“Google are a Rip-off!”

Its a frequent story when you talk to business owners about AdWords:

“I wasted hundreds on Google. I’m done with AdWords – I’d rather do anything other than line Google’s pockets with more money. The whole system is a rip-off”.

In fact, here is a real email I recently received from someone who once contacted me about AdWords. They didn’t go ahead with AdWords Management – which is a shame as even an initial consultation could have saved them alot of time and money.

“It has been a very unsatisfactory six months. While I have managed to get our costs down from Google’s original charges, we are still paying way more than we were for a pretty poor conversion rate/ROI. I am exploring other ways to promote our site as I think Adwords and the way they operate are just a rip off, and not the place for us to be. I’m just making them money while losing out myself. I expect you know how to get the best out of PPC but thank’s to Google messing us about for the last 6+ months, I don’t want to throw any more money in their direction.”

Here’s the reply I wrote:

“I really wish you’d let me know when you were back in the PPC game, I think I could have saved you a lot of money and trouble.

AdWords is a double edged sword. Google are really selling you the opportunity to advertise with them, which is a good thing as they can expose you to thousands of relevant people. BUT the opportunity does need to be managed properly because its far too easy to mess up. I think this is where Google fall down – they don’t make it obvious how to use the system properly and will gladly let you stumble ahead and waste lots of money (because yes, they profit from your mistakes). However, if you take advantage of the system with streamlined accounts, then it can work brilliantly.

As an example, when I last looked at your account, I don’t think you had any negative keywords. So a majority of your ads would have been exposed to irrelevant people, searching for pictures, videos, etc. Also, having keywords on broadmatch shows your ads for similar searches, but what Google thinks is similar is often way off the mark. So of all your clicks, maybe only 30% were actually relevant. So cutting out the 70% irrelevancy would have more than doubled your conversion rates. As an example, a client came to me who had a junk clearance company, his broadmatch keywords of “house clearance” were showing his ads for searches of “house selling” and even “flats for sale”. So only about 10% of the clicks were actually relevant. I know, you’d hope that people wouldn’t click on the ads if they weren’t relevant to them, but people do click on anything (which is annoying for the advertisers!)

It would be ideal if Google had the ethics (and customer support resources) to say “hang on a minute, this advertiser is paying us lots of money but not getting any conversions – we should call her up and offer to help with her account”. But they dont. Anyhow – thats just to put AdWords into perspective a bit, as its common to hate Google when you’ve had a muddled account – but it can also work very well.

On the flipside, I have just done a test account for another similar site, to research the suitability of using AdWords. I set up thirty or so relevant keywords linked to townnames, to test for click prices. The click prices were in the region of 75p to £3, which although they would become cheaper on broadmatch, were too expensive. The problem is that you can only afford so many clicks to still profit from a conversion, as the profit margin is so low, and with low conversion rates (ie. competing with the bigger sites) the clicks really do have to be very cheap to make it work. I think 75p – £3 would have wasted the client lots of money in the longrun, so advised not to proceed.”

Its too easy to make mistakes without AdWords Management

Frugal business owners may think investing in professional Google AdWords Management is another costly expense. So they try it themselves, think they have a grip of it, and then hate Google when it all goes wrong.

Here’s why its almost fool-proof to have your accounts professionally managed:

We only manage accounts we think are going to work well – i.e. we want the business owner to profit from their AdWords account, not simply waste money on us and Google.

We therefore do some preliminary research to see how confident we feel its going to work – based on your website, your product or service, industry, competition etc. We’re upfront about all of this, and share any concerns with you.

If we feel confident, and you want to go ahead, then you can do so a month at a time. So if things aren’t working out, you’ve only spent a small amount of money to learn exactly what’s wrong and why it isn’t working. Compare this to simply throwing money at it, and not having a clue whats going on or why it isn’t working.

When you invest in professional AdWords Management, all of the results are valuable feedback. Whether its in the form of reinforcing your confidence with profits, or letting you know exactly where the bottlenecks are (which you can then work on), you know what to do next to help your business grow.

This is why investing in expertise is so valuable – you get expert information back – not random guesses which leave you in the dark and feeling frustrated with Google!