My thoughts as an adwords user - stay away

In my opinion, adwords is the easiest way to lose money online. Let me explain my 3 reasons why.

1)Any keywords that you would want to use will require a bid of at least $1 to get on the front page, and often more like $2 or $3. At that rate, say 1 in 50 converts, you send 50 people at $2 each, and if your product gives you $100 each sale, you'll only be breaking even.

2)Now you're thinking, yea but use longer tail keywords. Wrong. The number of searches for long tails and exact matches pales in comparison to broad match generic keywords. With long tails you can expect to have many ads that go for days without getting any impressions! Also, the searches for the more popular long tails are already being bid up around the $1 mark anyway. Good luck thinking up any 'forex' long tails that haven't been thought of already... or dog training etc...

3)You will get into a position where you have to keep spending money. Say you've already burned through $25 on adwords trying to sell your $50 product. To close up shop would mean you lost the $25, and a sale could possibly be right around the corner. So you stick it out up to $50 but still no sales, you don't want to lose your investment so you just keep going. It's a wicked cycle folks, believe me... You don't know if the product your selling is junk, or whether your ads just aren't performing well enough...
At this point it will become just like a gambling habit as you pump more and more money in thinking a sale must be right around the corner.

Bottom line: If you're a newbie to this internet marketing thing, stay out of adwords as you'll only be making the rich (google) richer. Are some people making money off adwords? Sure, there's always exceptions to the rule, and hopefully one of them will chime in her and help us shed some light on this.

 

There are plenty of people making money with adwords. Many have more success with the content network.

 

Well, you have to look at many factors - your keywords, your pre-sell technique, etc. AdWords is not a game of luck, you need decent understanding how adwords work as well, how conversion work. I recommend you checking AdWords training videos provided by adwords.

 

I agree, the first mistake people make is thinking adwords is easy. The second mistake they make is not country targetting their campaigns and excluding certain citizens who aren't spending and mainly getting paid to click. And another mistake is not capping thier daily spend in case they've made a mistake with their keywords and end up with 1,000,000 clicks by noon.

The most important aspect of adwords, IMHO, is your negative match list. And for that you need a good - read not free - web analysis tool to see who's being sent to your site by google as they broad match your term. In my most profitable campaign, I have about 200 negative keywords so that when I pay $1 for a click I know exactly who I am getting.

 

Having said all that, done correctly adwords is a goldmine. But its an expensive learning curve.

Part of the problem is the hundreds of ebooks that promise $1,000/day results which many newbies fall for and end up losing big $$.

 

The only way to learn adwords is by wasting a couple of thousands in a year's time. Don't worry well known marketers have lost huge sums playing with adwords.

Thing is there is a secret behind adwords and that secret can only be learned in time..

 

I agree with apikon, however it's not 'wasting' money if you are learning by trial and error. How many businesses go into debt for tens of thousands and wont see any profit for years! In that way it can be viewed similiarly.

Even though I make a living at PPC, I drop 9/10 campaigns each month looking for a winner. But that 1 in 10 pays for the rest.

 

You are not taking into account the lifetime value of a customer here. Even if you we're only breaking even I'd say it's worth it for potential future sales. That said, there are plenty of people making quite a bit of money with AdWords but yes, done wrong, it can be a money pit.

 

when you consider about cost, Yes Google adwords costs more bcos huge advertisers are there..

But some unique services offered by google adwords can't beatable by others...Yes state level targeting,paying back money for invalid clicks and hundreds of other services also..

As a publisher Google adsense rocks..
But as a advertiser We should take more time to spend our money in good way by searching other ad networks..

 

My thoughts as an adwords user: if you REALLY want to waste your money then go for traditonal advertising campaigns such as TV, radio, newspapers. Spend thousands up front, get it wrong and get zero customers. Unless you are a total fool that is impossible with adwords.

 

I agree with Stephcren in that Adwords can be an easy way to lose money - but at the same time, if you do it right you can make A LOT more profit than 'traditional' advertising routes.

Stephcren - it's obviously true that generic phrases bring in a lot more clicks, but it's also true that that less generic phrases are generally better converters - to give you an example, the KWs "car" or "new car" have far more searches than "new bmw z4" - but guess which one of these three searches has a better idea of what they want and are therefore more likely to buy?

Internet advertising, more than any other form of advertising, is about targeting your spend so that you get the best possible ROI. Yes, this does take trial and error when you're looking for the right mix of phrases for your business - but so do traditional marketing campaigns - they're constantly being tweaked from one run to the next.

True, you don't know if it's the site that isn't selling it well etc - but once again this would be the same with whatever advertising you spend your money on - but with the big advantage in Adwords that you see how you're doing in real time and can take action to stop it. Google even provide tools to help in this area - if your site isn't up to scratch then use website optimiser to run proper split tests.

As far as knowing if your product is junk - well, no one's gonna help you on this one - you decide on this and to expect someone else to help / decide on this is totally unrealistic. In fact, as far as knowing if your product is junk goes, with Adwords Google provides you with the best market research tool you can use - you control how much research you do and the budget and if it doesn't work that's hardly Google's fault.

The fall in advertising spend on traditional media is more than mirrored by a rise in spending on online advertising - why? Because online advertising works for so many more people and has the potential to provide ROI that TV / magazines etc could NEVER dream of.

I get that you've had a hard time with it - but read up on quality score, web optimiser etc and as long as your product is good enough then you'll get on - if it's not good enough then junk it and move onto something else, you'll still have ended up spending a lot less on it than you would if you'd done enough traditional marketing to get to the same number of potential customers

 

Dear stephcren,

You're an idiot.

Thanks,
Grumio.

 

Hi,

I'm never sure when I see claims that long tail keywords mean the user is further into the buying cycle and therefore more likely to buy.

My feeling is that yes they are more likely to buy, but also they are more likely to be armed with thing like price comparisons - if they know exactly what they want they are more likely to search several sites looking for the best price. I believe this offsets the generic nature of intent for broader more generic keywords

 

Oh, by the way - good point Grumio, well made - I think you've definitely won the philosophical argument

 

I think Stephcren has lost some money if not more in adwords and he is taking it negatively.

Why do you think you have lost your money, I am sure by now you have got at least what not to do even if you do not know what exactly to follow.

THat's very important, you will learn from your mistakes here. This is how it goes.

 

It is a learning curve .....

 

It's possible to make a killing with adwords, if you can get a good QS. Problem is, on some of the bigger/better paying niches you're up against people dropping 2-5k/day or more on clicks and building a proper, quality landing page. Most people can't hold out long enough to take the initial hit and build the QS to a point where things become profitable.

 

The name of the game is not how many clicks you're getting (unless you're testing a headline or something like that)but how you convert.

That being said the more specific you can make your keyword list the better your conversions.

1or 2 keywords per group, long tail, lots of negative keywords that's what you need to focus on.

Leave the broad keywords to the big companies with deep pockets. They can afford to loose money, you probably can't

Nick Xifaras
Copywriter

 

Well if you go to Vegas and do not read any books on gambling or how to play poker you will lose money. If you go to google adwords and set up an account and go live without reading any books google will suck money out of your credit card account as fast as your settings allow.

Invest in some knowledge before you start. I give away an ebook at my blog. There are many others available.

 

I too have accumulated much financial loss over the years advertising with Adwords, but I would like to throw out a helpful tip that has increased my ROI: Catch your audience in the BUY phase. I agree that adwords can be expensive if you're going after every popular keyword in the book, but in my experience, the chance of someone purchasing your product significantly increases when they use keywords like "buy widgets" for example. Catch them in the buy phase and skip the hardship! Hope that helps.