Learn the 8 most Costly Mistakes in Google Adwords Campaigns

1. The 8 Most Costly Mistakes in
Google Adwords Campaigns:
Find Out How Much They
are Costing You.
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203
Roswell GA 30075

2. 8 Most Costly Mistakes in
Google Adwords Campaigns:
Find Out How Much They are Costing You.
I’ve been in Advertising for a long time and until I was introduced to
Google Adwords I never really thought any of it seemed like rocket sci-
ence. The biggest advantage to Google Adwords also
seems to be its biggest challenge for advertisers: DATA
and information, more data than we ever imagined possi-
receive an email
ble. The challenge is to know how to track and report on every time your
all of this data so that you can optimize your campaign
without spending eight hours a day looking at reports. phone rings and
The biggest “kicker” is that many people think that who-
tell you which
ever offers to pay the most shows up at the top of the keyword generated
ads, this is not true and the main reason you need to
have an optimized campaign. Google charges less and the phone call!
gives favorable treatment to ads that users tell them are
the best ad for their search (how this is done is also very
interesting and will be the source of a report in the near future).
1. Tracking
Most people put this at the end of the list, but for me this is the most
important element of a successful campaign. If you are not tracking you
will be back in the 90’s where you are spending money and not know-
ing whether it is working or not and that is the only thing worse than a
campaign that does not work. In today’s world if you are spending more
than $1,000/month for online marketing you should be able to track
exactly how much business you are closing from not just the campaign
but every single keyword in the campaign. Please note this report is not
focused on e-commerce, it is focused on companies that tend to generate
leads not sales online. For less than $100 a month you can track which
keywords caused someone to fill out a form on your website but also
receive an email every time your phone rings and tell you which keyword
generated the phone call! This allows you to stop spending money on
keywords that don’t drive sales and spend more money on those that do.
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203 • Roswell, GA 30075 • 404-624-6645

3. 2. Value Proposition
When the client finds your ad, what is it that is being said that makes
them want to choose your business over everyone else? When someone
goes to Google and searches for “Bankruptcy Attorney” they are going
to have access to hundreds of thousands of choices and I can assure
you that while they won’t look at most they will look at several… and
you better stand out! This is a problem that has been at the top of the
list since the beginning of advertising and it’s really not an advertising
problem, it’s a business problem. If you cannot give a
good reason that someone should do business with you One of the great
then it will be very difficult to grow from anything other
than referrals. One of the great things about Adwords
things about
is it helps you focus in on people that will relate to your Adwords is it helps
value proposition. If you are cheap then advertise as a
“Cheap Bankruptcy Attorney” and you will get the peo- you focus in on
ple that truly have no money and want something cheap. people that will
If you are an expensive bankruptcy attorney hopefully
you are also very high quality and you can help clients relate to your
that really have assets that they are trying to protect so
they will be willing to pay more for quality.
value proposition.
3. Landing Pages
If you don’t take anything else from reading this report, take THIS piece
of advice: Do not send all of this wonderful Adwords traffic
to your Home Page! If all of your Google Adwords are sending
traffic to your homepage stop reading right now and go and pause
your campaign… If the service or product that the client typed into
the search bar is not listed in the title of the page you send them to,
(we will get to the ad itself in a minute) you will be paying three times
more than your competitors and getting lower quality leads. That’s
right, many studies show that ads that go to a page with the product
or service listed in the title of the page will generate from 2-10+ times
more leads for the same budget. The pessimist would say that we as
consumers are too lazy to spend two seconds to see the product listed
in the side bar and click to go to that page but the consumer would say
“Why bother with a company that won’t take a few minutes to make
sure and send me to the right information first. “
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203 • Roswell, GA 30075 • 404-624-6645

