant for a minimum of 6 months and the best people in the industry understand that a 1-2 year cycle is imperative for any kind scalability.
What I learned doing 1,000s of Pay Per Click Evaluations around Google Adwords
Over the last 10 years while working with businesses and reviewing over 10,000 accounts within their pay per click accounts these common factors were the ones that I came across for over 80% of the time causing businesses to lose money and opportunities.
These factors included;
Lack of Time in Managing Account
Lack of Education – Only Set Up Account
No Conversion Tracking
Account Set-Up Improperly
Bad Ad Copies
No Ad Extensions
No Site Extensions
No Call Outs
Bad Call to Action
No Education of Quality Scores
No Call Tracking
Set Up Adwords, Never Managed it
Sending Traffic to Their Home Page
No PPC Strategy for their Campaign
No Google Analytics
Budget Too Small
Had Inexperienced Employees Manage Accounts
Has Your Business Become a Prisoner to Google Adwords and Why?
Most Businesses get attached and addicted to Google Adwords because of the immediate results. You are paying premium rates in order to get the NOW solution for your business. We live in a world where people want to get immediate sales and results and that comes with a cost and after paying all of that money you could miss building other channels of leads and traffic for your site for the long term to maximize your pay per click and online branding.
What is a Quality Score with Google Adwords?
Quality Scores have to do with a score Google gives you based on content and the landing pages that you are sending people to. Along with the Quality Score, there are several factors in what gives you that quality score and what rate you will pay for the cost per click. If your quality scores are too low Google will even pause your ads and not distribute your ads as frequently as those that have a high-quality score and are more aligned with Google’s scores.
Here is an image of the factors that influence your quality score:
Here is an image of a scale of how that quality score can impact your cost per click:
If you want results with your PPC accounts and want to hire a PPC Expert than schedule a time for a FREE CONSULTATION. I can walk you through your account and more than likely show you where you are wasting money.
If you are burning money on PPC and with Google Adwords your not only losing your marketing budget, but you’re also losing the time your spending along with opportunities to acquire customers and revenue.
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