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The Seven Myths Of Adwords

Friday, November 23rd, 2007 Steve Baker 5 Comments

Actually, there are probably a lot more than seven myths - feel free to reply with some more if you like! There are two types of myth - assumptions made by people who haven’t used Adwords, and inaccurate conclusions drawn by people who’ve tried it, and failed. The first lot are easy to dispel, but once somebody decides something based on their own experiences, it’s nigh-on impossible to convince them that they’re wrong. Even worse, they often shout their findings from the rooftops, spreading untruths and half-truths to new advertisers. I’m not the first to try to dispel these beliefs, and I won’t be the last, but to be honest, this wouldn’t be much of an Adwords blog if I didn’t have the occasional list-blog! I’ll start off with four myths that put people off ever using Adwords, and then have three that keep cropping up within the industry.

You Need A Big Budget

The simple fact is that you can run a successful Adwords campaign with very little money. I used to manage a campaign for a local restaurant that spent £5 per day, and typically got 10 - 15 bookings per week through Adwords. It’s probably true that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you need a big budget on Adwords, but that’s because Google don’t have a fixed minimum bid for a keyword. Instead, they establish how relevant they think your advert/site are to the searcher, and reward or penalise you accordingly. If you know how to manage your campaign properly, your minimum bid should almost never be more than £0.05, and usually it can be £0.02 or £0.03. At these prices, you can get 200 clicks per day for your £5. Of course, that’s a little unrealistic for most campaigns, for a few reasons:

1. Not everyone will click on your advert - typically, if there are a lot of PPC adverts showing, your clickthrough rate will be 2% - 10% (less if you write a poor advert), so you’d need 10,000 to 50,000 searches in order to get this many clicks per day. I doubt there 50,000 people a day searching for a restaurant in Leeds!
2. Your competitors are probably all bidding more than you are. If there are more than ten of them, you won’t be on the first page of the results, so you’ll only get a small percentage of the search traffic…

So. in competitive areas, if you just bid the minimum bid, you’ll only get a small volume of traffic. On the other hand, if you bid enough to appear near the top, you’ll spend your (small) budget in an hour or two. The trick is to find the balance between the two. If 1st place would get me 200 clicks per day at £0.50 each (cost of £100 per day), and 10th place would get 20 clicks per day at a cost of £0.05 each (cost of £1 per day), to spend my £5 per day, I may want to appear in about 7th, and get 42 clicks per day for £0.12 each. It may be that you don’t convert enough of these visitors to justify paying £0.12 per click. For example, if a booking generates a profit of £10, and only 2% convert, it may be more profitable to bid a bit less, and not spend your entire budget. Since you only pay for the clicks you get, there’s no fixed charge by Google, so you are completely free to get as much or as little traffic as you can afford. Getting back to the original myth, you can get traffic for only a few pence per click. If that traffic is profitable, then the campaign’s probably worthwhile. Just make sure that you understand how to get cheap clicks by managing your Quality Score before you start.

Competitors Will Click On My Advert And Cost Me Money

Understandable concern, but Google are pretty good at handling this. They look at the IP address, time of the click, duplicate clicks, and various other suspicious patterns, and only charge you if the click appears to be genuine. They probably don’t catch them all, but they do catch the majority, and if you think you’ve got a problem, you can always raise it with them. Any invalid clicks that they find will be refunded to you. I manage a large number of accounts, and have never seen a problem with any of them. And I’ve always found the folks at Google to be approachable when I have had a query, so this certainly shouldn’t be considered a reason not to advertise on Adwords.

There Are Some Clever Tricks That Mean That Agencies Will Do Better Than Me

No, actually there aren’t. Google are very open about how Adwords works, and there are plenty of guides to tell you how to run your campaign successfully. Basically, all you have to do is this:

• Keep an eye on your Quality Score, particularly on a new campaign. Make sure your landing page and advert text follow Google’s recommendations.
• Write eye-catching, honest adverts, and keep testing new ones. Don’t mislead people, or you’ll get clicks that don’t convert.
• Bid the right amounts on the right keywords. If it isn’t converting, bin it. If it delivering cheap conversions, bid more. If it’s delivering expensive conversions, bid less.
• Group your keywords in such a way that your adverts are relevant to every keyword.

There really isn’t much more to it that that!

Free Adwords!

