AdWords Doesn’t Have to Be a Dirty Word

Inevitably, when someone tells me that a particular type of marketing “sucked” or “didn’t generate any leads,” I tend to want to look for reasons why and how we can improve their result. This has never been truer than with advertising online using Google AdWords.

There are just so many things that can go wrong!

Creating a solid ad campaign with AdWords is a lot more involved than creating an ad for the local yokel. Things like CTR, Quality Score and CPC tend to scare off the uninitiated. And for those of you who soldier on and lose a couple hundred bucks before retreating back into the loving arms of free Craigslist ads will tell others to stay away.

But the streets really are paved with gold

You just have to get back in there and following these 3 quick tips to a solid AdWords campaign.

1. Always run two ads against each other – There is a select that asks if you want to “run ads more evenly”, which you want to do. This will run your two ads almost at a 50/50 mix. That way, you can track which ad performs better, while giving you the ability to change the ad copy (and hopefully your conversion ratio) of the weaker ad. Do this continually and this trick alone can improve your campaign significantly.
2. Get some new keywords – You want keywords that target buyers, not shoppers. You want to attract people to your sales pages after they have done their homework. This means you need to re-engineer your current keyword list.
3. Use tracking phone numbers – You never really know what makes people contact you. Try using a localized phone number then a toll-free number. Track which one generates more calls, and it is a great little trick to avoiding click-through costs.

So the next time you are blasting AdWords, ask yourself, how much time did you put into learning the system, because if you spent as much time doing that as you did putting together your business card, you just cost your business two ways; by giving up on the single most cost-effective way of generating leads in the last 25 years, and secondly, you gave it away to your competition.