For all the good that Google Ads can do for the larger companies, many smaller businesses often implement Google Ads incorrectly, or simply don’t suit Google’s model. Before you put money down, ask yourself these questions:
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Do people even follow paid links?
A large number of people are very wary of top search results, as they are savvy to the fact that this spot is reserved exclusively for paid advertising. While there are many individuals who click away unknowingly, the relevance and quality of organic search results still remains important.
A 2015 study found that “new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads but that more frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative.”
Even the best-prepared of ads will fail to make an impression on customers on high alert, resulting in wasted time and financial losses for your business.
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Does your product or service suit the Google Ads Model?
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Well, if no one searches for your keywords, your paid adverts definitely won’t make any noise. By using analytics, you can discover how often people are searching for your related keywords, indicating whether or not your product or niche is popular. If not, there may be little benefit to running a full ad campaign.
Equally, if your product is more easily sold alongside media, text ads may have a deflated impression on your potential customers. If may be more useful to invest your marketing budget into other medium like display ads. You are better off advertising your makeup store to people under 30 on Instagram than on Google.
Assess if your product is best for the Google Ads model. If not, start looking at alternative providers or ad formats.
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Do my keyword volumes merit paid advertising?
Back when clicks cost pennies, it was a lot more viable to run paid adverts, regardless of how much traffic your site or search terms generated. ‘Volume’ is the approximate frequency that a keyword is searched within a set timeframe, usually a month.
In much the same way your site’s quality and relevance can influence site traffic, so too does people’s general interest affect search-term volumes. If there are only 10 search queries related to your product or service each month, there is little use in investing both energy and money into Google Ads.
If you can’t even find related keywords that are creating significant numbers of searches, your business may just be too specific to benefit from Google’s service. If you do try, you may find your google ads links are just not working.
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Can I afford Google Ads?
PPC advertising can be very effective, but even more so expensive. The average cost-per-click (CPC) on Google Ads, depending on your industry and product is $1 to $4, but can easily go to $20+ or fall down to just a few cents.
Making mistakes in Google Ads is costly. Even back in 2014, there was anecdotal evidence that “clients [had been] wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on ad spend because they forgot to turn ads off.” The other major factor is how our ads are set up and whether the landing page is set up well, or set up at all.
If you don’t keep an eye on your settings, say you forgot to set your daily budget, left mobiles ads enabled with a site that is not mobile-optimised, or you’re unnecessarily running both search and display ads, you’ll find that your costs quickly escalate beyond your budget. Many of these settings need to be manually disabled. Of course, Google won’t remind you about these things, as it’s in their best interest to keep running as many ads as possible.
Conclusion
There is no flat rate for a Google Ad campaign, due to the fact that Google’s platform can be tailor to your business. It’s hard to resist investing when you hear the success stories, but for some businesses, this type of paid advertising is simply suboptimal.
You don’t know what will work best for your business until you try it. Putting it all in one marketing channel isn’t the right strategy, this is why we approach marketing in a holistic way and consider SEO, SEM, SMM and so on. Sounds expensive? It can be but does not need to be.