You get an email from Google, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter that says you have $50 or $100 to spend on paid advertising and you think, “What the heck – it’s not my money. It’s theirs. Let’s try this.”
Seems easy enough. You follow the link and create an account. You log in to the dashboard and think “Damn, this looks easy” so you create your first ad and push the submit button.
The next day, you check your Google Analytics (you did remember to set that up didn’t you?) and you notice that there was no additional traffic to your website. Not only that, all of your “free” money is gone and your account says you owe an additional 50 bucks.
It happened because, while creating an ad for Google AdWords (or Facebook) is easy, creating a campaign that’s actually going to generate results is not.
Google AdWords requires you to plan your campaigns the same way you have to plan your social media campaigns. Research everything. These campaigns are going to cost you real dollars. If you don’t plan appropriately, you’re going to end up spending a lot of money driving unqualified traffic to your website.
Unqualified traffic is traffic that’s not going to buy from you. They’re not at the stage where they’re looking to make a purchase. And that unqualified traffic won’t just hurt you now. It will hurt you later. That’s because all Google AdWords (and Facebook Ads) use a bidding system that rewards marketers who place ads that have a high click-through rates and low bounce rates with more impressions for less money. In other words, those visitors who clicked on the ads to your website, didn’t find what they wanted and “bounced” back to the search engine result page could make the difference between you spending $1.00 per click or $0.25 a click for the exact same keyword.
Once you set up a Google Adwords campaign, you have to make sure you’ve set up tracking in Google Analytics. To make solid decisions about how to tweak your campaign for maximum results, you have to measure engagement, time on site and set conversion goals.
Think about that. And then give us a call.
