It is simply the most powerful paid advertising platform for search online. With over 91% of the search engine market share, Google is without a doubt, the indisputable champion of all time.
As a result, it’s only normal that every company on earth wants a piece of the action on the first page of Google either by using AdWords PPC paid advertising or organic search marketing. Let’s face it, if your website is not showing up on the first page of Google for any given keyword query in your industry, you can forget about acquiring new clients on this platform.
Using the AdWords platform
As we all know, with power comes complexity and learning curves before one can show noteworthy accomplishment. AdWords can make you or break you depending on your skills at managing your campaigns. Let’s face it, companies don’t want to lose money in the process of buying paid advertising to acquire more leads. The main purpose of any business is to grow and make a profit.
At the end of the day, the only important metrics that matters to company owners are the conversion rates and ROI (return on investment). Sure there are lots of important metrics to track and monitor for any savvy marketer. Furthermore, these metrics are bundled in a measurable value called “KPI ” or key performance indicator. This value was designed to monitor a business overall marketing objectives (the success or failure of a campaign). Some of those KPIs to monitor are called: CPC (cost-per-click), CTR (click-through-rate), CPA (cost-per-acquisition), CPC (cost-per-conversion), CLV (customer-life-value), just to name a few.
The AdWords platform has countless amounts of settings that you could compare to the cockpit dashboard of an airplane. Yes, indeed, very confusing for someone without any paid advertising experience.
Just to give you a brief idea of the different settings requiring your attention when first creating an AdWords campaign, part of the list settings are as follows: campaigns to ad groups creation, ad copies, budget settings and max. CPC settings. From setting up keyword match types like “broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, exact match to setting up negative broad match, negative phrase match, negative exact match. Setting up conversion tracking and Google Tag Manager tags and triggers, demography, locations and ad placement settings, scheduling, setting up ad extensions, call extensions, display network ad settings, understanding QS (quality score) and the list goes on and on.
It’s quite understandable that most companies don’t have the internal expertise to fine tune and manage AdWords campaign. Most importantly, their CPA (cost-per-acquisition) is much higher due to the fact that their campaigns are not fully optimized. As a result, their QS (quality score) (measure from 1 to 10 based on ad relevancy, keywords in ad copy, URL, landing page, etc.) per keywords are very low therefore bringing their CPC (cost-per-click) much higher. Furthermore, the ad impressions (amount of times your ads are shown) will be low due to poor campaign optimization.
Time for a Google AdWords Account Audit
It’s always advisable to ask for a Google AdWords account audit by a third party certified professional. Most importantly, that professional will help you understand why your campaigns are not performing to your liking.
An AdWords account audit is the process of evaluating the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and make your account run smoothly in order to increase your ROI. Only a Google AdWords certified professional will be able to assist you and find the missing link. During evaluation, many hidden issues will be discovered. Each item will be analyzed and logged separately.
A complete structure analysis of your account will be conducted to point out the weak elements. An AdWords audit will also help you discover where ad spent is wasted and most importantly how it can be improved, even more, new ideas will also be suggested.
You see, there is a lot more to Google AdWords than simply creating an ad and throwing a bunch of keywords in a single ad group and adding the website URL.
The most important aspect of any AdWords campaign is conversion tracking. Over 95% of businesses don’t have that right. In order to fine tune and improve ROI, you first need to understand what is going on. If you can’t track your conversion properly, how can you analyze your data and correct the poor results that are burning your paid advertising budget?
Furthermore, a high percentage of companies are missing important elements online. They just don’t have a proper end to end sales funnel with automation to capture fresh daily leads and turn them into buyers. Having a website is just a small fraction of the online marketing equation and that is the main reason why so much companies are losing money trying to advertise online. Most importantly, they don’t have a proper CRM (customer relationship management) platform to capture and nurture their leads through email marketing automation. So they simply send expensive paid traffic directly to their websites and hope for the best, a spray and pray technique that won’t bring much results.
John Tahan