The Biggest Mistakes In Advertising: Google Adwords

Thank you for reading this next article I’ve written. The first article, titled “Working From Home is So Easy It Could Be An Insurance Commercial? Don’t Bet Your Income On It”, covered some of the mistakes most people make when they go out to start a business. This next article, as I’m sure you may have guessed, is about a major mistake people using when they go out online to market their business.

Google Adwords is a very popular method of advertising online, and there’s no mystery why. Google has by far the highest search engine traffic available online and you absolutely have to take advantage of it as a source of marketing. However, many people go out and have no idea whatsoever how to properly use Adwords to market. In fact, Adwords can be one of the main reasons your business fails because of how expensive it can get to use. It may not seem like much to pay 3.00 a click, but when you have over 100,000 impressions and 1500 clicks, suddenly your marketing budget is looking a bit tight, of course depending on how many clicks convert to income.

People just have no idea generally how to use Adwords effectively. They go out, throw on some arbitrary bid-per-click and never regulate their keywords to make sure that they’re being used effectively. I test my keywords per every 1,000 impressions and if they’re not up to the quality of clickability I’ve established, I get rid of them or I change my ad. So what are some of the ideas here that need to be used to improve your Adwords use?

First and foremost, you need to be stingy with your pay-per-click campaign. I know you want the best possible position on the Adwords campaign, but the fact is you have to understand your own budget and how to properly allocate your money. The number I try to use is 3-5 dollars for every 1,000 impressions. The most I tend to put up for a single click is $1. That’s only for the very best performing keywords I have. Learn to be frugal with your Adwords campaign. If your content is quality and is converting sales at a decent rate, you don’t need to go out and spend a huge amount per click.

Second, people use the wrong keywords. It can be very easy to do some research and find new keywords that are underused. In MLM and businesses, many people throw money at keywords like “Home business” and “online marketing”. These are very competitive keywords! You’ll be forced to pay up to use these words and they are so general, the odds your content specifically will fit your click audience is slim. You’ll end up paying a lot of money for little income. Go out and find keywords that are more specific. Find out “guru” names and see how much traffic they get, use specific location names or product names. If you’re dealing with a business opportunity, there’s a good chance that most people involved will be trying to sell the business opportunity and neglecting the retail product, go after the retail audience as well as the work from home crowd.

Third, and finally, make absolutely certain you are testing and altering your marketing! Don’t just set it on autopilot and forget about it for three months. That’s a great way to lose a very large amount of money very quickly. When I test a keyword, I test it for a week or for 1,000 impressions and see how high the click rate is. Then I’ll change my ad until I get a better click rate and when I finally get to where I want to be, I’ll check my keywords and look at which ones are converting on the highest percentage. I have a pre-set percentage of click through that I use as a baseline and when a keyword doesn’t perform to that level once I’ve established my ad is quality, it’s history. I may add a new word, I may not. It just depends on the situation.

Something else you may want to consider is separating your keyword specific ads from the Google ad network. Set up a campaign specifically targeted to just your keywords and then set up another one that targets the Google content network specifically. This can help bump up the quality of your ad campaigns.

This was a fairly brief article, but I think the content in it can be exceptionally valuable. Knowing how to properly handle Adwords can often be a make-or-break skill for the business owner on a budget. I hope it has been of some help to point out some of the more obvious problems and that you’ll be able to use this information right away to enhance your success.