Google Adwords is dangerous.
It’s seductive. It offers the promise of instant profits on one hand, yet on the other it has the potential to reach in to your wallet and clean it out.
Over the last two weeks, our team of client managers has audited almost forty new client and prospects’ campaigns.
Every one of them was hemorrhaging money like you wouldn’t believe. And these are prominent companies with smart marketers. So what’s going on?
The problem is that at first sight Adwords looks so darned easy to use. If you have a website, within thirty minutes you could set up Google Adwords and run ads to your site.
And within thirty one minutes you could just as easily be losing money!
I’ll wager that every Adwords professional lost money on their first campaign. I can recall the excitement I felt when my first ad went live, and the disappointment a day later when I saw how much I’d lost!
So what’s the best approach if you want to use Google Adwords?
- Resist the temptation to jump in (remember, that apple looked really juicy in the Garden of Eden)
- Get your hands on Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Adwords” and read it cover to cover
- Talk to an expert (yes, that is self serving to some extent, but if you saw what we saw in those 40 accounts you’d realize why we recommend talking to an Adwords Pro.)
Andrew Snow
Good points for starting out or revisiting an existing strategy.
I just ran across this article that points out that not only should you know how to use Google Adwords to YOUR best advantage but also so you know what your competition is doing with Adwords.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/technology/internet/15google.html