PPC Advertising

Is Adwords for you?

There’s more than one PPC programme, but Adwords is currently the largest.

If you’re a small business thinking of using Google Adwords then it’s probably not for you:

It’s too time-consuming and expensive.
The user interface is horrible – seemingly designed by programmers – and takes forever and a day to understand.
Understanding the ins and outs of relevant keywords, Quality Score, creatives and landing pages also takes forever and a day. Get counselling if you’re going to attempt it.
You’re unlikely to make any money for many months because Adwords is essentially pay-to-play – you spend a few thousand/many thousands of pounds a month until your account history clicks in, and then your clickthrough costs start to decrease and you might start breaking even.
The so-called ‘rules’ for inclusion in the Adwords programme are applied arbitrarily. The trademarked term that you’re not allowed to use might be used continually by other advertisers.
Adwords is part of the Google ecosystem. The Google ecosystem always works in Google’s favour e.g. your content might be stolen and put on a scraper site funded by Adsense, rank higher than you AND get you banned from Adwords because it seems you’re stealing the scraper site’s content .
Customer support doesn’t suck, but that’s because it’s non-existent. Always remember that the Google employees (if you’re lucky enough to talk to one) don’t have your best interests at heart, and neither does the algorithm behind the Adwords programme. Google is a mid-life corporation owned by shareholders and all that Google worries about is Google.
If and when your adverts are prevented from appearing (for whatever spurious reason) they’re usually stopped with no explanation and it’s up to you to realise that this has happened and then to try and figure out why.
Do too many minor things wrong too often and you get banned. If you get a life ban then ALL your websites are banned from using Adwords / Adsense. Go to the Ad Approvals and Policy forum in the Adwords Support Forums and you’ll find endless examples of advertisers spending thousands of pounds a week who’ve been banned for life for mysteriously violating Google’s policies. There’s no real appeal process and the Big G refuses to tell you why you’ve been banned. Here and here are some examples of people who’ve been banned from using Adwords. Note the stock copy-and-paste replies, and the (allegedly) completely fictional dialogue with a ‘specialist team’. And read the comments on this post about retroactive banning …

Google’s attitude is best summed up in their standard ‘So long, sucker!’ email:

‘Our support team is unable to provide any further information. Please do not contact us again. For questions about other Google products, please visit http://www.google.com/support. We appreciate your cooperation.’

The press, as always, are doing a thorough and professional job into the well-documented double-standards and self-serving practices that are Google …. Even the specialist computer magazines are cringingly illiterate, slobbering over the latest Google PR.

However, if you decide to use Adwords here are some basics:

Research and Feedback

The only guaranteed way to figure out the words your customers are likely to use is through feedback. In the past one quick and simple way to get such feedback was to set up a trial Pay Per Click campaign, casting the net wide and gradually removing keywords. The risk nowadays however is that you build up an account history of low clickthroughs, which will affect the price that you pay for ads.

Another way is to begin conservatively with one or two specific terms and to try out new search terms as you get more confident. Bear in mind that if you’re TOO conservative and only spend a small amount of money you will never get enough meaningful data to use as feedback.

Yet another way to gain insight into the terms your customers are using is to analyse existing log-files.

A considerable amount of time must be spent on discovering and testing search phrases your customers use. It’s also necessary to test the wording in the adverts that your customers see next to the Search Engine Results (the ‘creatives‘) and to track your visitors to and around your website.

‘Creatives’ and Landing Pages

Having discovered the words your customers are using on the search engines you need to create an advert (your ‘creative’) that is concise, informative and appealing, and make an offer to potential customers that will tempt them to click on that advert.

You need a landing page for your users to arrive at once they’ve clicked on your ad. This landing page needs to be focussed and relevant to your advert. You should have a clear idea of what the purpose of your landing page is. Are you trying to sell your product immediately? Are you asking users to contact you for a free quote? Are you asking them to sign up to a newsletter (with a view to ‘upselling’ later)?

Generally speaking your landing page needs to give users exactly what they hoped for in as quick and painless a way as possible and with no distractions or deceit.

You also need to track your users. Tracking tells you which search terms, adverts, offers and creative copy worked best – and ultimately helps you increase your ROI.

Clickthroughs

You also need a bidding strategy.

If you’re always ‘number 1′ (at the top of the adverts) you may be wasting money. The top adverts cost the most but don’t necessarily attract the best-qualified visitors. Casual users are more likely to click on the first advert they see whereas those with a genuine interest are more likely to browse down the adverts and click on the ones they think are most relevant to their needs.

In Google you usually pay for ‘clickthroughs’ (a user clicking on your advert) and your position in the page’s advertising hierarchy is determined by what percentage of clickthroughs to impressions you get and how much you are prepared to pay for those clickthroughs.

As a rough guide for every 10,000 users typing in your search term roughly 100 will click on your advert. You will pay for those 100 ‘clickthroughs’.

It’s then up to you to convert those clickthroughs as you see fit. If you’re selling your product directly then out of those 100 users betweeen 1 and 3 will go on to purchase your product. On the other hand if you’re giving away a free PDF White paper and require only an email address you might get a 70% sign-up.

Lots more

There’s lots more to Adwords than the above. For example there’s CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and CPM (Cost per thousand impressions). There are arbitrary minimum bids (even when there are no competitors). There are defaults that favour Google. There are keyword research tools (the Google one is crippled/biased, so don’t trust it). There are dynamic keywords. There’s Ad scheduling. There are embedded matches, negative embedded matches and embedded sitelinks. There’s conversion tracking. You can spy on your competitors’ keywords (e.g. using KeyWordSpy or SpyFu). It goes on … and on …. and on … and the only way you can keep track of it is to employ a dedicated professional, and the only way you can make it pay is to have deep pockets.