Adwords is a Fraud

I can understand the frustration people can get with adwords. The support letters really annoy me when they answer your query with a link to their tutorial. Every time you think you're "nailed it" something falls out of bed. A bit like golf)))

Anyway, in fairness, it's a great medium between buyer and seller and if you get the game right you should do well. Some businessses can't make a return there so I guess shouldn't be there. It's an auction. Pay what it's worth or walk away.

 

PPC Rocks if you know what you are doing.

I sell stuffed pets that cost $9.99

and

HVAC Units with prices over $3,000.00

Took years to learn how to do so properly.

In the two examples above, what works for one does not work for the other. I do not see where most webmasters have the understanding of these concepts, to make it work for them properly. Most webmasters do not know what a profit margin is, so there is little hope they would understand paid search marketing enough for it to be a profitable venture.

At that time it becomes Google Casino....

 

I did work with a finance company that made millions each year solely through Adwords.
I forget what their return on investment was, but they were in the Inc. Top 500 for last year so I'm sure it was pretty darn high.

 

Regardless of whether or not it works (and I bet this post is simply a result of your bad results), who are you to be telling companies how they spend their advertisement money?

 

Exactly. How can it be a fraud when thousands willingly pay for the service?

Right again. Can't win 100% of the time. But you can't steal second by leaving your foot on first. You have to take a chance.

Tiernan, we are using baseball analogies in this thread, not golf. Let's stick to one sport. Baseball is a game similar to cricket that is played in hours instead of days

 

AdWords will work for some and not for others. I believe you can get a better ROI if you sell physical products than services. When someone clicks your ad, they already want to buy something that you offer. The only thing you have to do is convince them to buy it from you and not the other guy.

I agree with the starter of this thread that AdWords is not a very open system. What I mean by that is how can you be sure that there is an actual person bidding higher on the keywords you also bid for? What if Google just makes up the highest bid to milk money from your account? What about the quality score? Who determines the quality of my page? These are just a few things that allow Google to pretty much set the bid to anything they want. To me, this is not something that should be ignored. Sure, there are people making money despite these concerns, but how many have lost a lot of money? Just something to think about before you dive head first into AdWords and the world of PPC marketing.

 

The quality score issue really has me stumped. I offer an online translation service between English and Russian and the quality score of "English Russian translation" varies from 2 -10 in different adgroups of mine even when CTR's are in the double figures. Their standard "results can vary" replies and "in crease" your budget nonsense knocks me for six. I write to them over and over without a logical response. Anyway, I'm still "tweaking" my campaigns as they suggest I do.

 

In my humble experience, any type of new DP user, but particularly pmagony, is a complete and utter idiot and disservice.

I am radically floored that no intervention has been conspired by Government on what is evident to be a scheme that tries to annoy random DP members by making idiotic statements.

 

I agree with my dear freind!!!

 

lol - on the money dlm

 

First understand that there are millions customers who are using adwords. These may be your personal opinion. When there are many advertisers and affiliates earning tons out of adwords your shouting will never reach heaven. So may be you can tweek and see if adwords works for you or you can just leave PPC industry and try out something different. Your wish.

 

PPC will seem like a fraud to any first time advertiser. I lost hundreds of dollars to adwords with only a minimal return.

Once you figure out how to make adwords work for you, I find that it's the only reliable business model for online sales.

The way my campaign is running lately, I have very few impressions and very few clicks, but it equates to many sales over time for me.

I had adwords disabled for a short period of time, but after several revisions, I had a sale on my second click after reenabling my campaign. A fluke... possibly, but I still maintain a good 7% to 10% conversion rate.

It's really about creating quality webpages and choosing GREAT keywords. Anything less than a quality score of 7... I say delete it.

I was paying over $1 per for selected keywords... I'm down to about 10 or 15 cents a click for my current keywords.

Adwords can work for you, but you need to stay focused. The biggest thing I've learned is this... if you have a small budget, do NOT promote several different pages. Focus ALL of your funds on one page unless you have enough money to send 100 visitors to each of the pages you are promoting. It's really like a game of risk.

$15 will essentially buy me about 100 visitors. If I focus those visitors on ONE product, I can convert roughly 7%. For each sale I make roughly $40. $15 just bought me $280 in profit. Don't forget, I don't get many impressions or clicks, so this is over a period of about a month.

Now, the old me got nervous over not getting many impressions or clicks, so I load up with keywords and other ad pages to run my costs up faster. The problem here is... if you focus your $15 across 15 different pages, you might end up with 10 visitors (or LESS since you may be paying more if you aren't being picky with your keyword relevancy) to each page... and at that point you are just gambling. You get 10 visitors to page 1... 7% chance of making a sale... 10 visitors to page 2... 7% chance of making a sale... etc etc ITS GAMBLING! You'll likely make no sales with that same $15.

Don't forget, a user needs to see an ad at least 3 times to feel comfortable buying a product. If you only have $15 and you run 15 different ads and a gazillion keywords... chances are you'll run out of money in a few hours and have no return to show for it. The key to adwords is SLOW AND STEADY. If you want to run 15 ads ... make sure you have about $150-$200 to spend, not $15.

 

Adwords has actually helped my business very much.
It also depends what you're advertising; whether or not it looks appealing and such.

 

you can make money with adwords, it's all about research, too many people just chose random keywords that arent targetting people in the buying state. Also too many things effect conversions, landing page quality, or sometimes just a product that doesnt convert at all.

Beleive me you can make money with adwords. For a while I was making over $500 a day before my niche became oversaturated.

 

I'm happy to see majority of users are posting success stories - hopefully we can put this topic / thread to bed now...

 

I'm afraid JHardy there will always be someone coming along and resurrecting this sort of thing. This and "Adwords affects SEO" threads (No it doesn't!!!).

 

Those are the worst of the lot.

There's not many things in the realm of SEO / PCC that Google have always been extremely clear on and never gone back on either - but the statement that Adwords doesn't affect organic rankings is pretty much set in stone

 

like i was saying , i don't trust google

 

Sell what people want and they will buy. Marketing is simple. Google Adwords doesn't make people buy it just lets you put your name in front of them. It's up to the seller to know how to sell their own products. Most of the time marketers are trying to sell what people don't want. Google is just a vehicle...that's it

 

For me and my social networkng site, AdWords went from bad to worse. Since I run a small site with a limited budget I simply did not have the time to go through hours and days of trial and error, while losing lots of money in the process.

For social networking my solution was Facebook. Targeted my audience down to the location, age, sex, marital status, and what type of relationship they were looking for. My registrations dramatically increased with exactly what I was looking for, more single females.

I am sure AdWords is the best solution for others, depending on what exactly they are selling. I am not selling anything, and just needed to increase by membership base/traffic and my AdSense earnings.