This interesting article, “Google AdWords: 11 Herbs and Spices Revealed”, got me thinking today about all the varying expectations and results AdWords I’ve had. I think the most positive part of the AdWords experiments I’ve done aren’t necessarily the results, but the feeling of control and potential you have over your campaigns.
I’ve worked with a team in the past who experimented with a fairly large monthly AdWords budget (not just in relation to the marketing budget, but as a percentage of the entire company’s expenditures, it was impressive).
(Random AdWords screenshot, not my real life example...)
The more we spent, the more we found we could drive up a selected action: a product download. And by managing the time of day, maximum bids, ad content, and other variables, we could begin to drive down this “cost per download”.
Some lessons from this experiment:
- Trying to figure out all the variables at play, and their correlating impact on results, can drain an amazing amount of time, to the point where it becomes an obsession.
- It feels really really good as a marketer to demonstrate quantifiable results. All other projects that can’t be measured as clearly and easily may quickly be deemed inferior.
- Google changes its algorithms all the time. There’s no such thing as “set up AdWords, optimize, and let it run”. It constantly needs tweaking to obtain consistent results.
And now, from this article, I’m reading that no matter how much you spend, you aren’t really ubiquitous within a category of results (only 3% of AdWords customers buy up 80% of the available real estate – the rest we fight over like feral animals!). Your results don’t come up nearly as often as you think they do, so it’s not a way to build a brand.
After getting the help of engineers, on this and other AdWords projects, we were able to track new visitors after they landed on our site, going beyond basic Analytics functionality. In one case, we built in a callback functionality within the product, so we could see if the product was actually opened after being downloaded. In another, we looked at what URL’s the ads were actually being displayed on. It dawned on me that these ads aren’t nearly as targeted as I thought. I had assumed a specific call-to-action like “download this software” would only attract clicks from people within my target audience. Apparently, you can’t correlate a click with interest in the subject matter of the ad quite as concretely as I had hoped. When I realized this, the high hopes and expectations I had for Google fell hard, as did the percentage of the marketing budget allocated to AdWords.
If I were to try any paid advertising next, it would have to be Facebook. I’m hearing the targeting is much more concrete and the cost per conversion is incredibly lower. Feeling burned from ads in general, and the way budgets are crunched in these economic times, it may be a while before I have any feedback to share.
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The recent meltdown of the world- economy has drastically affected the business at every level. Companies have become extra cautious and accordingly planning their budget and spending. In such a scenario, field marketing can only add to cost marketing campaign, which of course is not very encouraging.