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There is no doubt that Google is the biggest advertising player on the World Wide Web today. You can advertise on Google Ads (formally AdWords), Google's Banner Network, and YouTube just to name a few of its advertising properties. But is Google advertising all you need? Is ad placement the best way to generate bonafide leads and are those calls you get saying your Google listing needs to be updated real or just some ad agency fishing for business. In this episode of Working the Web to Win, we will explore the ins and outs of advertising with Google, show you what mistakes to watch out for and provide you with several ways to maximize your return on your marketing investment.
Online Advertising has been a productive way to gather sales leads, engage prospects and make sales almost since the web began. The problem for most businesses is that the mechanisms used to produce, display and measure ad performance keeps evolving at a pace that's hard for most business owners to keep up with. On top of rapid evolution are the problems that third party agencies add to the mix. It is not uncommon for unscrupulous (or ignorant) vendors to omit important statistics, to emphasize useless stats and keywords, to push venues and less effective or inappropriate advertising products that really don't fit the business' goals or target market. To make things worse, most businesses don't really prepare for success. They don't do appropriate research required to fully understand their target market and they often don't have a clear, unique selling proposition and call to action or offer. These problems are so pervasive that we have written about these issues many times.
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In our article called; "10 Things Your Online Marketing Manager Doesn’t Want You to Know", we discuss how often time websites designed by third party marketers leave out important information in order to they keep the business owner in the dark (example: not setting up website analytics to track results). In another article we published called; "Is Google Calling? Or is it Someone Else?", we wrote about how many web development agencies act as if they represent Google, when in fact they are just fishing for new clients. In our article called; "21 Common Marketing Mistakes That Lead to Advertising Failure", we outlined the 21 most common mistakes businesses (and vendors) make when implementing online advertising. If a company can avoid these mistakes, it will go a long way to increasing their success.
Finally, there is the issue of pay per click (aka PPC). I am not just talking about Google Ads (aka Adwords), I am also talking about social media, pay per click and pay per view as well. This also includes banner and link list advertising which are often included as part of the default setup in many pay per click campaigns. In our article called; "Making Pay Per Click Pay Big Dividends", we discussed several ways you can improve your chances of PPC success and increase your return on your PPC investment. In two other articles we published called; "Working The Web - Is Pay Per Click Eating Your Lunch? — Here's How to Make It Pay Off BIG!", and "Why Pay Per Click Frustrates So Many? And What You Can Do to Get Better Results", we addressed the many frustrations business owners and PPC vendors alike often run into when using various pay per click platforms.
Scott's Story is a great example; A few years ago, we had a client come to us saying that they had been spending $4,500 a month on pay per click advertising that had been going so badly that the business owner told us if we couldn't help him, he would be out of business in three months. This campaign was generating about 240 leads a month, of which he was only closing about 45. The business had zero organic positions on the search engines as well.
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We analyzed what his advertising vendors were doing, (or not doing) and found that their ads were set to run 24/7, had zero negative keywords, and his ads had no call to action or significant
We changed the client's campaign from a 24/7 schedule to one that only ran when his business was open to field the calls generated. Now when a call came in, he would get to answer the call and increase his chances of closing the sale. We also created targeted landing pages, with testimonials and the all important call to action along with a compelling offer. Lastly, we added a couple dozen negative keywords to filter out useless clicks that would never turn into leads or sales. The changes we made to his campaign lowered his PPC cost from $4,500 a month to $2,500. Overall clicks went down from approximately 240 to 125, but conversions went up from 45 to 75. We then used the remaining $2,000 to build an organic presence that included weekly blogs and daily social posts to 5 networks. We also posted the client's website and three landing pages to the top 100 search directories. Needles to say he was very happy!
Phishing for Your Web Business - Another interesting story is that of a home improvement products business, we worked with a few years back. By adding blogging and social network campaigns, we helped this client get (and stay on) page one of organic search (including Google) for many years. This also helped them with their PPC campaign and increased their overall traffic by as much as 40%. Like most businesses, they receive a phishing email from vendors trying to sell
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Once I understood that his anxiety was generated by the phishing email, I asked him to bring up a browser and do an incognito search on the best keywords for his industry. He did this and lo and behold, he was showing up on the top of organic search across the board. You see, unscrupulous online marketing companies who hunt with phishing emails really don't do any analysis of a prospects website. They just create a phishing email that highlights all business owners worst fear, then broadcast it to as many prospects as possible, knowing that they will hoodwink a few unsuspecting businesses.
