Category: Google AdWords

Posted on

Are You Holding Google AdWords Accountable?

I cannot begin to tell you how many clients have come to me for AdWords services to find out that they spend several thousands of dollars every month for clicks without holding Google accountable. What do I mean by that?

If you do not have Google AdWords conversion tracking installed and at the minimum Google Analytics installed, you are not holding Google AdWords accountable. You must have metrics in place to be able to identify the success or lack there of of your Google AdWords program.

Without conversion tracking installed you will never know how many leads AdWords actually generated for you. When things get tight financially the first thing you will choose to chop is AdWords. But if you know you got 30 leads from AdWords last month and 5 leads from your website, instead you may choose to increase your AdWords budget to generate more leads and cut back on website services for the time being. With the knowledge of what vehicles are generating a return for you, you can make smart choices in regards to your budget. But if you do not have these metrics in place, you are only guessing at where your business has come from.

Typically we will not take on a new AdWords client until these metrics have been installed by their webmaster, as we want to seriously help our clients get the most from AdWords. We want to have conversations built around historical data not guesswork!

AdWords can bring you leads and sales but you need to do your part to keep the program accountable to match your business objectives.

Posted on

What to Do When You Have No Impressions in AdWords

So you set up your Google AdWords account, set it to run, and now it’s been a few days and nothing is happening. What should you do?

First, if you have absolutely no impressions at all, I would contact Google help through the control panel and ask the ad approval powers to take a look at your program. In nearly all cases you will get a response in 24 hours that your program was under review and is running now. It used to be that a program would run in about 15 minutes after set up, but now I have seen some accounts sit there for three to five days in the ad approval process. The contact is like a kick start. So if nothing is happening give Google a push.

If your impressions are very low, the first place to look is your daily budget and cost per click. You may not be in the auction if you settings are too low.

For clients we recommend a minimum budget of $500 to $800 for clicks for a 30 day period and we will typically set up an account to run with a default cost per click of $1.75 to $3.50 depending on the market.

For professional services like legal and medical services your default cost per click may need to be $6.50 to $8.00 to get any action. If you CPC is at this level you really should have a 30 click budget of $1,000 to $1,500 on top of our fees to manage your account to get Google to show your program.

AdWords is an auction so if you have set your account up with a maximum cost per click of $.05 or $.25 and a daily spend of just a few bucks, the reality is that you are just not going to get any action on Google. Businesses are spending big money on Google and to have Google show your ads, you have to compete in this same arena.

Posted on

AdWords Trends

We’ve seen a strong downward trend in the cost per click in Google AdWords starting in January. If your account is still set up for clicks based on the cost per click increases you had to make in September and October to salvage your AdWords business, now is the time to take a careful look to see where you can start trimming back.

Google had a decrease of about 64% in income in the fourth quarter of 2008. The economic stagnation is finally hitting Google AdWords with advertisers moving out of the mix causing profits to fall for Google and impacting the cost per click in Google AdWords. With over 5 years as a professional account manager and managing accounts for businesses in a broad number of sectors, we are seeing several strong trends in activity.

  1. The opportunities to drop the cost per click and still retain excellent ad position on AdWords is happening right now. Although this is not across the board in every business, we are seeing a marked trend down in the cost per click needed to retain page position.
  2. Although impressions for many accounts still remain high, we are starting to see a drop in impressions for some accounts as a reflection of decreased searches.
  3. For our client accounts at this point we are not seeing a marked decrease in conversions. In fact for many clients due to the decreased competition online for clicks, we are actually seeing an increase in conversions.
  4. For my own business, I am seeing more clients come in to AdWords for the first time as well as more prospects wanting information or just consulting but wanting to self manage their accounts to keep expenses lean.

My biggest tip on AdWords at this time is to review your cost per click to see if you can start to drop your bid without impacting performance. For some account this means as much as a $1 per click drop and for others we are incrementally moving down at $.05 to $.10 at each review. For some accounts some keywords can go down and other hot property keywords have had to go up in cost per click, but the general marked trend is a downward drop in the cost per click.

If you haven’t read Jeremy Chatfield’s predictions on what will happen with Google AdWords for 2009 I would recommend that you click in to read his blog post on this topic.  I think as Google gets squeezed more by the economic realities of our time, we will see Google try to squeeze more dollars out of each click and work hard to stop the slide in their revenues by looking to creatively increase the cost per click for advertisers. We’ve already seen Yahoo add a minimum cost per click level on many keywords which is simply a bogus “grab for cash” and Jeremy expects Google to do likewise this next year with a big push on using broad match, minimum cost per click bidding, and “spin” on the impact of personalized search.

Jeremy’s been right before particularly on the September 2008 AdWords quality score adjustment. It will be interesting to see how Google reacts as we see an even greater decline in their profits for the first quarter of 2009.

Posted on

How Do You Monitor Google AdWords?

It is shocking, but there are business out there that are spending thousands of dollars on Google each month without any checks and balances in place to monitor the performance of their programs.

Before we start working with an AdWords client we want several things in place. (This is really in the client’s best interest.) We want to have metrics to evaluate the success, or lack thereof,  of their Google AdWords program.

This is what we recommend:

  1. Have a website statistics package installed. AWStats is not enough. We like Urchin and second best Google Analytics.
  2. Have a contact form on the website that when the script is triggered drops the client to a new URL for the thank you page. Contact forms that simply place text on the same page thanking the client for a form submission will never be able to have Google AdWords conversion tracking installed.
  3. Make sure that AdWords conversion tracking is installed on the thank you or order confirmation page.
  4. Have a budget established for $800 to $1,500 per month for clicks to start with. Less than that, you really should not use our services as we will add too much to your program’s overhead.
  5. Consider custom landing pages targeted to your ad group’s themes. Some clients don’t always need this as they may have a page on their website that is a good match, but we never recommend dropping the AdWords clickee on the home page of the website. When we do custom landing pages we always enable a form at the bottom to allow for fast questions and an additional way to capture the lead for further contact.

If you are not using metrics to evaluate your AdWords program, you are just leaving your pocket book or wallet open on the table for Google to grab your cash without accountability. You should only spend on Google AdWords when it is smart for your business.

I’ve seen and made happen some absolutely wild success stories with Google AdWords, but I’ve also told some clients that AdWords is not working for them and they should stop advertising there. If you don’t measure the activity and leads generated by your program, you will simply be guessing at whether AdWords is working for you. You should not be guessing, you should know!