Google Adwords Don’t Work
Posted on 15. Jun, 2009 by Jack in Marketing, SEO/SEM, Software
That’s what I hear from a lot of wholesalers, investors and agents. Well Adwords don’t work if you’re not using them effectively. You can definitely waste a lot of cash driving non targeted traffic to your website. But I believe wholeheartedly the quickest way to drive searchers to your website is through paid traffic. PERIOD. And Google Adwords is the Big Mac DaddyO of Pay Per Click Traffic.
I teach a whole course on PPC and couldn’t even begin to touch on the basics in this post, but here is the quick and dirty for those that want to get it up and running without wasting a lot of cash.
Lets start with what not to do. These are some of the biggest mistakes new (and some seasoned) Adwords users make.
Too many keywords in your campaigns. A lot of adwords teachers out there will tell you to fill up your campaigns with as many relevant terms as you can think of. Adwords even provides suggestions of more words to fill up on. Don’t do it. Sure you may get more traffic but not neccersarily traffic that will convert. It may even cost you more per click because the keyword is not as relevent to your ad as Google would like.
Ad not linked to a relevant and converting landing page. If you want the motivated seller to call or fill out your form, make sure the page that they land on has a call to action that includes calling you or filling out the submission form to get an offer on their house. Too many Adwords users just have the ad linked to the home page. Unless your site is squeeze page form then that is the wrong page to send them to.
To keep cost per click down and relevancy up I suggest using multiple ad groups for very tightly developed keyword campaigns.
For instance in the investors / wholesaler can build a campaign around the search terms We Buy Houses, Sell House Fast, Stop Foreclosure.
In this example you would have one ad group for Sell House Fast. You would create a very tight keyword list that was very relevant your ad.
Notice that most of the keywords can be found in almost every line of the ad. It may look odd to read but the way people scan the screen all three lines of the ad will have their highlited search term included.
Then create another ad group aroune We Buy Houses and another around Stop Foreclosure.
They may not be monster traffic getters but the traffic you do get will be better quaility and higer converting for sure. Your ad budget will drop signifigantly because of less click happy users choosing your ad due to a loosely picked keyword like “my city real estate”.