Here are 7 dirty tricks that PPC and other marketing Vendors use to deceive Businesses
- High-Priced Guaranteed Page one Search Position for your best keywords - Marketers
tout this like its an organic position, but in fact it's paid advertising (PPC). This, in and of itself, is not bad, but by overcharging you, they can afford to pay the highest PPC bid price for ad placement and then pocket the rest along with an additional management fee. - Guaranteed Clicks per high dollar amount - Unscrepulous Marketers often guarantee clicks which may come from bots, competitors or people they hire to click on your site. Just remember clicks are not sales! The goal is to convert visitors to customers (click to cash).
- Pay a High price until you quit - Often unscrupulous vendors will promise guarantees with no recourse because their agreement is one sided with lots of escape clauses. The problem starts when you can't get them to return your calls. They typically lead you on until you cut off payment to their program.
- Fake analytic reports - Some vendors don't give you access to the raw data or direct access to your own website analytics. This way they can slant the reports to make them look as good as possible while avoiding having to answer questions about poor ROI performance.
- Not telling you about conversion factors - If a vendor tells you that they can point your PPC ad to your website, run don't walk from this no-nothing vendor. Point a great ad to a website page that is not focused and not designed to convert visitors into prospects or clients is the most common way of throwing money away.
- Not taking into account PPC platforms serving negative keywords - Any PPC campaign needs to set up negative keyword filters to make sure non prospect clicks are minimized. If you only sell bathtubs you need to filter out showers because you don't sell showers, (showers is a negative keyword).
- Guaranteeing clicks on useless keywords - Underhanded marketers will sell you a guaranteed page one position for keywords that nobody is searching for. This can be a long list that looks impressive until you realize that no one is keying in these words in search.
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Tips to Improve Your Success - Now that you know about many of the dirty tricks unscrupulous vendor use, you need to know something that can improve your paid advertising. Google is by far the biggest online advertising venue on the web. If you're running Google Ads, it makes sense to use other Google properties as well. Using Google products to enhance and improve your organic search position is a great place to start. I recommend using Googles webmaster tools to analyze your websites and landing pages to make sure they are optimized for a great user experience. I also recommend setting up your company in Google My Business, Google Maps, Google's YouTube and Google Photos. Don't forget to also backlink all of your web properties to each other and to any authoritative websites you can in your industry. Create a blog and provide regular high quality, timely, relevant and useful articles to build your credibility. Remember to direct traffic from your social nets to your blog and other web properties. It is also a good idea to post your business profile to the top 100 Search Directories and lastly whenever possible, point your advertising to focused landing pages with a great video testimonial, a strong call to action and compelling offer. All of these tips will greatly increase your ability to convert online advertising Traffic.
Just remember there are only two purposes for online advertising. Being seen (i.e. branding and visibility, i.e. getting found) and generating leads and sales. For most businesses garnering leads is the highest priority. If you don't have enough money coming in, it won't be long before your brand doesn't matter anymore. Your goal should always include profit and growth. Anything short of receiving enough prospects and conversions, that then produce the money to cover your operating costs is unacceptable. Your priority is to receive enough sales revenue and profits to run and grow your business. Now, I understand that sometimes you have to get found first. If you aren't showing up on the web and have no credibility at all, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Having said that, the rest is all about converting clicks to cash and converting traffic to a loyal audience that likes, trusts, buys from you, and then spreads your good name. Anything else is often a big waste of money.
That's my opinion; I look forward to reading yours.
This article provides nine ways to enhance your Google Advertising and another eight dirty tricks to watch out for that unscrupulous advertising vendors use to con you out of your money. Lastly, this article also provides many links to other articles, including a link to the BlogTalkRadio show that goes with this and other related articles.
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Hector Cisneros is COO and Director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web to Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success” and the co-author along with his business partner Carl Weiss of their hit book also called “Working the Web to Win.”
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