Google “Free Adwords” and you get a long list of PPC adverts. To quote some of them, “Beat The System”, “Top PPC Secret Exposed”, “Adwords Ads Exposed” and my personal favourite “Man Makes $300 Million Because He Gets Pay-Per-Clicks Free. He’s Giving Away His Secret Here”. Sorry guys, but there is no way to get free Adwords, though selling an e-book about how you can may make you a few dollars… Ironically, people are now using the truth to sell their products. There are just as many adverts saying “Are Adwords Really Free? Read This Review Before You Buy” and “Warning! Getting Free PPC Is A Scam. Get The Truth Here”. As I said in my last point, there are no secrets, tricks or cons to make you money without putting in the work. There are good ways and bad ways to write adverts, and some interesting theories about things that may or may not work, but that’s about it. That’s the easy part out of the way. Now to tackle some more contentious ones…

The Google Slap

A regular question that appears on the Digital Point forum (which is a really useful resource, by the way) is “Have you been Google-slapped today?” or alternatively “I’ve been Google-slapped. What do I do about it?” Here’s the thing. Google tries very hard to deliver relevant adverts to its users. It has to, or they’d all go and use Ask or something! There are a lot of people out there who’ve built and advertised their sites solely to make money from affiliate adverts. The idea is that they pay a few pence when somebody clicks on their advert, and then make a lot more from the site that the visitor clicks on to from their site. But Google doesn’t really like this (even though they also run Adsense, which is what a lot of these people are using. I know that if I was looking for (for example) a printer, and I saw a PPC advert on Google for printers, but when I clicked on it, I just ended up on a page full of links, I’d be a bit cheesed off. So Google took steps. They decided that the landing page needs to be relevant and not covered in adverts. If they don’t like your landing page, they destroy your Quality Score (usually putting a £5 minimum bid on your keywords). This isn’t to make them more money, it’s to stop you from advertising with them. In addition, they reward three things - relevance, transparency and navigability. Is your site relevant to the keyword you’re bidding on? Do you have “Contact Us”, “About Us” and “Privacy Policy” pages? Can people easily find their way around your site? Google changes the algorithm quite often, but it can take a while to get around every account, so one day without warning, Google ’slaps’ you, and gives you a high minimum bid. But this is the important thing. If you are using Adwords as they intended - to promote your own product or service - you shouldn’t get slapped. And if you do get slapped, it should be very easy to fix. I’ve never had a Google slap, and I doubt many other PPC agencies have either. The people that get slapped are generally trying to use Adwords to make money as a middle-man - in effect making money from trying to get between Google and the page that the searcher is looking for. So it’s not that surprising that Google penalises them!

Google’s A Ripoff

If there’s one claim that’s bound to wind up an experienced PPC manager, it’s people saying “Don’t use Google! They’re just trying to rip you off! They’ll keep increasing your minimum bids to gouge as much money as they can out of you!” This is usually as a result of them starting a Google Adwords account without bothering to read up on how it works. As I’ve already said, Google Adwords isn’t a fair auction. It doesn’t claim to be. Google want the most relevant and appropriate adverts to appear, so they give them an advantage by utilising the Quality Score. To get a good Quality Score, you need three main things.

1. A good landing page
2. A good clickthrough rate (taking into account the advert’s position)
3. A relevant advert

If you see your minimum bid creeping up slowly over a period of time, you can probably rule out the landing page - a problem with that would generally give you a single, big jump in your minimum bids. Also, the advert relevancy is unlikely to cause the problem - as your campaign gets more history, the advert relevance seems to play a smaller part in the calculation.

• So, if you’re seeing your minimum bid slowly increasing over time, your clickthrough rate is almost certainly not up to scratch.

No Machiavellian plot to take over the world, no evil plan to gouge money out of innocent advertisers, just a penalty for writing adverts that don’t appeal to the people searching.

Bid High To Get A Great Quality Score

This one works if you assume that Google don’t know what they’re doing (or they’re doing that Machiavellian thing again!). Basically, you bid high to get a great clickthrough rate, Google rewards you with a low minimum bid, and you can stay top paying only a few pence whilst the people below you have to pay pounds regardless of their Quality Score. Or something like that. Google make it quite clear that when they are assessing your Quality Score, they take into account the position that your advert appears in when looking at your clickthrough rate. So a 2% clickthrough rate in 7th place will probably get you a better Quality Score than a 3% clickthrough rate in 2nd place. This seems to be another myth perpetuated by somebody who bid a lot and wrote a good advert, and found that they had to bid less over time to stay in the top position. What they didn’t realise was that they could have bid that amount initially, appeared lower, and then watched their advert gradually creep up the search results, until it nestled happily at the top. Watching this ‘cream rising to the surface’ effect is one of the great pleasures of PPC management, in my opinion. Once it starts to creep up, you know that the number of conversions is going to keep rising and rising, and the cost per conversion isn’t going to change very much. Or for a variation on this, you can keep cutting the bids a bit, and watch it rise (more slowly) but the cost per conversion come down. This latter option is probably more relevant if you have a restrictive budget, and can’t afford to pay for more clicks at the same cost per click. And so, dear reader, we come to the end of my epistle. Feel free to suggest some more myths, and I’ll see if I can add them in…

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 6:53 pm

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