Adwords is the primary advertising revenue platform for Google. Sometimes as marketers we forget that the close to $30B in ad revenue that Google collects from the US market is at the expense of the advertiser. Every part of the Adwords platform is designed to increase revenue for Google as opposed to results for the advertisers.
Pay per click advertising (PPC) is very attractive to most marketers because it is innately performance based. It makes sense to only pay when a user clicks your ad and goes to your site. What most people ignore is there are a variety of reasons a user might click. They might misunderstand the ad and have the wrong intentions when they click. The click might be entirely accidental. They might be clicking on the ad because of an enticing offer with no real intention to ever purchase. The way you maximize the number of high intent and engaged users is by doing the research to understand user behavior and vernacular.
There is a process to researching keywords, carefully selecting target phrases and setting bid prices when you first begin the campaign. The majority of advertisers on Google overlook or aren’t even aware of keyword match types (eg Phrase, Broad, Exact) and negative keywords. The nuances in how you setup your campaign determine how successful you are in the beginning. Once the campaign has begun, you will have a lot of data to analyze. 100% of campaigns need to be optimized post launch. Adwords is not a set it and forget it platform. A general lack of attention to campaigns is another big culprit in why advertisers lose money doing PPC.
In this session we will walk step by step through the most common mistakes that professional and amateurs alike make when setting up and optimizing Google Adwords campaigns. The default settings and most of the choices you are presented with are not your “best” option when building a campaign. It takes a substantial amount of time to observe and optimize the very best set of keywords, bids strategies and ads in your adwords account.
