This isn't a sob story (well, just a tiny bit), but an example of failing forward and sharing some lessons we learned the hard way!
We’ve invested a ton of money in Google Adwords in the past. Here’s the 5 things we did wrong, and why we decided to take a ‘vacation' from it.
Firstly, Google Adwords is an amazing way to drive a ton of highly targeted traffic to your website. But when we started out we wasted a lot of money and effort because we made 5 pivotal pay-per-click mistakes.
We're not going to discuss how to find the cheapest and most competitive keywords, but will instead delve into some of the basic errors we made – and these apply to any pay per click advertising platform, not just Google.
1. Don't Sell In Your Ad
Sell the click. Sell the click. Let's say that another way. Sell the click.
You can’t sell or define your product in a three line ad, you simply want to capture the readers attention long enough to have them click through to your website.
Once you've captured their email address on your website, re-direct visitors to your sales page which will pick over the pain points of our potential customers and provide the benefits of the product you're promoting.
Always focus on selling the click.
2. Too Much Too Soon
Ouch. This one really hurts! We wish we could say we didn’t do this but we did and wasted a lot of money in the process.
If you start your Google Adwords campaign with a high daily budget you are doomed from the get-go. So start with a small daily budget, and use this purely for testing.
Split test your optin page or landing page using Google's website optimizer tool.
Once you’ve got enough relevant data (website optimizer will tell you this), you'll know which ads are working the best for you and are supplying you with prospective customers for a reasonable ad spend.
Which brings us on to our next mistake…
3. No Return On Investment
Run your Google ads until you have sufficient relevant conversion statistics – so you have enough data to know how much it costs in ad spend to make one product sale. The reason is, you want to make sales but you also want to know your ad spend is profitable and you'll recover your investment in Adwords.
4. No System
To be successful with your Google Adwords campaign, you need a simple system.
Once you’ve recovered your initial costs back from sales, reinvest your profits into more ads, and bump up your ad budget by a small amount.
If you don’t recover your ad spend investment, revert to free traffic until you do, then bump up your Adwords budget again.
The good thing is you already know your conversion data are because you’ve done your testing.
Remember you should be split testing all throughout this process but that’s another subject for another article.
5. No Adequate Training
All the gurus say you can get a ton of traffic almost instantly to your website using Adwords. They’re right, but you need training. Our mistake was we did the training, but didn’t follow what we were told!!!
You can get a heap of free information from Adwords itself but you should also source reliable training. But above all else, be sure you recover the costs of any courses you take, by factoring the amount into your Adwords campaign and return on investment.
Using Google Adwords or any other pay per click system is a super source of targeted prospects, and we know a lot of people who do make a lot of money from it. But avoid our mistakes. Don’t try and sell in your ad, don’t start off with a high budget, don’t keep throwing money at Adwords without seeing a return on your investment, don’t even consider using it without a proper system no matter how simple it is and finally don’t start without proper training.
We’re still laughing (due to our stupidity) over how much we’ve lost on Adwords and it's certainly deterred us a bit. It's one thing having rules and strategies but you need to stick to them, which is the hard part!
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