Adwords Can Work For Small Businesses
Posted by Steve Baker on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 in Advert Text, Google Adwords
I read an article in Business Week the other day. This bloke called Gene Marks, who (scarily) heads up “The Marks Group” and has written numerous books about business, explained why Adwords was a bad idea if you’re a small company. Here’s his explanation in full:
“John’s a pretty smart guy. He runs a company that sells specialty pet foods. He manages his own investments. He keeps an eye on his taxes. But I’ve found a way to turn John into a blithering idiot. I’ve asked him to figure out how to use Google’s (GOOG) AdSense profitably. Are you interested in a mind-numbing exercise? Give AdSense a shot. Or Yahoo SM or MSN AdCenter. Don’t you know how much to budget for “clicks” on your ad? Are you just a little suspicious as to who exactly is counting these “clicks” that conveniently turn into revenue for these companies? Like John, you’ve just entered the alternate universe of Internet advertising! Here’s a word of wisdom: Leave the mass-market advertising to Coke (KO) and Pepsi (PEP). Small business owners should stick to less mystifying forms of promotion.”
Tech ‘Solutions’ Your Small Biz Can’t Use Now, I’m not going to go into detail about his argument – he doesn’t even know the difference between Adwords and Adsense, and I can’t actually FIND an explanation of what he thinks is wrong with PPC – but it does highlight a problem that the industry seems to have at the moment. There are a lot of ‘have-a-go’ advertisers who decide to give Adwords a go, and don’t make it work. That’s fine and dandy, but for a few people, when their egos clash with a dismal failure, they simply write the whole thing off as somebody else’s fault. I’d hazard a guess here, that Mr Marks decided to give Adwords a go, perhaps for his own site, or on behalf of one of his clients, and got bad results. Unable to accept responsibility, he decided that nobody could have done better. Cue some more bad publicity for the PPC industry. So what did he do wrong? What are the mistakes that business-savvy people make when setting up Adwords accounts?
Paying For Clicks
Well, there’s a big difference between PPC and just about every other form of advertising. Imagine that you’ve got a shop, but you have to pay every time somebody walks in through the door. You’d soon stick a bouncer on the door, making sure that only people who look like they might buy something get in. Compare this to any form of traditional advertising – whether it’s posters, e-mails or even SEO, you just want to get as much traffic as possible – if 90% of them aren’t really very interested, who cares? You may a (more or less) fixed price regardless of how many people visit your site. So PPC may be the only form of advertising where you want to deter the wrong people from visiting you.
Google Are A Bunch Of Con-Men
How dare they keep charging me more and more to advertise with them? This keeps cropping up time and time again – people seem to think that Google is some kind of business directory, and that you should pay a fixed amount for a certain amount of space on their SERPs. Let’s be clear on this – Google is a Search Engine, and the only thing that keeps them running is the number of people that use them to find things. If people stop using Google Search, their whole business will go south in record time. So they make sure that people keep using them, by making the search results as relevant as possible. This is, after all, why people use Google in the first place. And they do it by rewarding the adverts that people are clicking on it, and relate to the search, and penalising the ones that don’t. So if people aren’t clicking on your advert, Google doesn’t want it to appear (or, if you believe they’re evil, they want to be compensated for bad adverts messing up their nice, relevant search results). Why is this so hard to understand? Is it really that unreasonable? The point is, you can get profitable traffic from Google – all you have to do is to focus on keywords that are relevant to what you do, and write compelling adverts. Perhaps the people that accuse Google simply can’t conceive that their adverts suck (if you’ll forgive the American colloquialism). Where else do advert-writers have to go head-to-head with ten other advert writers, competing for the same traffic? No fancy graphics to play with, no superlatives, and only a few words to play with? For old-school advert writers, I can only guess that Adwords must be advertising hell!
Small Businesses Can Make Money From Adwords
We used to represent a restaurant in Leeds, who were getting bookings through Google for about £2 each. They were raking it in, and there’s no reason that other businesses can’t do the same. We’ve had plenty of campaigns over the years with small budgets that have worked well. Perhaps the problem is that they believe that it’s too difficult to manage a campaign themselves, and too expensive to hire an Agency. The truth is that Adwords really isn’t all that difficult – as long as you’ve got a reasonable level of numeracy, and the time to build and manage your campaign, then as long as you read up and understand exactly how Adwords works, you can do it yourselves. If your campaign is big enough or valuable enough that you want to get the very best from it, then talk to an Agency – they’ll generally be able to tell you upfront whether they can make you sufficient extra profit to cover their fees. You can make money from Adwords, if you just follow these basic steps:
- Only target keywords that relate to what you do, and nothing else. What percentage of the people searching for that keyword are actually looking for what you have/do?
- Group your keywords, so that the adverts and landing pages are relevant to every search that shows them. If your landing pages are product pages, or you want to include prices in your adverts, then group your keywords around individual products. If you want to land on a page helping people to choose a product (e.g. a kettle), then have an Adgroup for kettles.
- Stand out from the competition. Most businesses are very similar to their competitors, and this is often reflected in their adverts. Why should people visit your site rather than anyone else’s? Tell people how great you are (even if you aren’t all that great).
- Bid sensibly. You can see what percentage of your clicks are turning into sales or leads, and you should know what a sale/lead is worth to you, so don’t bid more than a click’s worth. There are no prizes for appearing at the top of search results!
- Test new adverts. Simple, really – keep writing new adverts, running them alongside the old adverts, and keeping the one that works better.
- Monitor and adjust your campaign. If a keyword is performing badly, reduce the bid or remove it. If it’s doing well, consider bidding a bit more.
That’s really all there is to Adwords. I’m not saying that every business is suited to Adwords, but it’s certainly worth the time and effort of trying it…