4. 4. Keywords in Ads
If I’m searching for blue baseball netting and there are 35 companies on
the home page trying to sell me sports netting, but only one company that
tries to sell me “blue baseball netting”, which ad do you think I’m go-
ing to click on? In an Adwords campaign you should have hundreds of
keywords in most cases and your ads should be written specifically to my
search. The stats are overwhelming. If you’re in the Insurance business
and I search for “boat insurance” you better have the word “boat” in your
ad and don’t forget that it needs to be on the landing page as well.
5. Bidding High to be # 1 on Google
Many people we talk to think the top position will get the most business
and to get there they need to outbid everyone else. This is simply not
true. First of all, as stated before, the top position is NOT given to the
person that pays the most, it is given to the ad that will generate the most
money for Google while also serving the needs of the searcher. For
starters, if your ad copy is written in such a way that three times more
people will click on your ad than the average, Google will charge you
less per click but still make more money because they are
getting more clicks overall. While that’s good for Google it the top position is
may or may not be good for you. For example, if you run
an ad for “Free Lawn Care” you may get a lot more clicks NOT given to the
which will cost you more money obviously, but the qual- person that pays
ity of the lead will be lacking due to this “bait and switch”
–type ad. Obviously, your ad doesn’t relate to your offer the most
and you just end up paying for a click that isn’t a good
lead. Another interesting thing to note is that many people find being in
the number three spot produces more traffic because it is closer to the or-
ganic search terms where most people are looking…remember less than
25% of searchers ever click the ads. Finally, you have to know the value
of a lead. We have some clients that would lose money paying $5 per
click to be in the top ad spots but they can get a great return by paying
$2 and end up lower on the page.
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203 • Roswell, GA 30075 • 404-624-6645

5. 6. Negative Keywords
We find that many clients put in high level keywords such as “lawn care”
and have their ad run for all variations which at the high level is not nec-
essarily bad, but you have to know that one of the most popular searches
on the internet is for jobs and if you are not hiring, this can eat up an ad-
vertising budget very quickly. So if you use “lawn care” as a broad term
and I search for “jobs in lawn care” I see your company advertising and
say hey let’s click over there…ouch waste of $3. It would
have been easier for you to set up your account so that
any searches that included jobs and careers were elimi-
if you are not the
nated from your campaign, thus allowing your budget to lowest price guy
be spent on more productive keywords. And don’t forget
about the example in #1 where someone is searching for
in the market then
“cheap lawn care” if you are not the lowest price guy in this is probably a
the market then this is probably a bad lead for you.
bad lead for you.
7. GEO-Targeting
GEO-Targeting is where Google allows you to have your ads run in a
specific area. This is great for a company that is not nationwide. Let’s
say you are a mortgage company that only covers one city such as
Atlanta, GA. There are a couple of great things that help you compete
with a big national mortgage company. First you can have your ad run
only in Atlanta so that you will not waste budget in areas you do not
serve. Second many people may not want to do their mortgage online
so those searchers will ignore many of the Lending Tree-type ads and
click on yours because the ad tells them you have an office in Atlanta.
Now, while many big companies can get a little lazy you need to know
that if I am a big bank with locations all over the country I could also run
different ads for every city where I have a location.
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203 • Roswell, GA 30075 • 404-624-6645

6. 8. A/B Testing
This is where I am really glad that I paid attention in all of those stats courses
in college. A/B testing is the ability to control one part of your campaign
and see specific results. Two of the most common are in Ad Copy and Land-
ing Pages. How does this work? First, for ad copy you should always be
running two versions (maybe more on a large budget) of each and keep
everything else constant. For example, a lawn care company providing
overseeding services in the fall might want to try the following ad headlines:
“Free Estimate for Overseeding” and “Keep Grass Green with Overseed-
ing”. Google allows us to run the ads in a perfect 50/50 random mix so af-
ter a month we can compare our tracking to see which one gave
us the best return for our ad dollars. Another example is for the
landing page, you can send half the traffic to one landing page
We have many
and the other half to another. We have many case studies that case studies
have increased leads by as much as 300% with very minor tweaks
in these areas. There are studies online where people are running that have
a campaign that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every
month to go from generating $1,000,000 to almost $3,000,000
increased
in revenue from changes such as this and of course these changes leads by as
to the page only cost the company a few hundred dollars… how
about that for some ROI? much as 300%
Truth be told, I could, and many have, made list of the top 100
with very
costly mistakes in Adwords or Pay-Per-Click Advertising. While minor tweaks
it is one of the more complex advertising mediums to come out
it is also one of the most effective I have ever seen. Fun fact: it
in these areas.
took the yellow pages over 100 years to get to $25 Billion. It
took Google 10 years. Another reason I am bullish on adwords for the
long term is this: Google makes 96% of its revenue from search advertis-
ing, Google knows they have given you all the tools to know whether it is
being effective or not and that if it stops working you will know within hours
so Google has no choice but to make adwords continue to work for ad-
vertisers. If you want to put your money on a winning team when it comes
to the advertising world comparing Google to the New York Yankees of
baseball would be a total understatement of the advantages Google has
in talent and money. For anyone that has taken the time to read this report
just give me a call and we will do a complete assessment of your adwords
campaign for free. Just our way of saying thanks and, of course, if there is
a good fit we are hoping you will be a client in the near future.
10929 Crabapple Road, Suite 203 • Roswell, GA 30075 • 404-624-6645